Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [50]
By contrast, what we may call the ‘Shield of Faith’ strategy for language survival has indeed been used quite often in the last couple of hundred years, and far away from the Near East, or Afro-Asiatic languages. It is this, after all, which has preserved ‘Pennsylvania Dutch’, i.e. German, among the separate community of the Amish in the USA.59 And it is this which since 1865 has preserved Welsh in the Nonconformist chapel community of Argentina, on the wind-swept plains of Patagonia.60 It could even be claimed that it is being reapplied, with a vengeance, to rebuild the Hebrew language in the new state of Israel.
But we must now turn, as the last part of our review of this area, to another language that has exploited its confessional associations mercilessly, not simply to survive but to expand, and to expand faster and more lastingly than any other language known.
Arabic—eloquence and equality: The triumph of ‘submission’
’aibbū al ‘araba liθin: li ‘anī ‘arabiyyun, wa al-qur ’ānu ’ arabiyyun, wa kalāmu ’ahli al-jinnati ’arabiyyun.
Love the Arabs for three reasons: because I am an Arab, because the Qur’ān is in Arabic and because the inhabitants of Paradise speak Arabic.
Saying attributed to Muhammad61
Arabic is another Semitic language closely related to the Aramaic and Akkadian that preceded it in the Near East. Its records actually go back to North Arabian inscriptions of the fourth century BC. But its speakers, mainly desert Bedouin and pastoralists, had remained outside the effective control (and perhaps interest) of all the previous empires in the region.
When they showed their mettle, the results were truly astounding. Within twenty-five years of the prophet Muhammad’s death in 632, they had conquered all of the Fertile Crescent and Persia, and thrust into Armenia and Azerbaijan. Their lightning advance was even more penetrating towards the west: Egypt fell in 641 and the rest of North Africa as far as Tunisia in the next decade. Two generations later, by 712, the Arabic language had become the medium of worship and government in a continuous band of conquered territories from Toledo and Tangier in the west to Samarkand and Sind in the east. No one has ever explained clearly how or why the Arabs could do this.62 An appeal is usually made to a power vacuum in the east (where the Roman/Byzantine empire and the Sassanian empire of Iran were just recovering from their exhausting war), and the absence of any power to organise resistance in the west.
Whatever caused the feebleness of the defences, a series of successful raids became harmonised into a wave of invasion that rolled on with the momentum of a tsunami. It originated in a small new state, based on the cities of Medina and Mecca in Arabia, which had recently been energised by divine revelation, embracing a new, and startlingly abstract, creed.
Lā ’lāha ill’ Allāhu, wa Muammadun rasūlu ‘llāhi
There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the apostle of God
This šahādah, the declaration of Muslim faith, and respected as the first of its ‘pillars’, was elemental in its power; it was a faith turned from shield into sword. Yet its name, Islām, is usually translated as ‘submission’ (to God); and its Semitic root slm (also seen in the agent form muslim) is also the basis of words for peace (as in Arabic’s own greeting salām ‘aleykum, ‘peace with you’). Doubly ironic, then,