Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [51]
But the importance of language in Islam went far beyond the production of a telling slogan. Eloquence, the sheer power of the word, as dictated by God and declaimed to all who would listen, played the first role in winning converts for Islam, leaving hearers no explanation for the beauty of Muhammad’s words but divine inspiration. The classic example is ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, a contemporary of Muhammad and acknowledged authority on oral poetry, determined to oppose, perhaps even to assassinate, him. Exposed directly to the prophet’s words, he could only cry out: ‘How fine and noble is this speech!’ And he was converted.
Language was used in a unique way in the spread of this religion too. The authentic utterances of the prophet, himself illiterate, were soon, in some undocumented way, reduced to writing. The text so arrived at was immediately holy and absolutely authoritative; it could not be changed, although it was permissible (as in the Hebrew scriptures) to annotate it with some dots and dashes to mark the vowel sounds, for the benefit of those whose Arabic was not native, and who consequently might need some help in reading the bare consonants.* It was known as the Qur ‘ān, ‘recitation’, based on qr’, the common Semitic root for reading aloud, and famously begun when the Angel Gabriel commanded Muhammad:
iqra ’ bismi rabbika allaī xalaqa, xalaqa l’’insāna min ‘alaqin
Recite, in the name of your Lord who created, created man from embryo.63
These distinctive scriptures, a totally closed set, are the great treasure of Islam, constantly pondered and declaimed by the faithful. Their existence seems to have been taken by Muslims as the badge of properly revealed religion, for in their domains holders of other revealed monotheistic faiths, Jews with their TaNaK, Christians with their Testaments, Zoroastrians in Iran with their Avesta, were called likewise ahl al-kitāb, ‘people of the book’, and thereby exempt from forcible conversion.
The linguistic effects of the Arab blitzkrieg can only be compared with those of Greek’s wild ride throughout Persia’s domains nine centuries before. They were ultimately to be much more durable than the extension of Greek had been, but like the spread of Greek across the east, the take-up of Arabic did not quite measure up to the spread of temporal power that had caused its advance.
Politically, the Arab campaigns destroyed the hold of the Roman, now Byzantine, empire on the whole of the eastern Mediterranean—excepting only Anatolia. Despite their efforts to take Constantinople, this centre of Roman power survived, and lived on in Christian defiance for another eight centuries. Farther east, the Arabs overran Armenia but did not convert it. More significant was the Arabs’ termination of Sassanian power in Iran and the mountains of Afghanistan. This was the beginning of the end for Zoroastrianism, gradually replaced in popular worship by Islam. Nowadays it survives only in the tiny minority of Parsees who were to flee to India three hundred years later.
Linguistically, the immediate effects were comparable to the political ones: Arabic established itself as the language of religion, wherever Islam was accepted, or imposed. In the sphere of the holy, there was never any contest, since Islam unlike Christianity did not look for vernacular understanding, or seek translation into other languages. The revelation was simple, and expressed only in Arabic. Furthermore, Islam was a religion that insisted on public rituals of prayer in the language, and where the muezzin’s call of the faithful to prayer, in Arabic, has always punctuated everyone’s day. Allāh akbar, ‘God is greater.’
In 700, the caliph in Damascus, ‘Abd el Malik, summoned his Greek adviser, Joannes Damascenus, to tell him that he had decided henceforth to ban the Greek language from all public administration. The adviser told his colleagues: ‘You had better seek another profession to earn your living: your present employment