Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [53]
Yet Arabic never penetrated any part of Iran as a language of daily life. In a sense, the insistence on the excellence of the Arabic spoken in Iran gives this away, for it implies that Arabic was not taking root, and taking on its own character as a local dialect, as it did everywhere in the Arabic-speaking world. Geographers describing the major towns of the west in the ninth century say they were Persian-speaking. Ibn Hauqal states that the entire population of Qum was Shiite, and mostly Arab; nevertheless they all spoke Persian.69 Ironically, the march of Islam seems to have supported the spread of Persian out to the east: the Arab conquests in what had been Buddhist central Asia in the eighth century spread Persian, at the expense of the local languages, especially Sogdian. Presumably most of the troops were from the east of Iran, where Persian was still the lingua franca.70 That is why Tajikistan, and the north-western half of Afghanistan, is Persian-speaking to this day. And when five hundred years later an Islamic army penetrated into India beyond, and set up the Delhi Sultanate, it brought Persian rather than Arabic in its wake.
Some 6000 kilometres away at the other end of Islam’s domains, in the Iberian peninsula, Islam had been spread at the point of a sword by an army made up mostly of converted Berbers. Under their leader, Tāriq bin Ziyād, they had crossed the Strait of Gibraltar (Jibl al-Tāriq, ‘the mountain of Tariq’) in 711, and after defeating the Visigothic king Roderik found themselves masters of the country. (They did attempt a major sortie north of the Pyrenees twenty years later, but were thrown back in 732, having got as far as Poitiers in central France.) Seven hundred and fifty years of Muslim presence in Spain and Portugal lay ahead; the country knew itself as el-Andalüs, its history was the story of different emirs contending for control, and the city of Cordoba especially became one of the cultural jewels of all Islam, especially as a home of Arabic poetry. Indeed, the emir ’ Abd al-Rahman III considered himself strong and magnificent enough in 929 to declare himself Amir al-mu ‘minîn, ‘Commander of the Faithful’, and so a pretending caliph of all Islam. Nevertheless, later the area of Muslim control began very gradually to be rolled back, as Christian kings grew stronger in Leon and Navarre, and later Castile and Aragon. Toledo fell in 1085, causing a new incursion of Berbers, the Almoravids, called in to redress the balance between Christian and Muslim. But after a respite, the tide continued to run against Islam: Cordoba fell in 1236 and Seville in 1248. The ’reconquista’ culminated in the capture of Granada in 1492.
During this long period Iberia must have been a bilingual zone—probably trilingual as long as waves of invading Berbers retained their own language. Some have claimed that Spanish, or its Romance forebear, had almost died out in the Islamic region by the twelfth century, replaced not by classical but by Andalusī Arabic, its dialectal nature showing that the language had been taken up in earnest by the people. Certainly, more than a century after the return of Christian power to Toledo, there were still large numbers of documents being written and notarised in Andalusi.71 Federico Corriente, an expert on Andalusi, has written: ‘Bilingualism evolves rapidly into monolingualism, a process that was complete in the 13th century, which must not make us forget that in the 11th and 12th centuries, the pockets of bilingualism were already residual.’72
Executive and legislative action was taken by the new power to eliminate Arabic speech for at least three generations after 1492. In 1501 and 1511 laws were passed against the possession of most Arabic books, and in 1511 it was decreed (apparently without effect) that contracts in Arabic would no longer be valid.