Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [54]
In Persia, then, Arabic, despite its religious prestige, had been unable to overwhelm cultural inertia; in Spain, though much more successful at first, it had finally succumbed to political, military and religious suppression. In the intermediate zone of North Africa, the picture was rather simpler. Arabic established itself first in the towns, where its main immediate competitor in the early days was Latin—and to an extent, as we have seen, Punic. For the Berbers, who accepted Islam quite readily, Arabic was at first taken only as the language of the faith. This had quite an impact, given the role of Arabic in Muslim education, and more when members of the elite began to send their sons to the east to study theology and law. Berber kingdoms of the hinterland maintained their independence as best they could, but there is no evidence of any attempt to throw off Islam as such.
It seems that Arabic only really made progress in the tenth century, after the devastation of Berber society at the hands of the Banu Hilal, a savage band of nomads.73 These seem to have been set on Maghreb society like so many wild dogs in the course of a dispute between emirates, the Fatimids in Egypt hoping that they would settle the hash of their erstwhile vassals the Zirids, a Berber clan who ruled from Tunis. Ibn Khaldün, a historian of Berber stock (with roots in El Andalus), writing two hundred years later, in Arabic, likened them to ‘a swarm of locusts’: ‘The very earth seems to have changed its nature. All the lands that the Arabs have conquered in the last few centuries, civilization and population have departed from them …’74
However, this put the Arabic-speaking cities in a position to provide form to this new world in North Africa: ‘… when there is an entire alteration of conditions, it is as if the whole creation had been changed and all the world transformed, as if there were a new creation, a rebirth, a world brought into existence anew’.75
The Berbers, once the dominant speech community all over North Africa, now became associated with distant regions, and a life unsettled. Their language lives on, though, strongest in the western area of the Maghreb, where the Banu Hilal never penetrated, and among the Tuareg nomads of the Sahara, although there are substantial pockets still along the Mediterranean.
Finally, consider the Turks, nomad forces who came into contact with Arabic, not through being conquered by its speakers, or proselytised by them, but through taking the initiative and conquering them. Coming from the north-east, they first dominated the eastern areas of Muslim power, moved to take the centre in Baghdad, and later expanded to be in effective control of the whole Dār-al-islām. Once they had conquered, there were none to match the Turks in their adherence to the Muslim faith. Nevertheless, they held on to their language even as they accepted the religion.
And they had one other linguistic effect: they also slackened the grip of Arabic on Persia as a whole. The Turks had first encountered the world of Islam through the Persian-speaking area of central Asia. In a sense, they saw it only through a veil of Persian gauze. And so, when the Turks began to exercise influence, Persian returned as official administrative language to Iran, with Arabic restricted more and more to religious functions.
The advent of full Turkish control under the Seljuks* in the eleventh century makes clear for the first time the emerging division of function between the spiritual responsibilities of the caliph and the temporal power of the sultan, his notional protector; the sultan relied on a Turkish army, but made full use of the Persian-speaking expertise of administrators.76 Arabic was not going to spread across the expanse of Turkish-speaking peoples