The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate ad 661-750

Arabisation
By ‘arabisation’ I mean the spread of a culture characterised above
all by its use of the Arabic language in the area which had become
subject to Arab Muslim rule. Although associated with the process
of islamisation, arabisation is a distinct movement as can be seen
from the fact that important communities of Jews and Christians
survived in the Islamic Middle East into modern times. These
communities maintained their religious traditions in spite of the fact
that they had renounced the everyday languages which they had
used before the Arab conquest and had adopted Arabic. Conversely,
Persia presents a striking example of a region which largely
accepted Islam as its religion but maintained its pre-Islamic
language at first in everyday and later in literary use, although, of
course, the language underwent significant changes in the early
Islamic period.
Again one has to take into account that Arabic itself changed as it
spread and was elaborated in the process of interaction between
Arabs and non-Arabs. Put crudely, as the non-Arab peoples adopted
Arabic, so their own linguistic habits and backgrounds affected the
language, leading to significant changes and to the formation of
different dialects. The result of this evolution is usually described as
Middle Arabic as opposed to Classical Arabic, which is identified
with the language of the Koran and of the poetry which, it is
claimed, originated in pre-Islamic Arabia. The origin and nature of
Classical Arabic itself, though, is to some extent a topic of
controversy. What led to the adoption or rejection of Arabic by non-
Arabic speakers is obviously a very complex question involving
consideration of political and social relationships as well as more
purely linguistic ones.

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Introduction
In attempting to chart the progress of arabisation the difficulties
again arise from the lack of explicit information on the topic in our
literary sources and from the paucity of written material surviving
from the Umayyad period. For instance, although it has been
suggested that Jews of all sorts began to speak Arabic as early as the
seventh century, the process of change must have been gradual and
our earliest texts written in Judaeo-Arabic (that is, the form of Middle
Arabic used by Jews and written in Hebrew rather than Arabic script)
come from the ninth century. Our earliest Christian Arabic texts
(Arabic written in the Greek script) have been dated to the eighth
century, but there has been some argument about the dating. On the
other hand, from later developments we know that Persian must have
survived as the spoken language of the majority of Iranians during the
Umayyad period, but our sources only rarely and ambiguously let us
see that it was so, and almost all of our source material on the history
of Persia under the Umayyads is in Arabic.
More concrete evidence is provided by the administrative papyri
which have survived from Egypt. In spite of the limited range of
subjects with which they are concerned, they at least enable us to see a
gradual change from Greek to Arabic in the language of the
administration. Furthermore, our literary sources report that around
700 it was ordered that henceforth the government administration
should use Arabic rather than the languages which had been used
before the Arab conquest and which had continued in use thus far.
This could indicate that there was at that time a significant number of
non-Arabs with sufficient command of Arabic at least for the purposes
of administration, since the bureaucracy continued to rely
overwhelmingly on non-Arabs. The change of language in the
bureaucracy did not happen overnight, and the sources are not
unanimous about when it was ordered, but in the development of
arabisation it seems to have been a significant step.
Why and how Arabic, and with it the other features which seem to
make Islamic culture in the Middle East significantly Arab and
distinguish it from others, spread is, therefore, still debatable.
Eventually, as we know, the adoption of Arabic for most purposes
became general in Syria, Iraq and Egypt while the Berbers and
Persians, in spite of their acceptance of Islam and therefore of Arabic
as their sacred language, continued to use their own languages for
everyday purposes. We can assume that arabisation, like islamisation,
progressed a long way under the Umayyads, but precise evidence is
hard to come by.
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Introduction
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