The Arabic Language

5.5 The official status of Arabic
Throughout the classical period of Islam, Arabic remained the language of prestige 
that was used for all religious, cultural, administrative and scholarly purposes. 
In none of these functions was it ever seriously threatened in the first centu-
ries of Islam. There appears to have been some discussion in the early period 
about the admissibility of praying or reciting the 
Qurʾān
in other languages than 
Arabic. Especially in the Islamic East, early Ḥanafī 
fuqahāʾ,
basing themselves on 
the opinion of the eponymous founder of their school, ʾAbū Ḥanīfa (d. 80/699), 
allowed the use of translations of the 
Qurʾān 
in ritual prayer and recitation, 
sometimes with the proviso that this applied only to those who did not master 
Arabic (Zadeh 2012: 53–91). For most jurists, however, the meaning and form of 
the 
Qurʾān 
were inextricably linked, and it was the combination of both that lent 
the 
Qurʾān 
its miraculous, inimitable nature. They based themselves on reported 
sayings of the first caliphs, who expressly forbade the use of Persian in prayer, 
for instance, in a report about the second caliph, ʿUmar. When he heard someone 
praying in Persian while performing the 
ṭawāf 
around the Kaʿba, he brandished 
his stick and shouted ‘Find yourself a way to speak Arabic!’ (
ibtaġi ʾilā l-ʿarabiyyati 
sabīlan
) (ʾAbū Ṭāhir, 
ʾAḥbār an-naḥwiyyīn
, ed. al-Bannā, Cairo, 1981, p. 25). ʿAbd 

---

The Development of Classical Arabic 
81
al-Malik’s decree to change the language of the 
dīwān 
(cf. above, p. 65) suggests a 
determined effort to downgrade languages other than Arabic.
Notwithstanding this official policy, most speakers of Arabic had to accept the 
fact that other languages were frequently used in daily interaction: cities like 
Basra and Kufa were highly multilingual, and outside the cities people in the 
countryside remained monolingual in their indigenous language for some time. 
Yet they took it for granted that in the domains of administration and religion 
there could be no alternative to the Arabic language. This explains the disap
-
pearance of languages like Coptic, Greek or Syriac from these domains. With 
very few exceptions, the Arab grammarians showed no inclination to study other 
languages, and speakers of these languages only very seldom found anything to 
boast of in their own language, preferring to speak and write in Arabic instead. 
During the first centuries of the Hijra, speakers of Persian tended to regard their 
own language as inferior to Arabic. We have already seen that the author of the 
first linguistic description of Arabic, Sībawayhi, was a speaker of Persian, but the 
only traces in his 
Kitāb
of any interest in the Persian language are two chapters 
about Persian loanwords in Arabic (
Kitāb
, II, ed. Bulaq, n.d., pp. 342–3), in which 
he explains the phonetic changes of these loanwords when they become Arabi
-
cised (
muʿarrab
). The Persian sound ‘between the 
k 
and the 
j
’
 
(
al-ḥarf allaḏī bayna 
l-kāf wa-l-jīm
, i.e., 
č
), for instance, becomes 
j
, as in 
čorbak 
‘lie, deceit’
 
> 
jurbuz 
‘deceitful person’, and the sound ‘between the 
b 
and the 
f
’ (
al-ḫarf allaḏī bayna l-bāʾ 
wa-l-fāʾ
, i.e., 
p
), becomes 
f
, as in 
pirind 
> 
firind 
‘excellent sword’. Another famous 
grammarian, al-Fārisī (d. 377/987), on being asked by his pupil Ibn Jinnī about 
his mother tongue, Persian, stated unequivocally that there could be no compar
-
ison between the two languages, since Arabic was far superior to Persian (
Ḫaṣāʾiṣ
, 
I, p. 243). Eventually, a counter-movement of Persian ethnic feeling (
šuʿūbiyya
) 
arose which opposed the monopoly of the Arabs. Adherents of this movement 
did not challenge the official position of Arabic, but they did argue that other 
languages, in particular Persian, were just as suited to the religious message as 
Arabic, perhaps even superior to it. One of their arguments concerned something 
Arabic grammarians were proud of, namely, the presence of a host of synonyms in 
Arabic, which according to the Šuʿūbīs made the language needlessly complicated 
and imprecise.
From the ninth century onwards, Persian became used increasingly as a literary 
language, first of all in eastern Iran, where Arabic culture had never gained a 
foothold. Especially in the eastern provinces of the Islamic empire, interlinear 
translations of the text had become common by the middle of the tenth century 
(Zadeh 2012: 267). This was no doubt preceded by a period in which oral instruc-
tion in religion regularly took place in Persian, which served as the vehicle for the 
first instruction of new converts who were still in the process of learning Arabic. 
The proliferation of written Persian translations and an extensive exegetical liter
-
ature in that language were connected with the emergence of New Persian as a 

---

82
The Arabic Language
court language and eventually as the main language of the Iranian dynasties. At 
the court of the more or less independent dynasties in the East, New Persian or 
Farsi was used in poetry. Under the dynasty of the Samānids (tenth century), it 
replaced Arabic as the language of culture. After the fall of Baghdad (657/1258) 
during the Mongol invasion, Arabic lost its position as the prestigious language 
in the entire Islamic East to Persian, except in matters of religion. In Iran itself, 
the Safavid dynasty under Shah ʾIsmāʿīl (906/1501) adopted Farsi and the Shiʿite 
form of Islam as the national language and religion.
In all other regions, Arabic kept its position for a long time. A case in point 
is Mamluk Egypt. The Arabs had always looked down on the Turks, whom they 
regarded as good soldiers and therefore useful as protectors of Islam, but without 
any gift for culture. Their Arabic, if they spoke it at all, was deficient. Yet Mamluk 
trainees received intensive instruction in Arabic, and most Mamluks must at least 
have understood the language. In the biographical sources about the Mamluks 
(e.g., aṣ-Ṣafadī’s 
al-Wāfī bi-l-wafayāt
), mention is made of many Mamluk scholars 
who occupied themselves with the religious and grammatical literature in Arabic, 
and even when in the fourteenth century they started to produce scholarly 
writings in Qipčaq and Oġuz Turkic, Arabic remained in use in Egypt as the main 
literary language (Haarmann 1988).
When in the eleventh century the Seljuk Turks conquered Anatolia, Turkish 
became the official language of their empire, with Persian as the literary 
language; but even then, Arabic remained important, in the first place as a source 
of loanwords in Turkic languages (cf. below, Chapter 17, pp. 324–6), and in the 
second place as the language of religion. It lost, however, its place as the admin
-
istrative language of the empire to Turkish. At the end of the nineteenth century, 
during the Renaissance (
Nahḍa
) of Arabic (cf. below, Chapter 12), attempts were 
made to reintroduce Arabic as the language of administration, but with the advent 
of the colonial period these attempts turned out to be short-lived, and it was not 
until the independence of the Arab countries as political entities in the twentieth 
century that it once again became the language in which matters of state and 
administration could be expressed.