In 2018, Manuela Ceballos, Tina Shepardson, Alison Vacca, and Antoine Borrut invited historians and art historians to rethink “traditional narratives of language change in the early Islamic period” (13). As they saw it, this objective was as ambitious as it was much-needed, for these Arabic-centered narratives “struggle to account systematically for the overwhelming quantity and variety of (extra-Arabic) multilingual evidence” (13). A variegated group of scholars was quick to answer their call to put multilingualism on the historical agenda, the result being the present volume of conference proceedings. In their introduction, the editors repeat the compelling case that deservedly drew these scholars to Tennessee. First, they succinctly present the main “current conversations about Arabicization” (15). Next, they highlight the key publications of David Wasserstein, Robert Hoyland, Arietta Papaconstantinou, and Kevin van Bladel as their main incentives for “nesting the study of Arabicization and language change in the early Islamic Near East into the context of multilingualism” (18).
The first of the book’s three sections sensibly focuses on Umayyad imperial strategies of language change. Its first two chapters are best read in tandem, since they both tackle the same dominant narrative of a Marwanid central decision for the divans to switch from local languages to Arabic. Given the overwhelming evidence of the prolonged use of languages other than Arabic in the various Umayyad administrations, this narrative’s resilience throughout history can only be considered remarkable. Starting from the accounts of Baladhuri and Jahshiyari, Petra Sijpesteijn convincingly deconstructs the narrative of a single top-down centrifugal Arabicization of the administration into distinct historical developments that were later conflated into one integrated sequence of events or even into a single event, a process she aptly described as “a well-known historical ruse” (73). With Sijpesteijn, the Marwanids’ single voice of command is replaced by a chorus of individuals working on various administrative levels across the empire. Her contribution is conveniently followed by that of Marie Legendre, who broadens the scope by tracing the translation of the diwan in all regions of the caliphate. Very much in line with Sijpesteijn’s findings, Legendre recognizes not a single reform or decree but a complex of separate and ad hoc translations of the diwans of Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, in which changes in the diwan personnel and the appointment of new elites proved to be crucial. By far the most ambitious and conceptually engaging chapter of the volume is Antoine Borrut’s. In his search for an encompassing model to explain why Arabic prevailed as the new prestige language among non-Arabs and non-Muslims alike, he builds on the seminal work of Sheldon Pollock (enriched with Ronit Ricci’s early modern “Arabic cosmopolis” and Alton Becker’s “prior texts”) to postulate the emergence of an early Islamic “Arabic cosmopolis.” Charting both parallels and differences with the Sanskrit and Latin cosmopoleis, he assesses the role of Arabic vernacular and literature, Islamic religion, and the cosmopolitan strategies of managing difference by way of subordination and assimilation. In doing so, he provides an alternative grand narrative that can accommodate the other chapters.
The second section changes focus from the caliphal center to the provincial elites and their respective linguistic strategies. First, Muriel Debié stretches the chronological scope of the volume by mapping the intricate interplay of literacy, languages and scripts among the Arab elites before the rise of Islam. Going against the paradigm of pre-Islamic illiteracy--still looming large despite ongoing corrections prompted by a burgeoning corpus of graffiti--she taps into a wide array of non-Arabic literary sources to demonstrate that pre-Islamic Arabs were very much part of the “literate life of empires,” and thus that their relationship to literacy was much more robust and sustained than is commonly assumed (197). The section’s second and fourth chapter introduce the reader to coinage and sealing practices on the eastern fringes of the caliphate. Robert Haug delves into the small collection of Arab-Hephthalite coins (one of which illustrates the book cover), in which three different cultural traditions coalesce. As pointed out by Haug, it is hard to find a single moment when these traditions would simultaneously make sense and to identify a single audience to whom these would all speak equally clearly. Yet, as he sees it, this should not surprise us in view of two observations that are as cogent as they are easily forgotten: first, the main functionality of coins is not to communicate ideology but to convey a monetary value; second, coinage tends to be conservative and hence out of sync with contemporaneous developments. With these two observations in mind, the triliteral coins make sense: in asserting their authority through coinage, the recently converted Hephthalites simply tapped into their recent past, present, and future (imperial legacies, existing networks, and powers on the rise), all at once and on the same limited surface area of the coin’s obverse and reverse. With Judith A. Lerner’s chapter, we stay in the same region of Bactria, now delving into the practice of sealing documents: Bactrian documents shortly before, and Arabic documents shortly after the arrival of Islam. Instead of a neat and singular transition from Bactrian to Arabic sealing practices, once more, the linguistic reality proves itself to have been much messier and to defy catch-all generalizations: Bactrian sealing practices, essentially of Hellenistic origin, were replaced by Arab ones, which were based on Sassanian models. While we already learnt that religion, language, script and iconography are not always neatly synced, Lerner’s chapter thus allows us to add documentary practices to the list. In a fourth chapter, Alison Vacca presents a bird’s-eye view of the history of Arabic in early medieval Armenia, identifying “political power” as the main thread that runs through it. Starting out as a language of conquest, Arabic next functioned as a caliphal Reichssprache and thus became intimately connected with political power. So powerful had this connection become that the rise of the Armenian kingdoms did not come with the demise of Arabic. Despite linguistic and confessional divides, Arabic continued to be used by the Armenian elite, who “recast Arabic to serve their own claims to the langue of empire.”
The third and final section of the book, “Languages in Contact and Shared Spaces,” offers a rather loose medley of historical sociolinguistics, paleography, and social history. The first two chapters both problematize the idea of unidirectional language change, the first regarding the transition from Middle Persian to New Persian and the second regarding that of Aramaic to Arabic by Christians. Rather than a linear succession of Middle Persian into New Persian in some Persian “heartland,” Khodadad Rezakhani recognizes New Persian as a “cosmopolitan tongue of the many” (353) that came to fruition much further east, as the Samanid administrative language in Greater Khurasan. While an oft-quoted excerpt attributed to Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ left scholars of Persian historical linguistics puzzled, Rezakhani’s alternative history offers a refreshing tantalizing solution to this puzzle. With Aaron Michael Butts’s chapter, we return to the history of Arabic, now as used by Christian communities. To the conventional two-chapter story of their linguistic make-over--with one chapter on “Aramaic before Islam” and one on “Arabic after Islam”--Butts adds “Arabic before Islam” and “Aramaic after Islam” as two additional crucial chapters. In doing so, he builds a case for the tenth-century development of a Fergusonian diglossic relation between Syriac and Arabic, while at the time stressing, much like Debié, that “we are never talking about only two languages; rather, we are dealing with multiple varieties of each” (389). In the section’s third chapter, Arianne D’Ottone illustrates that the messiness of linguistic reality can also be seen paleographically within a single script. Using two bilingual and digraphic manuscripts, she demonstrates how not only the source language of a translation often leaves a trace in the target language, but also the source script in the target script. Faint as these traces may be, they add an additional complexity to the cultural and linguistic context, “both within and beyond the walls--and the languages--of monasteries” (415) that is scarcely noticeable otherwise. The volume concludes with a wide-ranging chapter by Fred Astren that sets out to explain the florescence of ninth-century Jewish sectarianism against the backdrop of various early-Abbasid evolutions, each of which fuels the next: urbanization and migration, a booming economy, the introduction of paper and new ways of reading, with orality making room for the written word.
Ambitious as their goal may have been, the conveyors of the 2018 conference have succeeded in infusing the current debate on Arabicization with the much-needed perspective of multilingualism. Indeed, there is a lot to learn from the volume, be it from the numismatician working on early Islamic Iranian coinage or the paleographer focusing on Egyptian papyri; from the contact linguist working on multilingualism or the specialist mapping the Persianate. As the editors are the first to admit that “language change defies easy summaries” (20), let it be clear that the reader should not expect the catch-all narrative of Arabicization as given by Baladhuri and Co. to be replaced by an equally encompassing narrative that ostensibly makes sense of language and language change across the watershed of Islamization. Instead, it provides several case studies that first and foremost demonstrate the empirical messiness of the early Islamic imperial reality, or of any other imperial reality for that matter. What the editors also acknowledge is the fact that the volume provides no comprehensive coverage in terms of languages or regions and that three important thematic areas are, somewhat surprisingly, dealt with only tangentially: the religious connotations of multilingualism and the role of Arabic as the lingua sacra; travel and trade; language and ethnicity as two different yet interrelated dimensions of identity. Rather than deploring these lacunae, we can only hope that they will serve as an incentive for the editors to continue on the chosen path and make a sequel soon. Undoubtedly, this next volume would make the linguistic reality of the early Islamic world ever messier, but it is up to us to embrace this messiness.