The development of classical Arabic

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1. Introduction

At the beginning of the Islamic period, only two sources of literary Arabic were available, the Qur’an and the pre-Islamic poems. It is not surprising, then, that these two sources were to play a crucial role in the standardisation and develop ment of the Arabic language. It is not surprising, either, that the first scholarly activities in Islam concentrated on the text of the Qur’an, which had to be transmitted and explained, both on the level of the text and on that of the con tents. At the same time, when the direct ties of Arabs with the desert were broken, the living practice of poetry was very soon replaced by scholarly interest in the pre- Islamic poems. The transmission of both 'texts' had taken place orally and in formally, but in the rapidly-expanding empire such a form of transmission could no longer be trusted.

The language itself, too, underwent a process of standardisation. While in pre-Islamic times the Bedouin regarded themselves as members of one speech community, they had no single linguistic norm, and even in the language of poetry, which was supposed to be supra-tribal, a great deal of variation was accepted. After the conquests, when Arabic became the language of an empire, there was an urgent need to standardise the language for three reasons :

- First, the divergence between the language of the Bedouin and the various colloquial varieties that emerged became a real threat to communication in the empire.

- Second, the policy of the central government, first in Damascus and later in Baghdad, aimed at the control of the subjects, not only in economical and reli gious but also in linguistic matters. Obviously, if Arabic was to be used as the language of the central administration, it had to be standardised.

- Third, the changed situation called forth a rapid expansion of the lexicon, which had to be regulated in order to achieve some measure of uniformity.

This chapter deals with three topics connected with the process of standardi sation. The most important prerequisite for the written codification of the language was the invention of an orthography, or rather the adaptation of exist ing scribal practices to the new situation. Then a standardised norm for the language was elaborated, and the lexicon was inventoried and expanded. Subsequently, when these requirements had been met, a stylistic standard was developed. The existing Bedouin model at that time was instrumental in the development of a stylistic standard for poetry, but the emergence of an Arabic prose style marked the real beginning of Classical Arabic as we know it. In the final section of this chapter, we shall deal with the official status of the Arabic language.

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1. Development of Orthography

The first concern of Islamic scholars was to codify the texts with which they worked. Even though oral transmission continued to remain an essential component of Islamic culture, the risk of major discrepancies in the transmission became too large to ignore. The need for an authoritative text was imperative above all in the case of the Revealed Book. Clearly, the central government had a major stake in the acceptance of a uniform Book throughout the empire as the basis for all religious and political activities.

The codification of the Qur’an was a crucial moment in the development of a written standard for the Arabic language. On a practical level, the writing- down of the text involved all kinds of decisions concerning the orthography of the Arabic script and the elaboration of a number of conventions to make writing less ambiguous and more manageable than it had been in the jāhiliyya. [...] There are clear indications that as early as the 6th century writing was fairly common in the urban centres of the peninsula, in Mecca and to a lesser degree in Medina. In the commercial society that was Mecca, businessmen must have had at their disposal various means of recording their transactions. There are references to treaties being written down and preserved in the Ka'ba in Mecca. Even the rāwi, the transmitters of poetry, sometimes relied on written notes, although they recited the poems entrusted to them orally. In the Qur’an, we find the reflection of a society in which writing for commercial purposes was well established. In the second sūra we find, for instance, detailed stipulations on the settlement of debts that include the exact writing-down of the terms. In the biography of the Prophet, there are many references to his using scribes for his correspondence with the Arab tribes and for the writing of treaties, for instance the famous treaty with the settlements in N. Arabia. This treaty, which was signed in the course of the expedition to Tabuk in year 9 of the Higra, laid down for the first time the relations between Muslims and people of other religions. In the account preserved by the historians, the scribe and the witnesses are mentioned, as well as the fact that the Prophet signed it with his fingernail.

The Prophet may well have been illiterate himself, but there were scribes on whom he could rely, just as his fellow Meccans used scribes in the management of their affairs. In the beginning, the revelation consisted of short messages which the Prophet brought to the believers and which could easily be commit ted to memory. But very soon, the messages grew longer and longer, and it be came essential to have a written aid to memory, while the recitation of the text continued to take place orally. Tradition has preserved the names of several scribes to whom Muhammad dictated the messages, chief among them being Zayd b. Thābit (d. 665). The text of the Qur’an itself documents this shift from recitation to collected text. The current term qur’an in the early suras (possibly borrowed from Syriac qeryana 'recitation') is replaced increasingly often in the later suras with the term kitab 'book'.

Both Islamic tradition and Western scholars agree that there was no complete collection of the revelation during the Prophet's lifetime, but there were frag ments of all kinds of material, on which parts of the messages were recorded. According to the tradition, the third caliph, 'Utman (d. 656), ordered the establishment of an authoritative codex of the Qur’an. He entrusted this edition to Muhammad's scribe Zayd, who had already been involved in the recording of the text during the Prophet's lifetime. When the work was finished, the codex was sent to the centres of the Islamic empire, where it was to replace all existing alternative readings. Acceptance of this text, usually called al-mus'haf, was slow, but eventually, by the end of the 2nd century of the Higra, the 'Utmanic text had become the basis for religious teaching and recitation almost everywhere. In the first grammatical treatise of Arabic, Sibawayh's (d. 793) "Kitab", all deviations from the consonantal text of the codex are rejected and only some divergence in the vocalisation of the text is allowed. Around the variant readings (qirā’at), a massive literature arose which at the same time contributed to the linguistic study of the text and the language of the Qur’an.

Apart from the problems of unification encountered during the codification of the text, the main problem confronting Zayd b. Thābit and his committee of text-editors was the ambiguity of the Arabic script. The type of script which the Meccan traders had at their disposal was still a primitive one. Basically, there were two problems connected with this primitive form of the Arabic alphabet. In the first place, there were as yet no diacritic dots to distinguish between certain phonemes, and many of the letters of the alphabet indicated two or even more phonemes. This was the heritage of the Nabataean script that had been the model for the earliest form of Arabic script and that did not contain all of the Arabic phonemes. The second problem was connected with a general trait of all Semitic scripts, namely the fact that these scripts do not indicate the short vowels. In the case of the Nabataean model, even many of the long vowels were written defectively. The former problem may already have been solved in pre-Islamic times. There are some indications that, very early on, scribes had used diacritic dots to distinguish between homographs. They may have borrowed this device from a Syriac model, since in the Syriac script dots are used to distinguish between allophonic variants of phonemes. According to some scholars, there are even examples of the use of dots in the Nabataean script.

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The notation of the short vowels was an altogether more complicated problem. During the 1st century of Islam, when people started to collect and record the fragments of the Qur’anic revelation, the need for a uniform and unambiguous system for the short vowels made itself felt. Various grammarians, among them the legendary 'inventor' of grammar, Abu l-Aswad al-Du’ali (d. 688), are credited with the introduction of a system of (coloured) dots below and above the letters to indicate the three short vowels. [...] We know from the Islamic sources that at first there was considerable opposition to the use of vowel dots in Qur’anic manuscripts, and as a matter of fact this system is absent in the oldest manuscripts in Kufic script as well as in the inscriptions. In some manuscripts, the dots have been added by a later hand.

Two other innovations attributed to Abu l-Aswad concern the notation of the hamza (glottal stop) and the shadda (gemination). Both signs are absent in the Nabataean script. We have seen that in the Hijaz the hamza had probably disappeared, but in the variety of the language in which the Qur’an was revealed and the pre-Islamic poems were composed, the hamza was pronounced. Because of the prestige of the language of poetry and the Qur’an, the Hijāzi scribes had to devise a way of recording the glottal stop. Since in their own speech the hamza had been replaced in many cases by a long vowel, they spelled words containing a hamza with a long vowel, indicated by a semi consonant "w", "y" or "alif". According to the tradition, Abu l-Aswad improved this system by using a small letter 3ayn above the semi-consonant ; this sign indicated the presence of the glottal stop. The gemination of a consonant was noted by a diacritic dot.

A substantial improvement in the system of short-vowel notation is usually attributed to the first lexicographer of the Arabic language, al-Halli b. Ahmad (d. 791). He replaced the system of dots with specific shapes for the three short vowels, a small waw for the vowel "u", a small "alif" for the vowel "a", and a small "y" for the vowel "i". He also changed the sign for the shadda, using a small sīn instead. When a single consonant was intended, a small "ha" could be used. Originally, this system had been devised for writing down poetry, which also went throught period of codification, but gradually it spread to Qur’anic manuscripts written in cursive script as well. It was considerably less ambiguous than the old system, in which the dots had to perform various functions.

With al-Halil's reform, the system of Arabic orthography was almost completed and, apart from a very few additional signs, it has remained essentially the same ever since. The frequency of diacritic dots and vowel signs varies considerably, however, and alongside fully-vowelled manuscripts one finds texts in which even the diacritic dots are left out. After the establishment of the orthography, a large variety of writing styles were developed, each with its own special domains. Apart from the epigraphic script (called Kufic), which was also used in early Qur’anic manuscripts, a cursive script was developed for use in the chancellery, after Abd al-Malik's reform. The script itself became an essential component of Islamic art. Because of the general aversion to pictorial art, calligraphy was one of the most important means of decoration. This devel opment of Arabic script will not be dealt with here.

Having an orthography is one thing, but elaborating a standardised language for official - commercial and administrative - purposes is another. As far as we know, the Meccan traders did not have any archives, and we must assume that they did not have at their disposal an elaborate legal terminology or conventions for book-keeping, either. In the first period of the establishment of the Islamic empire, the government, therefore, opted to use Greek-speaking clerks in Syria and Egypt and Persian-speaking clerks in the East for purposes of administration and taxation. In the sources, the shift from Greek to Arabic in the tax register (diwān) is traditionally connected with the name of the ommeyad caliph Abd al-Malik b. Marwān. According to this story, the caliph ordered the clerks to shift to Arabic in the year 700. It is was sign of the growing self-confidence of the Arabs and their increased familiarity with a practical writing system.

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3. Standardisation of the Language

Even before the language shift of the diwān, Arabic was used as a written language: the earliest papyri date from year 22 of the Higra, and at the end of the 1st century of the Higra quite a number of papyrus texts must have been circulating. The language of these papyri is highly irregular from the point of view of the codified grammar of Classical Arabic, but the fact that they contain a large number of hypercorrections demonstrates that the scribes tried to emulate a linguistic ideal. In this chapter, our main purpose is to sketch the process of standardisation that was soon under way.

The Qur’anic language, though virtually identical with the language of pre- Islamic poetry, has a typically religious flavour, manifesting itself in peculiari ties of style and language that must have been absent in other registers. Likewise, the language of the poems was marked by poetic licences that did not occur in ordinary language. Although both sources constituted a model for correct Arabic, they could hardly serve as a model for ordinary prose. The arbiters of linguistic correctness, the Bedouin, were frequently called in for help in linguistic matters, but they were in no position to enforce a standard language, if only because of their own linguistic differences.

We have seen above that in the period of the Jāhiliyya the language of the various tribes varied to a certain extent; and, even though it is reasonable to assume that there were no real problems of communication, there was no general standard either. On the other hand, the growing sedentary population with a more or less complete command of the language was very much in need of such a standard, but could hardly be expected to devote themselves to decisions about linguistic correctness. As a matter of fact, their slipshod use of the language for practical purposes, as in the texts which we find in the papyri, was one of the reasons for a growing concern on the part of those who regarded themselves as the true heirs of Bedouin civilisation, the pure Arabs. [...] it can hardly be denied that in the early decades of Islam there was an increasing call for specialists who could provide adequate teaching in Arabic.

According to most of our sources, the fourth caliph Ali (d. 661) was the first to insist that something be done about the growing number of mistakes in speech. The person whose name has become connected with the first efforts to standardise and codify the language was the same Abu l-Aswad whom we met above as the reformer of the writing system. Several stories are told about his reluctance to accept this job; according to some historians, he was finally persuaded when his own daughter made a terrible mistake in the use of the declensional endings, by confusing the expressions mā ahsana s-samā’a ('how beautiful is the sky!') and mā ’ahsanu s-sama’i ('what is the most beautiful thing in the sky?').

The historicity of these anecdotes is, of course, doubtful. But the point remains that grammarians must have played an important role in the standardisation of the language. The earliest scholarly efforts concerned the exegesis of the Revealed Book, but since study of the language of the Qur’an could hardly ignore that other source of pre-Islamic Arabic, the poems, very soon the two main components of the corpus of texts that was to become canonical for the linguis tic study of Arabic were combined in the writings of the grammarians.

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The first grammarian to give an account of the entire language in what was probably the first publication in book form in Arabic prose, Sibawayhi, was not of Arab stock himself, but a Persian from Hamadhan. His example set the trend for all subsequent generations of grammarians.

The grammarians believed that their main task was to provide an explanation for every single phenomenon in Arabic, rather than a mere description, let alone a set of precepts on how to talk Arabic correctly. Consequently, they distinguished between what was transmitted and what was theoretically possible in language. In principle, they accepted everything that was transmitted from a reliable source: in the first place the language of the Qur’an, which was sacrosanct anyway, in the second place everything that had been preserved from pre-Islamic poetry, and in the third place testimonies from trustworthy Bedouin informants. In this frame work, even singularities or deviant forms were incorporated without, however, being accepted as productive forms that could constitute the basis for a theo retical linguistic reasoning. Such a distinction is characteristic of Islamic science as a whole, where 'aql 'logical reasoning' is always carefully distin guished from naql 'transmitted knowledge'. In this way, a separation was realised between the study of attested forms and the theories of the grammar ians, and without being prescriptive the grammarians could still impose a canonical norm of the language.

The codification of grammatical structure went hand in hand with the exploration of the lexicon and its necessary expansion. These two aspects of the process of standardisation are connected. Just as the grammarians were needed because of the perceived 'corruption' of the language, the first aim of the lexicographers seems to have been the preservation of the old Bedouin lexicon, which was at risk. There are several reasons for the lexicographers' worries. In the first place, the sedentary civilisation of early Islam was markedly different from that of the desert tribes, who had been the guardians of the special vocabu lary of the pre-Islamic poems. No city-dweller could be expected to know all the subtle nuances of a vocabulary connected with camels and animal wildlife and tents. There are several anecdotes about grammarians that stress this component of a grammarian's activities. Thus, the grammarian Abu Amr b. al-Alā’ (d. 770), when he started lecturing about language and poetry, was confronted by a real Bedouin, who interrogated him about the explanation of obscure words. When the grammarian passed the test, the Bedouin said "transmit from him, because he is an extraor dinary beast of burden [i.e. a depository of knowledge]!". This anecdote shows how grammarians had to prove their worth by their knowledge of the Bedouin lexicon.

For the ordinary speaker, who had grown up in an Islamic city and knew nothing about the Bedouin milieu, even ordinary Arabic words had become unfamiliar. From one of the earliest commentaries on the Qur’an, we can get an idea about which words had fallen into disuse. Muqātil b. Sulayman's (d. 767) Tafsir contains a large number of paraphrases of Qur’anic words that he felt to be in need of explanation, e.g. alīm 'painful' (replaced by waj3), mubīn 'clear' (replaced by bayyin), naba’ 'news' (replaced by hadath), nassīb 'share' (replaced by hadh) ... etc. and the interrogative adverb ayyan 'when ?' (replaced by matā).

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The second threat to the lexicon had to do with the contact with other languages. When the Arabs became acquainted with the sedentary culture of the conquered territories, they encountered new things and notions for which there did not yet exist Arabic words. The most obvious sources for terms to indicate the new notions were, of course, the languages spoken in the new Islamic empire. And this was precisely what some of the Arab scholars feared. They were convinced that the influx of words from other cultures would corrupt the Arabic language, which had been chosen by God for His last revela tion to mankind.

In the 1st century of the Higra, this attitude did not yet make itself felt, a the comments by the earliest exegetes on the vocabulary of the Qur'an demonstrate. In pre-Islamic times, the Arabs had taken over a considerable number of words from the surrounding cultures. Most of them were borrowed either through the Jewish/Aramaic language of Syria, or through the Christian/Syriac language in Mesopotamia, where al-Hīra was the most important centre for cultural and linguistic contacts. [...] The oldest commentaries on the Qur’an, such as the one by Mujāhid (d. 722), had no qualms in assigning words in the Qur’an to a foreign origin. Mugahid stated, for instance, that the word tōr 'mountain' came from Syriac, the word sidjīl 'baked clay' from Persian or Nabataean, and the word qistt 'balance' from Greek. [...]

The real problem arises in the case of Qur’anic words that have developed a new technical meaning not supported by the semantics of the Arabic root. In such cases, the exegetes go out of their way to find a connection. Thus, for instance, for the expression yawm al-qiyāma 'the Day of resurrection', the standard explanation in the commentaries is that it is connected with the root q-w-m 'to stand up', but most likely the Christian Syriac term qiyameta as a translation of the Greek anastasis 'resurrection' prompted the semantic extension of the Arabic word. Similar examples are those of zakāt 'alms', masjid 'mosque', suhuf 'scriptures', sabt 'Saturday', sūra 'portion of the Qur’an', and such central notions in the Qur’anic message as kitāb 'book', sā3a 'hour' ... etc. For example, the term suhuf 'scriptures', plural of sahīfa, is connected by the Arab commentators with a root s-h-f, which occurs only as a denominative in the second measure with the meaning of 'making a mistake in reading'. In pre-Islamic poetry, sahīfa (plural sahā’if) is used in the sense of 'page of writing'. The Qur’anic use of the word in the sense of 'scriptures' is difficult to explain from this, which is why Western commentaries often connect it with an Old South Arabian word shft or with the common Ethiopic root s’-h-f 'to write'.

In line with the idea of the purity of the language, the semantic extension of an existing word was regarded as the most appropriate device for the expansion of the lexicon. The model for this procedure was believed to have been given by the language of the Qur’an itself. Since the grammarians analysed many reli gious terms such as salāt 'prayer', zakāt 'alms', and the term islam itself, as old Bedouin words which had received a specialised meaning in the religious con text, semantic extension became an accepted method of creating new termin ology. They were doubtless right in the sense that part of the religious vocabu lary of the Qur’an is the result of an internal development without external influence. A case in point is the word ’islam, which meant in general 'to surren der oneself', but came to mean 'to surrender oneself to God, to convert to the new religion brought by the Prophet'. Besides, even when the new meanings of existing words were calqued on cognate words in other languages, their occur rence in the Qur’an canonised the new meaning.
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4. Development of an Arabic literary

The history of literary style in Arabic went hand in hand with the standardisa tion of the language. The development of such a style did not have to start from scratch. The same two sources that had been available for the standardisation of the language, the Qur’an and the pre-Islamic poems, became the initial models for a literary style. As in other cultures, the structured composition of poetic Arabic preceded the emergence of a literary prose style.

But here, too, the desert type of poetry did not satisfy all the needs of a new, elegant sedentary civilisation. New forms of poetry developed under the the ’Umayyads, at whose court love poems became a new fashion (e.g. the poems of Umar b. Ablī Rabī3a, d. 712). Inevitably, this led to a looser use of language and to the development of new, often strophic types of poetry, that were not as heavily dependent on the Bedouin model. In such forms of poetry, there was easier access for popular expressions reflecting the new environment of Arabic culture. Some deviations in morphology, syntax and lexicon became gradually accepted, e.g. the use of contracted forms such as nasihi (< nasiyahu), baqi (< baqiya), or the confusion of the 4th and the 1st verbal form. In rajaz, poets could experiment with the creation of new words and word forms to a much higher degree than was permitted in official poetry. In general, the muwalladūn, the "new Arabs", who had never seen the desert, could not be expected to be as excellent connaisseurs of Arabic as the pre-Islamic poets. Although for a long time the Bedouin model continued to serve as a strict canon, in Sībawayhi's Kitab the poems of the muwalladun are not excluded as evidence: the 1,000-plus quotations from poetry in the Kitab include both jahili poets and those from the urban milieu of the ’Umayyad period ; he even quotes from rajaz poetry.

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