Arabization

[diegosimeone]

So according to Webster Dictionary, definition of Arabize: to cause to acquire Arabic customs, manners, speech, or outlook.

The reason I'm opening this topic is to discuss the various countries tha thave been part of this Arabization process and are now part of what is known as the 'Arab world' and also an additional question. The only other situation I can recall where the aftermath of a conquest brought an entire populace speaking the language of the conqueror is with British, French and Spanish colonialism mostly, while Porutgal and Netherlands could also apply here to an extent. But the Arabization is the only one that has proper borders and is not scattered around due to settlers and colonists.

The wikipedia entry ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabization ) either focuses on the modern aspects of this situation or vaguely mentions anything about the origins.

What is it that made all these people stop using their own language and adopting Arabic? Was it economic and political importance? Was it through a religious conversion which gradually gained importance as a political power tool? Was it perhaps something forced to the conquered under the threat of heavy taxation or even death?

What exactly was the landscape in these conquered places? Most were isolated, scattered around the desert terrain etc. And when exactly was this complete for the countries involved? For example on the wiki article it says that Syria essentially became 'Arab' starting from the 40s and into the 50s , meaning that we should have some information on the why and how these people lived and felt ethnically before this moment.

Has this been performed anywhere else to this extent that we know of? My guess would be China to some extent but even they still have different languages within them whereas the Arabic world while split into religious factions still speaks Arabic through.

I also hear that Berberism in Northern Africa rose as a response to the Arabization but not sure if its following is significant enought to cause a cultural shift in the region other than a more secular society as a compromise.

 

[Geriander]

. Has this been performed anywhere else to this extent that we know of? My guess would be China to some extent but even they still have different languages within them whereas the Arabic world while split into religious factions still speaks Arabic through..

Half of Europe speak Romance languages in the aftermath of conquest. Local dialects of Latin have drifted apart more than Arabic and form separate languages now but the previous local languages were pretty much wiped out.

 

[diegosimeone]

Half of Europe speak Romance languages in the aftermath of conquest. Local dialects of Latin have drifted apart more than Arabic and form separate languages now but the previous local languages were pretty much wiped out.

That's actually a very good example, but even within this core of Romance languages we have numerous sub-languages or dialects that have strong connections to their pre-Roman roots, but obviously the overwhelming influence is Romance. And most importantly, as you mentioned, it's now split into various different languages, which begs questions and research as to where and why they have formed these differences and caused the drift. With Arabic we haven't met this. If Latin was still around we'd have the perfect counter-example.

As far as I know, we have Arabic dialects, but not to the extent of forming a new Arabic language.

 

[Abdul Goatherd]

So according to Webster Dictionary, definition of Arabize: to cause to acquire Arabic customs, manners, speech, or outlook.

The reason I'm opening this topic is to discuss the various countries tha thave been part of this Arabization process and are now part of what is known as the 'Arab world' and also an additional question. The only other situation I can recall where the aftermath of a conquest brought an entire populace speaking the language of the conqueror is with British, French and Spanish colonialism mostly, while Porutgal and Netherlands could also apply here to an extent. But the Arabization is the only one that has proper borders and is not scattered around due to settlers and colonists.

The wikipedia entry ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabization ) either focuses on the modern aspects of this situation or vaguely mentions anything about the origins.

What is it that made all these people stop using their own language and adopting Arabic? Was it economic and political importance? Was it through a religious conversion which gradually gained importance as a political power tool? Was it perhaps something forced to the conquered under the threat of heavy taxation or even death?

What exactly was the landscape in these conquered places? Most were isolated, scattered around the desert terrain etc. And when exactly was this complete for the countries involved? For example on the wiki article it says that Syria essentially became 'Arab' starting from the 40s and into the 50s , meaning that we should have some information on the why and how these people lived and felt ethnically before this moment.

Has this been performed anywhere else to this extent that we know of? My guess would be China to some extent but even they still have different languages within them whereas the Arabic world while split into religious factions still speaks Arabic through.

I also hear that Berberism in Northern Africa rose as a response to the Arabization but not sure if its following is significant enought to cause a cultural shift in the region other than a more secular society as a compromise.

Elites have little or nothing to do with it. Determinants of language are in the countryside, not cities.

Language doesn't emanate from urban to the rural, but rather the other way around.

While urban elites will speak the language of the conquerors, the language that prevails depends on the language spoken in countryside.

To answer your particular question, it was the transplantation of the rural Bedouin tribes from Arabia, most famously the Banu Hillal, to North Africa (first to Egypt, and thereafter to the rural valleys of Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco , c.1150s), that began the process of Arabization.

By contrast, Persia, which was ruled just as long by Arab conquerors, never Arabized. Arabs in Iran stayed in urban garrisons. Rural Arab Bedouin tribes never settled in the Iranian countryside. So Persian prevailed.

It is not a question of prestige either. In North Africa, the illustrious ruling elites (Almoravids, Almohads, Marinids, etc.) for centuries were Berber, not Arab. The language spoken in the cities was Berber. But the countryside, from the 12th C. onwards, was increasingly Arabic-speaking because of the arrival of waves of transplanted rural Arab Bedouin tribes. Once Arabic prevailed in the rural valleys, Berber language became limited to an urban language (and to a few mountainous areas which the horse-back Arab Bedouin did not climb).

You see similar patterns in other countries. You have French-speaking Quebecois after two centuries of British rule because the countryside (not the cities) were French-speaking.

I expect you'll find much the same pattern in Ottoman-ruled Balkans, with Turks ensconced in urban garrison towns, and rural folk carrying on speaking their Greek, Serbian, etc. dialects.

So it is with the gazillion languages/dialects persistent in so many regions, even if the ruling urban languages are different.

The reason is rather obvious. Rural folk talk to each other, not to elites. So whatever language is the rural language, will persist there, by rural folk talking to each other. By contrast, urban populations are not as self-enclosed. Until the advent of industrialization, urban residence was never very permanent. People tended to move back and forth between city and country (the poor for food/jobs, the rich to country homes). So urban folk tended to be at least bilingual, and could switch between city language and rural language, depending on who they're talking to at the moment, They were not particularly insistent on either.

In the long term, increasing urbanization brought rural folk, and their funky language, into the cities. And at length, the rural languages tends to overwhelm the urban language even inside cities. The reverse does not tend to happen. By rural-urban migration patterns, language goes from periphery to center, not center to periphery.

Now it is not necessary that one must always prevail. Urban Berber and rural Arabic coexisted alongside each other in North Africa for centuries, Berber only gradually losing ground. It is really only in the 20th C., with deliberate Arabization programs that things accelerated into overdrive.

French colonial rule was in part to blame. In an effort to "divide-and-rule", French colonial authorities tried to create a legal division between Berbers and Arabs, to weaken "protectorate" governments and divide independist movements, e.g. the infamous "Dahir" imposed by the French residents-general in 1930 in Morocco, removing Berbers from the legal jurisdiction of the King of Morocco, and placing them under French courts. So when independence finally came around, the Maghrebi governments adopted a deliberate "Arabization" program to "erase" the hated colonial distinctions (plus, you get to emotionally join the rising stream of Arab nationalism elsewhere in the post-colonial Middle East).

Similarly, it took a external shock to accelerate the "erasing" of dialects and language in Europe in the early 20th C. Public education had only a little effect. The main impact really began with WWI, with the mobilization of armies. Recruits were plucked from their rural cocoons, with their persistent rural language, and thrown into national armies of mixed dialects and languages. They were forced to uniformly adopt the elite language of their officers.

(Unlike during the 19th C. industrialization, when dispossessed rural folks from the same area moved together to the same urban neighborhoods, so the rural dialects and languages persisted inside cities. e.g. Breton was spoken in Montmartre quarter of Paris, Occitan in another quarter, etc.)

Tl, dr;: Arabization prevailed in North Africa because Arab Bedouin tribes moved into the rural countryside of Egypt and the Maghreb. Arabization failed in Persia because they didn't.

 

[Geriander]

That's actually a very good example, but even within this core of Romance languages we have numerous sub-languages or dialects that have strong connections to their pre-Roman roots, but obviously the overwhelming influence is Romance. And most importantly, as you mentioned, it's now split into various different languages, which begs questions and research as to where and why they have formed these differences and caused the drift. With Arabic we haven't met this. If Latin was still around we'd have the perfect counter-example.

As far as I know, we have Arabic dialects, but not to the extent of forming a new Arabic language.

IIRC the Koran was taught in the original Arabic and this tie to religion may explain why local dialects didn't drift apart when the Caliphate split. Latin had a similar support in the form of the Catholic Church but that was more limited to a small group of priests than recitations of the Koran are.

 

[PMLF]

If I recall correctly, the Arabic regional dialects did drift apart, but there is some kind of diglossia in Arab countries, with standard Arabic used in media, official matters, etc while local Arabic varieties are used locally by the population and those varieties aren't necessarily fully mutually intelligible.

 

[trybald]

Elites have little or nothing to do with it. Determinants of language are in the countryside, not cities.

Language doesn't emanate from urban to the rural, but rather the other way around.

While urban elites will speak the language of the conquerors, the language that prevails depends on the language spoken in countryside.

To answer your particular question, it was the transplantation of the rural Bedouin tribes from Arabia, most famously the Banu Hillal, to North Africa (first to Egypt, and thereafter to the rural valleys of Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco , c.1150s), that began the process of Arabization.

By contrast, Persia, which was ruled just as long by Arab conquerors, never Arabized. Arabs in Iran stayed in urban garrisons. Rural Arab Bedouin tribes never settled in the Iranian countryside. So Persian prevailed.

It is not a question of prestige either. In North Africa, the illustrious ruling elites (Almoravids, Almohads, Marinids, etc.) for centuries were Berber, not Arab. The language spoken in the cities was Berber. But the countryside, from the 12th C. onwards, was increasingly Arabic-speaking because of the arrival of waves of transplanted rural Arab Bedouin tribes. Once Arabic prevailed in the rural valleys, Berber language became limited to an urban language (and to a few mountainous areas which the horse-back Arab Bedouin did not climb).

You see similar patterns in other countries. You have French-speaking Quebecois after two centuries of British rule because the countryside (not the cities) were French-speaking.

I expect you'll find much the same pattern in Ottoman-ruled Balkans, with Turks ensconced in urban garrison towns, and rural folk carrying on speaking their Greek, Serbian, etc. dialects.

So it is with the gazillion languages/dialects persistent in so many regions, even if the ruling urban languages are different.

The reason is rather obvious. Rural folk talk to each other, not to elites. So whatever language is the rural language, will persist there, by rural folk talking to each other. By contrast, urban populations are not as self-enclosed. Until the advent of industrialization, urban residence was never very permanent. People tended to move back and forth between city and country (the poor for food/jobs, the rich to country homes). So urban folk tended to be at least bilingual, and could switch between city language and rural language, depending on who they're talking to at the moment, They were not particularly insistent on either.

In the long term, increasing urbanization brought rural folk, and their funky language, into the cities. And at length, the rural languages tends to overwhelm the urban language even inside cities. The reverse does not tend to happen. By rural-urban migration patterns, language goes from periphery to center, not center to periphery.

Now it is not necessary that one must always prevail. Urban Berber and rural Arabic coexisted alongside each other in North Africa for centuries, Berber only gradually losing ground. It is really only in the 20th C., with deliberate Arabization programs that things accelerated into overdrive.

French colonial rule was in part to blame. In an effort to "divide-and-rule", French colonial authorities tried to create a legal division between Berbers and Arabs, to weaken "protectorate" governments and divide independist movements, e.g. the infamous "Dahir" imposed by the French residents-general in 1930 in Morocco, removing Berbers from the legal jurisdiction of the King of Morocco, and placing them under French courts. So when independence finally came around, the Maghrebi governments adopted a deliberate "Arabization" program to "erase" the hated colonial distinctions (plus, you get to emotionally join the rising stream of Arab nationalism elsewhere in the post-colonial Middle East).

Similarly, it took a external shock to accelerate the "erasing" of dialects and language in Europe in the early 20th C. Public education had only a little effect. The main impact really began with WWI, with the mobilization of armies. Recruits were plucked from their rural cocoons, with their persistent rural language, and thrown into national armies of mixed dialects and languages. They were forced to uniformly adopt the elite language of their officers.

(Unlike during the 19th C. industrialization, when dispossessed rural folks from the same area moved together to the same urban neighborhoods, so the rural dialects and languages persisted inside cities. e.g. Breton was spoken in Montmartre quarter of Paris, Occitan in another quarter, etc.)

Tl, dr;: Arabization prevailed in North Africa because Arab Bedouin tribes moved into the rural countryside of Egypt and the Maghreb. Arabization failed in Persia because they didn't.

Germanization of Silesia happened out of cities into rural population. Mainly in the course of mandatory education and religious instruction done by teachers and pastors coming out of cities.

Contrary to popular myth, the Ostsiedlung was never even close to a massive population movement.

 

[Henry IX]

The role of religion and language in the Middle East is complex. To give some context, in Egypt Arabic replaced the indigenous language in the Muslim community some time in the Middle Ages. Coptic, which is the descendent of the native Egyptian language survived until the 19th century amongst Christians. A similar pattern can be seen in modern Iraq, where Mandaean communities maintained their language for several centuries longer than the Muslim community. Language in this case is part of a deliberate marker of difference, with concepts of religious identity tied up with language.

Language loss tends to occur when the replacing language is seen as 'better' or 'higher status' and is advantageous to use, but is not viewed as oppositional to the existing language. The language of conquerors is generally only adopted when it is associated with mass movements of people (the New World colonies are a good example of this). In the Middle East Arabic was viewed as higher status by Muslims, but conversion to Islam was actively discouraged during the early part of the Caliphate. This led to Islam (and therefore Arabic) as non-oppositional but highly desirable (lower taxes). As a policy to reduce resistance to cultural spread, making it inconvenient but possible to adopt the dominant culture is a surprisingly effective technique.

 

[Abdul Goatherd]

All of the arguments here trying to find something inherent in elites, Arabic or Islam, have one big flaw: Iran.

Egypt Arabized. Iran not Arabized. Discuss.

 

[Henry IX]

Persian was a high status language. It was the language of a culture that had dominated the eastern side (at least) of the Mesopotamian basin for hundreds of years as well as the Iranian plateau up to the Indus valley. It had a significant noble culture and remained the language of power in the area. Hence, Arabic lacked the status to replace Persian as the dominant language. Indeed, the evidence is that the Persian elite looked down on the Arabs as barbaric.

In contrast Coptic had no status. It had not been the language of the ruling class for hundreds of years. When Arabic became entrenched as the desirable, high status language of the elite, which ordinary Egyptians could, to some extent, enter by learning the language, Coptic began to be displaced. This did not occur in the Christian community where Coptic was a signal of choice to maintain your religious identity.

Arabic failed to displace the native languages where the elites spoke the local language and succeeded where it was not. Greek did not supplant Coptic in the same way because the Greek elite did not allow non-Greeks entry into it regardless of the language they spoke - Greek was an exclusive language of the elite. Arabic was not.

 

[Xamand]

I would postulate that two factors for Iran that could cause it to buck the trend would be firstly being predominantly Shia surrounded by Sunni neighbours and secondly their strong Persian cultural heritage going back millennia that they identify with.

 

[Sabotage13]

I would postulate that two factors for Iran that could cause it to buck the trend would be firstly being predominantly Shia surrounded by Sunni neighbours and secondly their strong Persian cultural heritage going back millennia that they identify with.

Shia Islam wasn't dominant in Iran until the Safavids.

In Persia most of the ruling class actually converted to Islam and retained their dominant position in society, whereas Egypt was a conquered province and the ruling class was Arabs from Arabia. And even then Egypt wasn't fully Arabized until well into the 15th-16th century (or possibly even later than that, I don't remember).

By that time Persia had been conquered several times by Turkic and Mongol tribes and as a result had been more or less run by native bureaucrats and vassals for centuries. There simply was no contunuity of Arabic rule and Arabized ruling classes like there was in Egypt and the Maghreb.

 

[Calad]

Has this been performed anywhere else to this extent that we know of? My guess would be China to some extent but even they still have different languages within them whereas the Arabic world while split into religious factions still speaks Arabic through.

Russification is also a good example. Unlike English speakers all Russians speak the same Russian dialect: Muscovite. Russia is huge but even people in the furthermost corner in Siberia speak in similar way.

Only White Russia (Belarus) and Ruthenian (Ukrainian) dialects exist to rival with Muscovite dialect. All others died out, for example Novgorodian. This not including non-Slavic languages like Ugrian and other Asian languages.

 

[Abdul Goatherd]

Shia Islam wasn't dominant in Iran until the Safavids.

In Persia most of the ruling class actually converted to Islam and retained their dominant position in society, whereas Egypt was a conquered province and the ruling class was Arabs from Arabia. And even then Egypt wasn't fully Arabized until well into the 15th-16th century (or possibly even later than that, I don't remember).

By that time Persia had been conquered several times by Turkic and Mongol tribes and as a result had been more or less run by native bureaucrats and vassals for centuries. There simply was no contunuity of Arabic rule and Arabized ruling classes like there was in Egypt and the Maghreb.

But there wasn't continuity in the Maghreb. Arabs did not remain the ruling classes there any longer than in Persia. Arabs were driven almost entirely out of the Maghreb before the end of the 8th C. The later glorious dynasties of Almoravids, Almohads, Marinids, etc. were emphatically Berber. Not Arabized Berber, but Berber Berber. The Arabs that remained as a holdover from the early conquest became Berberized Arabs.

It was only with the arrival of the Banu Hillal that Arabic returned - not as an elite language, but as a rural language.

That is the difference. The migration of rural Arabic-speaking Bedouin tribes into the countrysides of Egypt and the Maghreb, and not Persia.

Anatolia speaks Turkish not because Seljuk or Ottoman elites, but because of the migration of Turkish goatherders, while Greece speaks Greek because Turkish goatherders didn't move there.

 

[Yakman]

At least with the case of Egypt, Abdul is correct.

Following the Arab conquest, large waves of Arabic - speaking migrants arrived in the countryside and were given land grants. They rapidly took over the rural communities and economies. While the Copts remained a going concern their bishops were complaining just two centuries later that they were having trouble finding priests, not so much because they didn't have enough Christians but they didn't have enough Coptic speaking Christians to fill up the ranks.

The Arabs gave preferential treatment to their own, and that definitely accelerated the process, but it was land grants to a new rural elite which spelled Coptics doom.

 

[Arilou]

´"imilarly, it took a external shock to accelerate the "erasing" of dialects and language in Europe in the early 20th C. Public education had only a little effect. The main impact really began with WWI, with the mobilization of armies. Recruits were plucked from their rural cocoons, with their persistent rural language, and thrown into national armies of mixed dialects and languages. They were forced to uniformly adopt the elite language of their officers."

The problem is that dialects were getting erased even in countries who did not enter the World Wars.

 

[diegosimeone]

How about the cases of Morocco and Iraq?

 

[Abdul Goatherd]

The problem is that dialects were getting erased even in countries who did not enter the World Wars.

Which countries are you thinking of? Did they have military conscription?

 

[Yakman]

How about the cases of Morocco and Iraq?

Morocco was discussed above, I think. Iraq/syria, I assume was probably a situation close to Egypt.

What language was the lingua franca in Mesopotamia in late antiquity?

 

[Abdul Goatherd]

but still, did any more than a few hundred thousand Arabs go to Egypt or Syria?

Hundreds of thousands isn't a drop in the bucket.

Incidentally, Egyptian TV did a mini-series on the story of Abu Zayd al-Hilal, the guy who led the Bedouin Arab migration of the Banu Hilal tribe from Egypt to Ifriqiya in the 1050s (their descendants proceeded further west to Morocco a century later, at the invitation of the Almohads).

Happily, it is available online Sadly, not translated nor subtitled. It is a narrative re-telling of the Arabic epic poem Sirat al-Hilali.