Afghanistan, Java, Sumatra, New Guinea, and Southern Russia. Arabic is
the spoken language not only of Arabia proper but forces the linguistic
boundary of that peninsula 300 miles north of Bagdad to Diarbekr and
Mardin, and is used all over Syria and Palestine and the whole of
northern Africa. Even at Cape Colony there are daily readers of the
language of Mohammed. As early as 1315 Arabic began to be taught at the
universities of Europe through the missionary influence of Raymund Lull
and to-day the language is more accurately known and its literature
more critically investigated at Leiden than at Cairo and at Cambridge
than in Damascus.
A missionary in Syria who is a master of the Arab tongue thus
characterizes it, “A pure and original speech of the greatest
flexibility, with an enormous vocabulary, with great grammatical
possibility, fitted to convey theological and philosophical and
scientific thought in a manner not to be excelled by any language
except the English, and the little group of languages which have been
cultivated so happily by Christianity in Central Europe.” Ernest Renan,
the French Semitic scholar, after expressing his surprise that such
a language as Arabic should spring from the desert-regions of Arabia
and reach perfection in nomadic camps, says that the Arabic surpasses
all its sister Semitic languages in its rich vocabulary, delicacy of
expression, and the logic of its grammatical construction.[83]
The Semitic family of languages is large and ancient, although not
as extensive geographically nor so diverse as those of Indo-European
family. Some maintain[84] that the Semites were ancient immigrants from
the region northeast of Arabia. They hold that before the formation of
the different Semitic dialects the Semites everywhere used a name for
the camel (_jemel_) which still appears in all of the dialects. They
have however no names in common for the date-palm, the fruit of the the
palm nor for the ostrich, therefore, in their first home, the Semites
knew the camel but did not know the palm. Now the region where there is
neither date-palm nor ostrich and yet where the camel has lived from
the remotest antiquity is the central table-land of Asia near the Oxus.
Von Kremer holds that from this region the Semites migrated to Babylon
even before the Aryan emigration; the Mesopotamian valley is the oldest
seat of Semitic culture.
Others[85] hold that the original home of the Semites was in the south
of Arabia whence they gradually overspread the peninsula, so that, as
Sprenger expresses it, “All Semite are successive layers of Arabs.” The
arguments for this theory are briefly given by Sayce:[86] “The Semitic
traditions all point to Arabia as the original home of the race. It is
the only part of the world which has remained exclusively Semites. The
racial characteristics—intensity of faith, ferocity, exclusiveness,
imagination—can best be explained by a desert origin.” De Goeje
lays stress on the fine climate of Central Arabia and the splendid
physical development of the Arab as additional proof together with the
indisputable fact that “of all Semitic languages the Arabic approaches
nearest to the original mother-tongue as was conclusively demonstrated
by Professor Schrader of Berlin.”
The following table will show at a glance the position of Arabic
in the Semitic family group, _dead languages being put in italics_.
Arabic, ancient and modern belongs to the South Semitic group and at
an early period supplanted the Himyaritic in Yemen, although the Mahri
and Ehkeli dialects are still used in the mountains of Hadramaut.[87]
It was practically the only conquering language on the list and is the
only one that is growing in use.
TABLE OF SEMITIC LANGUAGES.
NORTHERN:
EASTERN
_Babylonian._
_Assyrian._
WESTERN (Aramaic)
Eastern
Syriac.
Mandean.
_Nabathean._
Western
_Samaritan._
_Jewish Aramaic_ (as Targums and Talmud).
_Palmyrene._
_Egyptian Aramaic._
CENTRAL:
_Phœnician._
Hebrew.
_Moabite_ and _Canaanitish dialects_.
SOUTHERN:
ARABIC (Ishmaelite)
One written language but Modern Dialects in speech.
Maltese [?].
Morocco.
Algerian, etc.
Egyptian.
Syrian.
Yemen.
Bagdadi.
Omanese, etc.
_Himyaritic_
Mahri.
_Ehkeli._
Ethiopic (Joktanite)
_Old Geez._
Tigre.
Tigrina.
Amharic.
Harari.
There are to-day over one hundred Arabic newspapers and magazines
regularly published and which together have an immense circulation in
all parts of the Arabic-speaking world.
While the Arabic language has now acknowledged supremacy above all its
sisters, in its historical and literary development it was last of
them all. Not until the seventh century of our era did Arabic become,
in any sense, important. The language received its literary birthright
and its inspiration through the illiterate prophet who could not read
but who set all the Eastern world to studying his book. The Arabic
literature of the days before Mohammed has a high literary character,
but with all its beauty it was only the morning star that ushered
in the sunrise. When once the Koran was promulgated, literature and
grammar and the sciences all spoke Arabic. It was the renaissance of
the dead and dying East. Whatever effect the Koran may have had on
the social life and morals of a people, no one denies that it was
the Koran and that alone which rescued Arabic from becoming a local
idiom. Again this Koran was the unifying factor of the new religion,
sweeping everything down before it; not only did it unify the hostile
tribes of Arabia but melted all their dialects into one and established
an ever-abiding classical standard for the remotest student of the
language of revelation. We do not of course hold, as do the Arabs, that
the Arabic of the Koran is absolutely without a parallel in grammatical
purity and diction. The contrary has been proved by Nöldeke and Dozy.
The latter states that the Koran is “full of bastard-Arabic and has
many grammatical blunders, which are at present unnoticed, since the
grammarians have kindly constructed rules or exceptions to include even
these in the list of unapproachable style and perfection.”
The origin and history of the Arabic alphabet is exceedingly
interesting. All writing was originally pictorial, the next stage
being that of the ideogram. Perhaps a trace of this earliest writing
still remains in the _wasms_ or tribal marks of the Bedouin. Scholars
maintain that the earliest Semitic writing we possess of certain date
is that on the Moabite Stone, discovered by the missionary Klein in
1868. Almost of equal age is the Cyprus and Sidon alphabet, and that
of the Phœnicians, found on ancient coins and monuments. The date of
this writing is put at 890 B. C. On these monuments and coins the
system of orthography is already so carefully developed as to prove
that the Semites understood the art centuries before that date. The
oldest forms of these Semitic alphabets are in turn derived (Halévy,
Nöldeke) from the Egyptian hieratic characters. The oldest inscriptions
found in North Arabia by Doughty and Enting, in the Nabatean character,
and in South Arabia by Halévy and others in Himyaritic character, are
both written, like modern Arabic, from right to left. Although the
characters do not resemble each other, this would seem to indicate a
common origin. The intimate connection of the present Arabic alphabet
with the Hebrew or Phœnician, is shown not only by the forms of the
letters, but by their more ancient numerical arrangement called by the
Arabs _Abjad_, and which corresponds with the Hebrew order.
[Illustration: CUFIC CHARACTERS.]
Accounts differ even among the Arabs as to who adapted or invented
the present Arabic alphabet from the older Cufic forms. Some even
hold that they both developed simultaneously out of the Himyaritic.
The Cufic, it is true, is found on old monuments and coins from the
Persian Gulf to Spain, and is a square, apparently more crude kind of
writing. But the cursive script (now called _Naskhi_) seems to have
been in use also long before Mohammed’s time, the Arab historians to
the contrary notwithstanding, for the exigencies of daily life. That
writing was known at Mecca before the era of Mohammed is acknowledged
by Moslem tradition and the close intercourse with Yemen long before
that time would certainly indicate some knowledge of Himyaritic. Syriac
and Hebrew were also known in Mecca and Medina because of the Jewish
population, and it is not improbable that this may have had influence
on the present form of the Arabic alphabet.
[Illustration: MODERN COPYBOOK STYLE OF ARABIC (VOWELED.)]
[Illustration: ORDINARY ARABIC HANDWRITING (UNVOWELED.)]
It is not without reason that Mohammed’s cognomen for Jew and Christian
alike was, “the people of the _Book_.” At first, like the Hebrew,
Arabic had no vowel-points or diacritical marks. In the earliest Cufic
Koran manuscripts these have the form of accents, horizontal lines
or even triangles. The Arabs tell many interesting stories about the
cause and occasion of their invention by Abu Aswad ad Duili or by Nasr
bin ’Asim. In each case the awful sin of mispronouncing a word in the
Koran leads to the device of vowel-points as a future preventative.
According to another tradition it was Hasan-el-Basri (who died A. H.
110) that first pointed the Koran text with the assistance of Yahya bin
Yámar. The vowel-points, so called, were in reality the abbreviated
weak-consonants and were placed, in accordance with the sound of these
letters, when so pronounced. The vowel-points and diacritical marks
are always found in copies of the Koran, but seldom in other books
and never in epistolary writing. They are considered by the Arabs
themselves as at best a necessary evil, except for grammarians and
purists. The story is told that an elaborate piece of Arabic penmanship
was once presented to the governor of Khorasan under the Caliph al
Mamun, and that he exclaimed, “How beautiful this would be if there
were not so much coriander seed scattered over it!”
[Illustration: MOGREBI ARABIC OF NORTH AFRICA (UNVOWELED.)]
The demand for perfect accuracy in copying the Koran in every detail of
point and accent, led the Arabs to glorify the art of caligraphy, and,
as they followed neither painting nor sculpture because of their creed,
they naturally put all their artistic taste into their manuscripts.
Brilliantly colored and adorned with gold on delicately tinted
parchment, or paper, the fanciful chapter-headings and the elegant
tracery of each letter in the book make such an old manuscript Koran a
real work of art. Three names are recorded of those who in the early
days of Islam were the Raphaels and Michael Angelos of the reed-pen;
Wazir Muhammed bin Ali, Ali bin Hilal al Bauwab, and Abu-’d-Dur bin
Yakut al Musta’sami. As time went by there arose various schools of
this art; chiefly distinguished as the Magrib-Berber or Western, and
the Turko-Arab or Eastern style. In the decorations of the Alhambra the
western school shows some of its most finished art, while Damascus and
Cairo mosques show the delicate “Arabesque” traceries of the lighter
oriental school. It is in manuscripts, however, that the best work is
found; some of these are of priceless value and exceeding beauty. Even
to-day there are Arab penmen whose work commands a good price as _art_
and gives them a position in society as it did the monkey, described in
the Arabian Nights, who improvised poetry in five styles of caligraphy
for the astonished king.
[Illustration: PERSIAN STYLE EXTENSIVELY USED IN EASTERN ARABIA.]
The Arabic language is distinguished among those that know it for its
_beauty_, and among those who are learning it for its _difficulty_. To
the Arabs their language is not only the language of revelation, but
of the Revealer himself. Allah speaks Arabic in heaven, and on the day
of judgment will judge the world in this “language of the angels.” All
other tongues are vastly inferior in grammatical construction, and what
else could they be since the Koran with its classical perfection has
existed before all words, uncreated, written on the preserved tablet
in heaven, the daily delight of the innumerable company of angels! As
Renan says, “among a people so preoccupied with language as the Arabs,
the _language_ of the Koran became as it were a second religion, a
sort of dogma inseparable from Islam.” But the innate beauty of the
language is acknowledged by all who have made it a study, whether born
on the soil of Arabia or educated in the universities of Europe. From
the days of the Dutch scholars, De Dieu, Schultens, Schroeder and
Scheid, and the Swiss Hottinger to the times of Nöldeke, Gesenius and
Renan, the praises of Arabic have been proclaimed in Europe, and its
study pursued with a devotion that almost amounted to a passion.
The elements of beauty in this language are many. There is first its
logical structure, which, we are told, surpasses that of any other
language. Even the order of the alphabet is more logical as regards
form than the Hebrew; its grammar is altogether logical; the exceptions
to its rules can be formed, so to say, into a syllogism. Palmer’s and
Lansing’s grammars show how this logical structure can be discovered in
the minutest detail, so that, _e. g._, the three short vowels control
the forms not only, but the significance of roots, and are the key to
the interpretation of all grammatical mysteries.
A second element of beauty is found in the lexical richness of the
Arabic. Its boundless vocabulary and wealth of synonyms are universally
acknowledged and admired. A dictionary is called a _Kamoos_ or
“Deep Ocean” where “full many a gem of purest ray serene, the dark
unfathomed caves” conceal for the diligent student. Renan tells of
an Arab linguist who wrote a book on the 500 names given to the lion
in literature; another gives 200 words for serpent. Firozabadi, the
Arabian Webster, is said to have written a sort of supplement on the
words for honey and to have left it incomplete at the _eightieth_ word;
the same authority asserts that there are over 1,000 different terms in
Arabic for sword and, judging from its use by the Arabs, this appears
credible. De Hammer Purgstall, a German scholar, wrote a book on the
words relating to the _camel_ and finds them, in Arabic literature,
to the number of 5,744. But this remarkable exhibition loses some of
its grandeur when truth compels us to state that many of the so-called
synonyms are epithets changed into substantives or tropes accidentally
employed by some poet to conform to his rhyme. It is also true that the
wealth of synonym is limited in Arabic to a certain class of words;
in other departments of thought, ethics for example, the language is
wofully poor, not even having a distinctive word for conscience.
A third point of beauty in the Arabic language is its purity as
compared with other Semitic languages or even all other languages.
This was partly due to the geographical location of the Arabs and is
still due to their early literature together with the Koran which has
put a classical standard into the hands of every schoolboy and has
prevented, by the law of religion, both development and deterioration.
“While other languages of the same family became dead and while
many of their forms and meanings changed or disappeared, the Arabic
remained comparatively pure and intact excepting perhaps the temporary
corruption which necessarily occurred during the Moslem conquests and
foreign applications of the first four Caliphs.”[88]
The Arabic race occupied at first a circumscribed territory and came
little into contact with the surrounding nations so that the forces
which produce linguistic decay were absent. The only thing that will
preserve a language pure next to isolation is a classical literature.
English has changed less since Shakespeare’s time than it did in the
interval between him and Chaucer. So too with Arabic. Had it not been
for the Koran and its cognate literature, by this time the people
of Syria, Egypt, Morocco and Oman would perhaps scarcely understand
each other, and their written language would differ vastly; but the
existence of this literature has kept the written language a unit and
put a constant check on the vagaries of dialect.
The last, and chief element of beauty in the Arabic tongue is
undoubtedly its wonderful literature. In poetry alone, the Arabians
can challenge the world; in grammar, logic and rhetoric the number of
their works is legion; while both at Bagdad and Cordova Arab historians
and biographers filled whole libraries with their learning; in Cordova
the royal library contained 400,000 volumes. Algebra and Astronomy are
specially indebted to the Arabs; all the sciences received attention
and some of them addition from the Arabian mind.
The Arabic tongue is not only beautiful but it is difficult,
exceedingly difficult, to every one who attempts to really master it.
One of the veteran missionaries of Egypt wrote, in 1864, “I would
rather traverse Africa from Alexandria to the Cape of Good Hope, than
undertake a second time to master the Arabic language.” The first
difficulty is its correct pronunciation. Some Arabic letters cannot be
transliterated into English, although certain grammars take infinite
pains to accomplish the impossible. The gutturals belong to the desert
and were doubtless borrowed from the camel when she complained of
overloading. There are also one or two other letters which sorely try
the patience of the beginner and in some cases remain obstinate to the
end. Then the student soon learns, and the sooner the better, that
Arabic is totally different in construction from European tongues and
that “as far as the East is from the West” so far he must modify his
ideas as to the correct way of expressing thought; and this means to
disregard all notions of Indo-European grammar when in touch with the
sons of Shem. Every word in the Arabic language is referred to a root
of three letters. These roots are modified by prefixes, infixes and
suffixes, according to definite models, so that from one root a host
of words can be constructed and vice versa, from a compounded word
all the servile letters and syllables must be eliminated to find the
original root. This digging for roots and building up of roots is not a
pastime at the outset because of the extent of the root-garden. Dozy’s
_supplement_ to Lane’s Monumental Arabic Lexicon has 1,714 pages. So
large in fact is the vocabulary of Arabic writers that the classics
require copious explanatory notes for the Arabs themselves and some of
them have written notes on the notes, to explain the difficult words
used in explaining others more difficult. Moreover Arabic literature is
so vast in its extent that acquaintance with the vocabulary of a dozen
authors in one line of literature does not yet enable the student to
appreciate the language of other works. You may be able to read the
Koran tolerably well and understand its diction and yet when you turn
to the Arabian Shakespeare or Milton find yourself literally at sea, in
the _Kamoos_, and unable to understand a single line.
The regular verb in Arabic has fifteen conjugations, two voices, two
tenses, and several moods; the irregular verbs are many and mysterious
to the beginner although grammarians try to make them appear easier
by demonstrating that all their irregularities are strictly logical,
not the result of linguistic perversity but foreseen calculation and
providential wisdom. Is it not “the language of the angels”?—even the
broken-plurals?
As a final testimony to the difficulties of the Arabic language listen
to Ion Keith Falconer. After passing the Semitic Languages Tripos at
Cambridge under Dr. Wright, and taking a special course in Arabic at
Leipzig, he writes from Assiut in Egypt: “I am getting on in Arabic,
but it is most appallingly hard.... I have learned a good deal and can
make myself intelligible to servants and porters. I have a teacher
every day for two hours and translate from a child’s reading book.”
After _five years_ of further study he writes once more from Aden
(Jan. 17, 1886), “I am learning to speak Arabic quite nicely but it
will be long before I can deliver real discourses.” And this man was
an all-around scholar with a passion for languages. Without any doubt
Arabic _is_ one of the most difficult languages in the world to acquire
with any degree of fluency, and progress in its attainment means
ceaseless plodding and endless diligence.
XXV
THE LITERATURE OF THE ARABS
The literature of the Arabs is either pre-Islamic or post-Islamic;
the former has as its chief classics the Muallakāt or seven suspended
poems, the latter finds its centre and apex as well as its origin and
inspiration in the Koran. The seven ancient poems, still extant, are
also called _Muthahabat_ or the “golden poems,” and it is generally
admitted by Arabic scholars that this was indeed the golden age of Arab
literature. Zuhair, Zarafah, Imru-l-Kais, Amru-ibn-Kulsum, Al Harith,
’Antar and Labid were the authors of these poems and all but the last
were idolaters, and belong to what the conceit of Islam calls “the Time
of Ignorance.” These poems furnished the model ever afterward for later
writers and, according to Baron de Slane, are remarkable for their
perfection of form and exhibit a high degree of linguistic culture.
But the Koran has eclipsed all that ever went before it or came after
it in the eyes of the Arabs. It is the paragon of literary perfection
as well as of moral beauty. Its style is inimitable because it is
Divine in the highest sense of the word. To criticise its diction is to
be guilty of blasphemy and to compare it with other literature is to
commit sacrilege. There is no doubt that the chief charm of the Koran
from a literary standpoint is its musical jingle and cadence. It is
such as the Arabs, the earliest masters of rhyme, love, and servilely
imitate in all their later prose works. Our English translations of
the Koran, although accurate, (and even idiomatic, as Palmer’s) cannot
reproduce this; in consequence the book appears vapid, monotonous and
to the last degree wearisome and uninteresting. Attempts have been made
by Burton and others to acquaint English readers with this element of
beauty in Mohammed’s revelation. The following[89] is almost equal to
the Arabic itself, and, to say the least, sounds more interesting than
Sale’s prose version of the same passage:
“I swear by the splendor of light
And by the silence of night
That the Lord shall never forsake thee
Nor in His hatred take thee;
Truly for thee shall be winning
Better than all beginning
Soon shall the Lord console thee, grief no longer control thee,
And fear no longer cajole thee.
Thou wert an orphan-boy, yet the Lord found room for thy head.
When thy feet went astray, were they not to the right path led?
Did He not find thee poor, yet riches around thee spread?
Then on the orphan-boy, let thy proud foot never tread,
And never turn away the beggar who asks for bread,
But of the Lord’s bounty ever let praise be sung and said.”
It is not to be expected that all the transcendant excellencies and
miraculous beauties which Moslem commentators find in the Koran should
unveil themselves to cold, unsympathizing western gaze, but that the
book has a certain literary beauty no one can deny who has read it
in the original. As Penrice says in his preface to his Dictionary of
the Koran, “Beauties there are many and great; ideas highly poetical
are clothed in rich and appropriate language, which not unfrequently
rises to a sublimity far beyond the reach of any translation; but it
is unfortunately the case that many of those graces which present
themselves to the admiration of the finished scholar are but so many
stumbling-blocks in the way of the beginner; the marvellous conciseness
which adds so greatly to the force and energy of its expressions cannot
fail to perplex him while the frequent use of the ellipse leaves in his
mind a feeling of vagueness not altogether out of character in a work
of its oracular and _soi-disant_ prophetic nature.”