Plain Talk
By
Mursi Saad El-Din
Last week I gave a rather quick survey of borrowings from Arabic in the English language over the years, and I will continue from where I left off. Although the channels through which Arabic words infiltrated English are many and diverse, the main conduit was Spanish.
It is not surprising that the Spanish language should have mingled with Arabic during the Arab occupation of Spain for more than five hundred years. Arabic became the language of the ruling class, and though it was not used by ordinary people it was regarded as the language of a higher civilisation. It therefore had a considerable effect on Spanish.
Here we might consider the theory of a German linguist who proposes that when one linguistic group colonises another the invading language remains pure while the native language becomes hybrid. Even when the population as a whole becomes bilingual -- in this case using Arabic and Spanish -- the natives will take care not to bring in words from their own language when speaking the authoritative foreign language, and the imperial power will naturally wish to keep its own language pure.
Consequently, the Arabic spoken in Spain was inflected neither by classical nor colloquial Latin. Colloquial Latin (now Spanish) was, on the other hand, influenced by Arabic.
It would be interesting to follow the story of Arabic in Spain since the Moors crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, conquered and ruled the peninsula, and imposed their culture and language upon it. At first used only for administrative and religious purposes, classical Arabic gradually spread further afield. Intelligent Arabs learned Latin and Spanish while educated Spaniards learnt Arabic. Eventually the country's lingua franca became a hybrid of the two languages, with a great number of Arabic words entering into the Spaniard's everyday language. Arabic did not affect the grammatical structures of Spanish. However, the definite Arabic article was borrowed and used frequently in Spanish names. The residues of this borrowing are widely found in names such as El Cid, El Wadi El Kebir and Al Hambra.
A number of historians have dealt with the period extending from the first Moorish expedition in 711 to the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1610. It is particularly interesting that some historians regarded the Maghreb (Morocco) and Spain as one country. Nevil Barbour wrote of "The Land of the Two Shores" while Ibn Khaldun used the same expression and emphasised the fact that Spain had been engaged in cultural exchange with North Africa for a long time.
What is surprising is that in spite of the long occupation of Spain by Muslim Arabs there is no residue of this Muslim community in contemporary Spain, while there are Muslims in almost every other European country. The reason, in the opinion of certain historians, is that when Christian armies ended Islamic rule in 1492 they conducted a forceful movement of conversion into Christianity aimed at Muslims as well as Jews.
There has recently emerged an Islamic movement in Spain which succeeded in building a mosque in Granada, the first to be erected here in over 500 years. On the occasion of the inauguration of the mosque many articles in the press emphasised the fact that Andalusia (the name the Arabs gave to the territory) was an enlightened society that combined diverse religious beliefs with humanism and notable artistic achievements. Dr Maria Rose Menocal, professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, writes in her book The Ornament of the World about "how Muslims, Jews and Christians created a culture of tolerance in mediaeval Spain". She asserts that Andalusia's culture was rooted in pluralism and shaped in different ways by religious tolerance.
According to reports, this Andalusian spirit of tolerance was invoked at the opening ceremony of the mosque and it is hoped that it will endure.
