- Email: [email protected]
Islam in the Near East*
Islam in the Near East 45
to respond to the changed situation: in the past, their principal concern was to preserve the basic functional framework of the religion: now they are able, and indeed encouraged, to take a more active role in society, to help in its moral regeneration. It is not an easy task. They have yet to come to terms with it. See also: Calligraphy, Islamic; Christianity in Central Asia and the Near East; Islam in the Near East; Kazakh; Tatar; Turkmen; Uzbek.
Bibliography Akiner S (1986). The Islamic peoples of the Soviet Union (2nd edn.). [Contains some information on scripts and vocabulary.] London: Kegan Paul. Sjoberg A F (1963). Uzbek structural grammar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Waterson N (1980). Uzbek–English dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Islam in the Near East J N Mattock, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. This article is reproduced from the previous edition, volume 4, pp. 1783–1785, ß 1994, Elsevier Ltd., with revisions made by the Editor.
While Islam numbers among its adherents speakers of very many languages, it is dominated linguistically by Classical Arabic (al-lugha al-fus. h. a¯ ‘the pure language’) to an extent that not even medieval Christianity can be said to have been dominated by Latin. The Qur’a¯n, as the actual word of God, must be read or recited in Arabic. It is widely disputed whether it is permissible to translate the Qur’a¯n and thus modify, if not pervert, the divine revelation. Many translations have, of course, been made, by Muslims as well as by non-Muslims, and an English translation was authorized in 1984 by the University of al-Azhar in Cairo, the most widely respected repository of Sunni orthodoxy, but the permissibility of translation remains a live issue. The prayers of the five canonical times must also be recited in Arabic. Only the Friday sermon is generally given in the vernacular in non-Arab communities.
Islam and Classical Arabic – A Symbiosis It may reasonably be argued that it is the universal use of Arabic for religious purposes that largely sustains the very considerable cohesion of the Muslim brotherhood, bridging as it does the gulf between Sunni and Shi‘i Islam, and even that between the Ahmadi movement and the rest. However imperfect a Muslim’s command of Classical Arabic may be, it has become, as the medium in which the word of God was revealed, part of his heritage, which is to be revered and cherished.
It may also be argued that to an even greater degree, it is Islam that has, reciprocally, sustained Classical Arabic. The idiom of the Qur’a¯n is not precisely that of the other surviving literature of its period – the preIslamic and early Islamic poetry – or of that of later periods. This is inherent in the doctrine of the inimitability (i‘ja¯z) of the Qur’a¯n. It is, however, closer to the language that has survived, with remarkably little change, to become what is now known as ‘Modern Standard/Formal Arabic’ than are, for example, most 16th-century forms of European languages to their modern counterparts. It is this language that the Arabs use for writing of all kinds, for formal oral communication – lectures, broadcasts, speeches, etc. – and, to some extent, for communication with speakers of ‘dialects’ that differ greatly from their own. It is the spoken native tongue of no one, and proficiency in its use varies greatly according to the degree of education of the user. It is still uncertain what the relationship is between Classical Arabic and the various forms of speech (which are not generally represented in writing) that are familiarly referred to as the Arabic ‘dialects,’ collectively known in Arabic as al-lugha al-‘a¯mmiyya ‘the common language,’ al-lugha al-da¯rija ‘the current language,’ or al-lahaja¯t ‘the idioms, the dialects.’ Traditionally, it has been claimed that these are simply offshoots of the classical language that have become differentiated from it and from one another in the course of time. However, the theory has been advanced that a more complicated process of pidginization and creolization among the non-Arab subject peoples of the Islamic empire should be recognized as having taken place. Whatever the answer, the result has been that these ‘dialects’ are as different from one another as are the various languages of the Romance group. They are, to all intents and purposes, separate languages and might well already have been
46 Islam in the Near East
recognized as such but for two factors, which are partly interconnected. The first of these factors is Arab nationalism. This, although fostered by those who have had an interest in so doing, has never proved particularly powerful and is indeed somewhat specious; the great majority of those who consider themselves Arabs have little enough direct link with the original Arab conquerors of the 7th century. The second is the importance that the Arabic language has for Islam. It is this that has, on the one hand, preserved it virtually in its pristine form and, on the other, given it a status that has caused its offspring to be regarded, even by those who speak them, as inferior. The ‘dialects’ are referred to in terms of greater or lesser ‘purity’ according to the degree to which they diverge from the classical norm. That this is attributable to the influence of Islam is suggested by the case of Maltese; here one finds a descendant of Arabic that has developed in an entirely non-Muslim environment over more than seven centuries, has adopted its own Romanized system of writing, and has been recognized as a language in its own right. Elsewhere, non-Muslim speakers of various ‘dialects’ have formed minorities within territories under Muslim domination. Classical Arabic, then, is in effect a hieratic language for Muslims, although it is hardly recognized as such by those who consider themselves Arabic speaking. The extent to which the vernaculars are permeated with classical expressions, largely of a religious nature, perhaps tends to disguise the fact. Thus, the frequent citation of verses from the Qur’a¯ n and the Hadith of the Prophet, exclamations such as al-h. amdu li-La¯ h ‘praise be to God!’, bismi l-La¯ hi r-Rah. ma¯ ni r-Rah. ı¯m ‘in the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful’, a‘u¯dhu bi-l-La¯h ‘I take refuge in God (i.e., God forbid!)’, and even the customary exchange of greetings, as-sala¯mu ‘alaykum ‘peace be upon you!’ – wa-‘alaykumu s-sala¯m ‘and upon you be peace!’, in all of which the inflections of the classical language, absent from the vernaculars, are generally retained, strengthen the belief that other features of everyday speech represent a falling short from a classical perfection. On a secular level, the predilection of the educated for quoting medieval classical poetry, in which the inflections are necessary for the meter, also reinforces this. Thus, although Classical Arabic is not a natural medium for them, ‘Arabic-speaking’ Muslims do not feel it to be so divorced from their own native speech as, for example, Russian speakers regard Old Church Slavonic. For non-Arab Muslims, of course, Arabic is a hieratic language. Since, however, in many cases their familiarity with it is exclusively in a religious context – whether simply as used in worship or also as encountered in the study of secondary
theological literature – they may not be in a position to differentiate between ‘varieties’ of ‘Arabic.’ In addition, they are disposed to follow the Arabs in regarding ‘Arabic’ as one language, proficiency in which is attained by different people to different degrees. Thus, although it is to them a hieratic language, it is not one that is equally remote from all believers; their Arab coreligionists have the enviable advantage of possessing it as their native medium of communication.
Other Islamic Languages There is no documentation extant for the evolution of Pahlavi into Islamic Persian during the first three centuries after the Arab conquest; all Persians apparently wrote in Arabic, even though they presumably still spoke some form of their native tongue. When Persian emerged, it was heavily arabicized. A large proportion of its vocabulary was borrowed directly, and Arabic phrases were also adopted wholesale – not merely pious expressions and other religious idioms, but ordinary secular elements as well. It was at first still possible to use a less arabicized version, as can be seen in Firdawsi’s epic the Sha¯hna¯mah, in which, since it is concerned with preconquest history, Arabic phraseology would clearly be inappropriate. This, however, appears to have been regarded as deliberate archaizing, and although the Sha¯hna¯mah has always remained immensely popular, no subsequent writers followed Firdawsi’s example. The degree to which the language of individual authors was consciously arabicized, however, differs greatly; in general, prose is more affected than verse, and the more orotund the style adopted, the more Arabic it appears. Oddly enough, some items of Persian religious terminology survive, used interchangeably with their Arabic equivalents, and sometimes in preference to these, for example, nama¯z ‘prayer’ (Arabic sala¯t), paygha¯mbar ‘messenger, prophet’ (Arabic rasu¯l, nabı¯), and Khuda¯ ‘God’ (Arabic Alla¯h). Arabic, however, was a dominant influence; sometimes even Persian syntax seems to be approximating to Arabic. Persian and Arabic words were readily compounded, as in khidmatgar ‘servant’ (Arabic khidma ‘service’ þ -gar, a Persian suffix indicating ‘one who does something’), and dawlat-bar-anda¯z ‘revolutionary’ (Arabic dawla ‘state’ þ bar-anda¯z, a participial form from the Persian verb bar-anda¯khtan ‘to cast down’); Persian plural endings were attached to Arabic singular nouns, side by side with Arabic plurals, e.g., h. a¯latha¯ (Persian plural suffix -ha¯, for inanimate objects) and h. a¯la¯t as plurals of h. a¯la ‘state/condition’ and ghula¯ma¯n (Persian plural suffix -a¯n, generally for animate beings) and ghilma¯n as plurals of ghula¯m ‘boy/slave’.
Islam in the Near East 47
It appears possible that the Persian word musulma¯ n ‘Muslim’ may have come into existence through a misreading of such a hybrid, muslima¯ n ‘Muslims’ (muslim þ plural suffix -a¯ n), requiring the formation of a further plural musulma¯ na¯ n. The languages that appeared somewhat later on the Islamic scene, such as Turkish and Urdu, borrowed largely from Persian, taking over in the process the Arabic borrowings already naturalized there. Persian itself, from about the 15th century, came to replace Arabic as the principal cultural, if not religious, language of Eastern Islam. It continued to enjoy this position until the last century; of the poetry of Muhammad Iqbal, the celebrated Urdu poet, a sizable proportion is in Persian. Attempts have been made to ‘purify’ both Turkish and Persian by replacing the ‘alien’ elements with ‘native’ ones. Atatu¨ rk’s efforts in the 1920s to do this for Turkish had some success; modern Turkish contains a great deal less Arabic and Persian vocabulary than Ottoman Turkish, although much remains, some of it, no doubt, unrecognized as such. The last Shah, Muhammad Reza, became an enthusiastic propagandist for the ‘Aryan’ character of Persian civilization, and accordingly encouraged the resurrection of Persian terms to replace Arabic; thus, ‘agriculture’ became kasha¯ varzı¯ instead of zira¯ ‘at and ‘student’ da¯ nish-ju¯ (literally, ‘knowledge seeker’) instead of t. a¯ lib. How much of this linguistic engineering will survive the Islamic revolution, with its inevitable emphasis on Arabic, remains to be seen. In fact, both the Turkish and the Iranian initiatives may be regarded as moves in campaigns of secularization. In Atatu¨ rk’s case, the campaign was overt and acknowledged; in Muhammad Reza’s case, it was covert, but nevertheless real, consequent upon the opposition that both his and his father’s policies of modernization had encountered from the Iranian religious leaders.
The Arabic Script The Arabic script, with various modifications, was almost universally adopted for other languages of the Muslim world; this remained the case until earlier this century, constituting a further bond between Muslims. The respect in which it was held amounted almost to reverence. The art of calligraphy was highly valued, and the Arabic script, often in highly ornate
and fantastic forms, became one of the principal features of all the decorative arts. Poetry abounds in metaphors and similes taken from the shapes of the letters. It has been retained for Persian, Urdu, and Pashto, all three of which are, of course, the languages of regions in which Islam is particularly strong. With some qualifications, it is reasonably well suited to these languages, although the absence of short vowels means that they cannot be read aloud by someone who does not know them. Turkish abandoned the Arabic script in 1928. It was not well suited to a language with a sophisticated vocalic system, but this reform was also a further step in Atatu¨ rk’s attempt to diminish the influence of Islam in Turkey; it distanced the newly literate both from the Qur’a¯ n and associated Arabic writing and from the corpus of Islamic Turkish and Persian literature. The modified Latin orthography of modern Turkish works well, but it does tend to disguise the Arabic and Persian borrowings in its reproduction of their Turkish pronunciation: the elements ajza¯ ’ ‘components, drugs’ (plural of Arab juz’) and kha¯ nah ‘house, shop’ (Persian) are barely recognizable in eczane ‘chemist’s shop’; fevkalaˆ de ‘extraordinary’ appears somewhat far removed from its Arabic original fawq al-‘a¯ da. Kurdish, which is, somewhat distantly, related to Persian, has modified the Arabic script in such a way that short vowels can be represented; this expedient also disguises the shape of the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish elements, but it appears to have had no antireligious origin.
See also: Arabic; Islam and Arabic; Maltese; Qur’an.
Bibliography Fa¯ru¯ qı¯ I R & Fa¯ru¯qı¯ L L (1986). The cultural atlas of Islam. New York: Macmillan. Gibb H A R et al. (eds.) (1960). The encyclopedia of Islam. Leiden: E. J. Brill. [esp. articles ‘Arabiyya, Isla¯m, Lugha.] Holt P M, Lambton A K S & Lewis B (eds.) (1970). The Cambridge history of Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Versteegh K (1984). Pidginization and creolization: the case of Arabic. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, series 4, (vol. 33). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
to respond to the changed situation: in the past, their principal concern was to preserve the basic functional framework of the religion: now they are able, and indeed encouraged, to take a more active role in society, to help in its moral regeneration. It is not an easy task. They have yet to come to terms with it. See also: Calligraphy, Islamic; Christianity in Central Asia and the Near East; Islam in the Near East; Kazakh; Tatar; Turkmen; Uzbek.
Bibliography Akiner S (1986). The Islamic peoples of the Soviet Union (2nd edn.). [Contains some information on scripts and vocabulary.] London: Kegan Paul. Sjoberg A F (1963). Uzbek structural grammar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Waterson N (1980). Uzbek–English dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Islam in the Near East J N Mattock, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. This article is reproduced from the previous edition, volume 4, pp. 1783–1785, ß 1994, Elsevier Ltd., with revisions made by the Editor.
While Islam numbers among its adherents speakers of very many languages, it is dominated linguistically by Classical Arabic (al-lugha al-fus. h. a¯ ‘the pure language’) to an extent that not even medieval Christianity can be said to have been dominated by Latin. The Qur’a¯n, as the actual word of God, must be read or recited in Arabic. It is widely disputed whether it is permissible to translate the Qur’a¯n and thus modify, if not pervert, the divine revelation. Many translations have, of course, been made, by Muslims as well as by non-Muslims, and an English translation was authorized in 1984 by the University of al-Azhar in Cairo, the most widely respected repository of Sunni orthodoxy, but the permissibility of translation remains a live issue. The prayers of the five canonical times must also be recited in Arabic. Only the Friday sermon is generally given in the vernacular in non-Arab communities.
Islam and Classical Arabic – A Symbiosis It may reasonably be argued that it is the universal use of Arabic for religious purposes that largely sustains the very considerable cohesion of the Muslim brotherhood, bridging as it does the gulf between Sunni and Shi‘i Islam, and even that between the Ahmadi movement and the rest. However imperfect a Muslim’s command of Classical Arabic may be, it has become, as the medium in which the word of God was revealed, part of his heritage, which is to be revered and cherished.
It may also be argued that to an even greater degree, it is Islam that has, reciprocally, sustained Classical Arabic. The idiom of the Qur’a¯n is not precisely that of the other surviving literature of its period – the preIslamic and early Islamic poetry – or of that of later periods. This is inherent in the doctrine of the inimitability (i‘ja¯z) of the Qur’a¯n. It is, however, closer to the language that has survived, with remarkably little change, to become what is now known as ‘Modern Standard/Formal Arabic’ than are, for example, most 16th-century forms of European languages to their modern counterparts. It is this language that the Arabs use for writing of all kinds, for formal oral communication – lectures, broadcasts, speeches, etc. – and, to some extent, for communication with speakers of ‘dialects’ that differ greatly from their own. It is the spoken native tongue of no one, and proficiency in its use varies greatly according to the degree of education of the user. It is still uncertain what the relationship is between Classical Arabic and the various forms of speech (which are not generally represented in writing) that are familiarly referred to as the Arabic ‘dialects,’ collectively known in Arabic as al-lugha al-‘a¯mmiyya ‘the common language,’ al-lugha al-da¯rija ‘the current language,’ or al-lahaja¯t ‘the idioms, the dialects.’ Traditionally, it has been claimed that these are simply offshoots of the classical language that have become differentiated from it and from one another in the course of time. However, the theory has been advanced that a more complicated process of pidginization and creolization among the non-Arab subject peoples of the Islamic empire should be recognized as having taken place. Whatever the answer, the result has been that these ‘dialects’ are as different from one another as are the various languages of the Romance group. They are, to all intents and purposes, separate languages and might well already have been
46 Islam in the Near East
recognized as such but for two factors, which are partly interconnected. The first of these factors is Arab nationalism. This, although fostered by those who have had an interest in so doing, has never proved particularly powerful and is indeed somewhat specious; the great majority of those who consider themselves Arabs have little enough direct link with the original Arab conquerors of the 7th century. The second is the importance that the Arabic language has for Islam. It is this that has, on the one hand, preserved it virtually in its pristine form and, on the other, given it a status that has caused its offspring to be regarded, even by those who speak them, as inferior. The ‘dialects’ are referred to in terms of greater or lesser ‘purity’ according to the degree to which they diverge from the classical norm. That this is attributable to the influence of Islam is suggested by the case of Maltese; here one finds a descendant of Arabic that has developed in an entirely non-Muslim environment over more than seven centuries, has adopted its own Romanized system of writing, and has been recognized as a language in its own right. Elsewhere, non-Muslim speakers of various ‘dialects’ have formed minorities within territories under Muslim domination. Classical Arabic, then, is in effect a hieratic language for Muslims, although it is hardly recognized as such by those who consider themselves Arabic speaking. The extent to which the vernaculars are permeated with classical expressions, largely of a religious nature, perhaps tends to disguise the fact. Thus, the frequent citation of verses from the Qur’a¯ n and the Hadith of the Prophet, exclamations such as al-h. amdu li-La¯ h ‘praise be to God!’, bismi l-La¯ hi r-Rah. ma¯ ni r-Rah. ı¯m ‘in the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful’, a‘u¯dhu bi-l-La¯h ‘I take refuge in God (i.e., God forbid!)’, and even the customary exchange of greetings, as-sala¯mu ‘alaykum ‘peace be upon you!’ – wa-‘alaykumu s-sala¯m ‘and upon you be peace!’, in all of which the inflections of the classical language, absent from the vernaculars, are generally retained, strengthen the belief that other features of everyday speech represent a falling short from a classical perfection. On a secular level, the predilection of the educated for quoting medieval classical poetry, in which the inflections are necessary for the meter, also reinforces this. Thus, although Classical Arabic is not a natural medium for them, ‘Arabic-speaking’ Muslims do not feel it to be so divorced from their own native speech as, for example, Russian speakers regard Old Church Slavonic. For non-Arab Muslims, of course, Arabic is a hieratic language. Since, however, in many cases their familiarity with it is exclusively in a religious context – whether simply as used in worship or also as encountered in the study of secondary
theological literature – they may not be in a position to differentiate between ‘varieties’ of ‘Arabic.’ In addition, they are disposed to follow the Arabs in regarding ‘Arabic’ as one language, proficiency in which is attained by different people to different degrees. Thus, although it is to them a hieratic language, it is not one that is equally remote from all believers; their Arab coreligionists have the enviable advantage of possessing it as their native medium of communication.
Other Islamic Languages There is no documentation extant for the evolution of Pahlavi into Islamic Persian during the first three centuries after the Arab conquest; all Persians apparently wrote in Arabic, even though they presumably still spoke some form of their native tongue. When Persian emerged, it was heavily arabicized. A large proportion of its vocabulary was borrowed directly, and Arabic phrases were also adopted wholesale – not merely pious expressions and other religious idioms, but ordinary secular elements as well. It was at first still possible to use a less arabicized version, as can be seen in Firdawsi’s epic the Sha¯hna¯mah, in which, since it is concerned with preconquest history, Arabic phraseology would clearly be inappropriate. This, however, appears to have been regarded as deliberate archaizing, and although the Sha¯hna¯mah has always remained immensely popular, no subsequent writers followed Firdawsi’s example. The degree to which the language of individual authors was consciously arabicized, however, differs greatly; in general, prose is more affected than verse, and the more orotund the style adopted, the more Arabic it appears. Oddly enough, some items of Persian religious terminology survive, used interchangeably with their Arabic equivalents, and sometimes in preference to these, for example, nama¯z ‘prayer’ (Arabic sala¯t), paygha¯mbar ‘messenger, prophet’ (Arabic rasu¯l, nabı¯), and Khuda¯ ‘God’ (Arabic Alla¯h). Arabic, however, was a dominant influence; sometimes even Persian syntax seems to be approximating to Arabic. Persian and Arabic words were readily compounded, as in khidmatgar ‘servant’ (Arabic khidma ‘service’ þ -gar, a Persian suffix indicating ‘one who does something’), and dawlat-bar-anda¯z ‘revolutionary’ (Arabic dawla ‘state’ þ bar-anda¯z, a participial form from the Persian verb bar-anda¯khtan ‘to cast down’); Persian plural endings were attached to Arabic singular nouns, side by side with Arabic plurals, e.g., h. a¯latha¯ (Persian plural suffix -ha¯, for inanimate objects) and h. a¯la¯t as plurals of h. a¯la ‘state/condition’ and ghula¯ma¯n (Persian plural suffix -a¯n, generally for animate beings) and ghilma¯n as plurals of ghula¯m ‘boy/slave’.
Islam in the Near East 47
It appears possible that the Persian word musulma¯ n ‘Muslim’ may have come into existence through a misreading of such a hybrid, muslima¯ n ‘Muslims’ (muslim þ plural suffix -a¯ n), requiring the formation of a further plural musulma¯ na¯ n. The languages that appeared somewhat later on the Islamic scene, such as Turkish and Urdu, borrowed largely from Persian, taking over in the process the Arabic borrowings already naturalized there. Persian itself, from about the 15th century, came to replace Arabic as the principal cultural, if not religious, language of Eastern Islam. It continued to enjoy this position until the last century; of the poetry of Muhammad Iqbal, the celebrated Urdu poet, a sizable proportion is in Persian. Attempts have been made to ‘purify’ both Turkish and Persian by replacing the ‘alien’ elements with ‘native’ ones. Atatu¨ rk’s efforts in the 1920s to do this for Turkish had some success; modern Turkish contains a great deal less Arabic and Persian vocabulary than Ottoman Turkish, although much remains, some of it, no doubt, unrecognized as such. The last Shah, Muhammad Reza, became an enthusiastic propagandist for the ‘Aryan’ character of Persian civilization, and accordingly encouraged the resurrection of Persian terms to replace Arabic; thus, ‘agriculture’ became kasha¯ varzı¯ instead of zira¯ ‘at and ‘student’ da¯ nish-ju¯ (literally, ‘knowledge seeker’) instead of t. a¯ lib. How much of this linguistic engineering will survive the Islamic revolution, with its inevitable emphasis on Arabic, remains to be seen. In fact, both the Turkish and the Iranian initiatives may be regarded as moves in campaigns of secularization. In Atatu¨ rk’s case, the campaign was overt and acknowledged; in Muhammad Reza’s case, it was covert, but nevertheless real, consequent upon the opposition that both his and his father’s policies of modernization had encountered from the Iranian religious leaders.
The Arabic Script The Arabic script, with various modifications, was almost universally adopted for other languages of the Muslim world; this remained the case until earlier this century, constituting a further bond between Muslims. The respect in which it was held amounted almost to reverence. The art of calligraphy was highly valued, and the Arabic script, often in highly ornate
and fantastic forms, became one of the principal features of all the decorative arts. Poetry abounds in metaphors and similes taken from the shapes of the letters. It has been retained for Persian, Urdu, and Pashto, all three of which are, of course, the languages of regions in which Islam is particularly strong. With some qualifications, it is reasonably well suited to these languages, although the absence of short vowels means that they cannot be read aloud by someone who does not know them. Turkish abandoned the Arabic script in 1928. It was not well suited to a language with a sophisticated vocalic system, but this reform was also a further step in Atatu¨ rk’s attempt to diminish the influence of Islam in Turkey; it distanced the newly literate both from the Qur’a¯ n and associated Arabic writing and from the corpus of Islamic Turkish and Persian literature. The modified Latin orthography of modern Turkish works well, but it does tend to disguise the Arabic and Persian borrowings in its reproduction of their Turkish pronunciation: the elements ajza¯ ’ ‘components, drugs’ (plural of Arab juz’) and kha¯ nah ‘house, shop’ (Persian) are barely recognizable in eczane ‘chemist’s shop’; fevkalaˆ de ‘extraordinary’ appears somewhat far removed from its Arabic original fawq al-‘a¯ da. Kurdish, which is, somewhat distantly, related to Persian, has modified the Arabic script in such a way that short vowels can be represented; this expedient also disguises the shape of the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish elements, but it appears to have had no antireligious origin.
See also: Arabic; Islam and Arabic; Maltese; Qur’an.
Bibliography Fa¯ru¯ qı¯ I R & Fa¯ru¯qı¯ L L (1986). The cultural atlas of Islam. New York: Macmillan. Gibb H A R et al. (eds.) (1960). The encyclopedia of Islam. Leiden: E. J. Brill. [esp. articles ‘Arabiyya, Isla¯m, Lugha.] Holt P M, Lambton A K S & Lewis B (eds.) (1970). The Cambridge history of Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Versteegh K (1984). Pidginization and creolization: the case of Arabic. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, series 4, (vol. 33). Amsterdam: Benjamins.