By Peggy McInerny, Director of Communications

The fall 2024 conference explored the concept of an "Arabicate" world as a predicate to the "Persianate" world in Islamic civilization elucidated by historian Marshall Hodgson.

UCLA International Institute, January 8, 2025 — An ambitious one-day conference co-organized this past fall by the Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at UCLA explored the concept of the “Arabicate” world.

Cosponsored by the African Studies Center, Center for India and South Asia and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies of UCLA, the conference featured an accompanying exhibit at the UCLA Young Research Library, “From the 'Persianate' to the 'Arabicate' World: A Display of Manuscripts from UCLA Special Collections.” Scholars’ presentations at the conference will be be published in a future edited volume.

UCLA historian Nile Green, Ibn Khaldun Endowed Professor in World History in the department of history, launched the day by outlining the parameters of the “Arabicate” and its intellectual origins. He defined the term to mean the “written languages — and their intellectual and literary traditions — that were shaped in substantial part through adopting and adapting from Arabic their orthographic, lexical, generic or other intellectual apparatus.”

The concept, he noted, draws directly on the idea of the “Persianate” world delineated by historian Marshall Hodgson in his three-volume “The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization” (University of Chicago, 1974) — which divided the Islamic world into respective Arabic and Persian linguistic zones — as well as the decades of research on the “Persianate world” that followed.

An “Arabicate world,” said Green, was very much a process or set of processes that “unfolded in very different geographical, social and linguistic contexts.” This world was shaped by shared cultural tools and media, as well as by cultural mediators (especially ‘ulama and Sufi shaykhs) across specific areas of Africa, the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean.

“It was… a world in an internal, emic sense that was recognizable to its participants through their shared use and reverence of the Arabic traditions on which their own learned systems were partly built,” he commented.

Geographically, said Green, “[T]he ‘Arabicate’ world includes only parts of Africa, primarily the Saharan and Sahel belt and the eastern littoral of the continent, which in turn abuts the Indian Ocean; parts of the Indian Ocean (particularly East Africa, the Comoros Islands, coastal Madagascar, the Malabar region of India, the Maldives, and parts of the Malay archipelago as far as Mindanao in what is today the Philippines); and the western and southern sectors of the Mediterranean (comprising parts of Iberia and North Africa — which is to say, the historical Maghreb). We might also perhaps include inland ‘islands,’ such as Dagestan in the Caucasus.

“These regions were connected by routes of pilgrimage and pedagogy, conquest and trade,” he continued, with networks of ‘ulama and Sufis, the trans-Saharan book trade and the maritime distribution of Arabic manuscripts playing a key role in fostering connections.”

In temporal terms, Green said, “the timeline of the ‘Arabicate’ varied from region to region, such that new Arabicate literatures emerged over the course of a thousand years, from the ninth century to the early twentieth century, and even today.”

Within this framework, the historian said Persian could be considered the original “Arabicate” language. Like Arabic, written Persian would go on to influence the development of other written languages and literary traditions in the Islamic world.

At the time that Hodgson elucidated the idea of a “Persianate,” there was a dearth of secondary literature on Islamic languages of Africa that had been shaped by Arabic, said Green. Today, he continued, “a critical mass of scholarship has emerged on African as well as Asian and Mediterranean written languages that were shaped by Arabic,” making it an ideal time for an exploration of an “Arabicate” world as a counterpart to a Persianate world.

An ‘Arabicate’ Africa

Two scholarly panels considered the impact of Arabic on the languages and literary traditions of Nigeria, the East African Coast, West Africa and ‘ajami manuscripts in Africa.

In his introductory address, Green had specifically addressed the ‘ajami tradition, but opted for the broader ‘Arabicate’ as a conceptual framework. “In classical Arabic, the word ‘ajam meant ‘mute’ or otherwise incapable of speech,” he said. “Since in practice, such speech meant speaking in Arabic, the meanings of ‘ajam and its adjectival form ‘ajami were expanded to mean unclear or improper Arabic, and by extension a non-Arab foreigner who was unable to speak clearly (in Arabic).

“Clearly ‘ajam and ‘ajami were originally pejorative terms,” said Green, “… that, after being deployed to refer to Persia and Persian… were subsequently used to label a whole range of other regions and their languages… This is significant because it points to an emic recognition of commonalities between the African, Mediterranean and Indian Ocean: these were all the domains of languages called ‘ajami.”

In his paper, “Linguistic Dilemma on National Symbols: The Place of Arabic and Ajami in Nigeria’s Competing Literacies and Vernacular Nationalisms,” Abdulbasit Kassim, IDEAL provostial fellow and lecturer in the department of African and African American Studies of Stanford University, explored the controversy over the use of Arabic and ‘ajami on Nigeria’s national symbols.

Kassim’s presentation endeavored to answer such questions as: “Is Arabic or Arabic-derived ‘ajami script an indigenous or foreign language in Nigeria? How is the linguistic preference for Arabic and ‘ajami on Nigeria’s national symbols connected to debates on religious identity, secularism, colonialism and campaigns to promote vernacular nationalisms above imperial languages?”

To answer these questions, the interdisciplinary scholar examined the competing claims of Arabophone and Europhone public figures, writers and intellectuals and provided an historical overview of the evolution of Arabic and ‘ajami literacy in Nigeria.

In particular, Kassim looked at “the British colonial administration's engagement with the corpus of Arabic and ‘ajami writings in the country — including … linguistic reforms that facilitated script change from Arabic to Roman transliterations and the mainstreaming of Europhone-centered literacies …— [as well as] post-imperial debates on Islamization, Muslim identity and vernacular nationalisms.”

Clarisa Vierke, professor of literatures in African languages at Bayreuth University, Germany, presented an overview of Swahili literary tradition and Arabic-Islamic literary networks on the East African Coast in her paper, “The Language of the Prophet and the Poetry of the East African Coast: Swahili Literature and the Changing ‘Arabicate’ Ecologies in East Africa.”

Her analysis revealed “how dynamic, diverse, multidirectional and often fuzzy the relationship between Arabic and Swahili language and literature have been: they have taken different forms in various places along the coast, changing social contexts and in relation to other languages, a variety of media (from manuscripts to oral performance and social media), as well as controversies about language, literature and education.”

Using examples from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century and a range of geographical sites in East Africa, her presentation traced “a number of key agents, including not only Sufi brotherhoods, scholars and poets, but also colonial officers and European philologists, reshaping the notion of language.” Vierke observed that the influence of Arabic fluctuated over time in the city states of the Swahili coast, with different varieties of Arabic and different traditions and social practice in contact with the region.

“It is not enough to consider a sheer dichotomy of Swahili and Arabic and the influence of the latter on the former. Rather, there are, firstly, cascade effects on other African languages, and, secondly, more intricate entanglements of influence, as the example of booklet production shows, where colonial patterns have an influence on local ‘Arabicate’ productions,” she concluded.

In his paper, “Arabic Internalized, Parsed, Amplified: Grammatical thought in West Africa,” Dmitry Bondarev explored the impact of Arabic on the languages and literary culture in Sub-Saharan Africa. The professor of West African linguistics and Islamic studies and head of the “Ajami Lab” at Hamburg University noted, “From the early period of Islamic influence in the region, children memorized the Qur’an and learned elite used Arabic in their religious, political and administrative writings across the Sahel. Real and imagined connections with the Arabic-speaking lands were reinforced by invented genealogies tracing descent from Hijaz or Yemen.

“A specific bond between Arabic and West African languages developed in translation and linguistic explanations of Arabic grammar,” he explained. Drawing on Old Kanembu in Qur’anic manuscripts produced in Borno around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he argued that “Bornoan scholars created an effective grammatical tradition born from the conceptual fusion between Arabic and Old Kanembu linguistic structures.”

Seyni Moumouni, professor and managing director of the Institut de Recherches en Sciences Humaines at the Université de Niamey, Niger, presented “The Art of Writing Arabic Letters in Africa: An Analytical Study of Some ‘Ajami’ Manuscripts.”

Defining ‘ajami writing as the use of Arabic characters to write languages other than Arabic, Moumouni argued, “The exceptional opening of Arabic to other cultures has made the Arabic language a privileged instrument of knowledge, thanks in particular to a vast movement of transcription and translation in the world. In Africa, this movement concerned the transcription of certain African languages from the Arabic alphabet from the [sixth] century.”

“Indeed, the so-called ‘ajami script, produced from a system of transcription of African languages by the adoption of the Arabic alphabet, made it possible to fix languages that had been oral until then: Hausa, Fulfulde, Songhay-zarma, Gonja, Mampurlé, Wolof, Swahili, etc.,” he said. “These languages lived around Arabic until the beginning of the 20th century.

Hausa Ajami Arabic script. (Photos: Ashashyou via WikiCommons, left and right.) CC BY-SA 3.0.

“Manuscripts in ‘ajami script are part of the African and world written heritage… People use ‘ajami script to express themselves, write and communicate in their languages,” he said.

“‘Ajami script still exists today; it serves as a means of expression to write national languages in daily life (correspondence, contracts, messages, etc.) and in the composition of religious, literary and historical works. “ In conclusion, Moumouni observed, “These manuscripts are at risk of being destroyed unless urgent measures are taken for archiving and safeguarding work.”

An ‘Arabicate’ Mediterranean

Two scholars, Lameen Souag, director of Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale (LACITO), a branch of the Center National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) of France, and Michael Cooperson, professor of Near Eastern languages and literatures at UCLA, explored the influence of Arabic on languages and literary traditions of the Mediterranean world. Despite differing histories, they found the influence of Arabic more apparent in more formal literary written styles of both of Northern Africa and Malta than in vernacular speech in these areas.

In his paper, “Amazigh and the Arabicate,” Souag claimed the Amazigh languages had been “profoundly influenced by over a millennium of contact with Arabic and their literature reveals similar effects,” but argued that the notion of “Arabicate” was problematic for these languages because it presumed a “high culture” based on written works, whereas Amazigh languages were characterized by diglossia: using separate dialects or languages for literature and education, and for everyday communication, respectively.

“From the beginning of the Islamic period until the late 20th century, Berber written literature – where it emerged – was a liminal zone where themes and genres largely taken from Arabic-language sources combined with forms and elements drawn from Berber oral literature,” said Souag.

“The notion of ‘Arabicate’, insofar as it centers high culture, seems potentially misleading as a way to describe the complex influences of Arabic on Berber oral tradition,” he continued, “stemming in large part not from Classical Arabic, but from dialects that themselves show the effects of a Berber substratum, and unhelpful for disentangling the varying influences on modern Amazigh printed literature.

“For Berber manuscript literature, however, it usefully highlights the extent to which bilingual authors were attempting to achieve the same goals in effects in Berber as in Arabic, drawing upon monolingual Arabic models.”

In his paper, “The (Non-)Arabicate in Malta, ” Cooperson contended that the Maltese language was the converse of Arabicate. “Linguistically, it is a kind of Arabic, but its social and literary history can be read as an attempt to suppress or abolish that descent,” he said.

“In 1053, Malta was resettled by Arabic speakers from Tunisia,” he explained. “When the island came under Christian rule shortly thereafter, the population — still Muslim and Arabic-speaking — was left unmolested. During the 1240s, the Kingdom of Sicily forced the islanders to adopt Christianity, without, however, attempting to regulate their speech.

“From that time onward, Maltese Arabic has developed in close contact with other languages, beginning with the Sicilian spoken by the Normans,” continued Cooperson. “It is this contact-led change that eventually made Maltese Arabic a distinct language.

“Beginning in the fifteenth century, we find European visitors calling the language ‘Saracen,’ ‘Moorish,’ or ‘African,’ indicating that they perceived it as identical, or very similar, to the Arabic of North Africa,” he observed. “In counterpoint we have the equally insistent claims of Maltese speakers that their language is not Arabic. A particularly resistant argument has it that Maltese is descended from Punic.

“It is not too difficult to see, in this insistence on separating Maltese from Arabic, a desire to foreground Malta’s Christian identity and to establish the antiquity and prestige of a minor topolect by associating it with a language of the Bible.

“If there is any area where the truly Arabicate has persisted, albeit quietly, it is in the area of literary style,” concluded the UCLA professor. “Although spoken Maltese is heavily heteroglossic, good writing is supposed to happen in so-called ‘pure Maltese,’ that is, Maltese based on Arabic roots rather than on English or Italian. Of course, advocates of Malti safi never call those roots Arabic, but rather ‘Semitic.’”

An ‘Arabicate’ Indian Ocean (South and Southeast Asia)

At the final panel of the conference, M. Keely Sutton, honors program instructor at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, and Andrew Peacock, Bishop Wardlaw Professor of History at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, considered the “Arabicate” in relation to Muslim India and Malay-speaking Muslim Southeast Asia, respectively.

Sutton’s paper, “‘Unpacking Arabicate’: Contextualizing Global Connections in Mappila Pattu Literature,” explored the impact of Arabic on the Mappila Muslim poetic corpus (māppiḷa pāṭṭǔ) of Kerala, India. “These Mappila songs, with their blend of Arabic, Malayalam and other linguistic and literary influences, provide rich and textured examples of how Arabic intellectual and literary traditions have been adapted and woven into regional practices,” said the scholar of religions.

In an analysis that used a selection of texts and accounted for their historical context and development, Sutton examined “how Mappila songs reflect[ed] the navigation and negotiation of global and local influences, contributing to a broader understanding of the Arabicate as a process of cultural and intellectual exchange.”

“In the case of Mappila songs, the integration of Arabic literary and religious elements into the local Malayalam language and cultural context demonstrates the fluidity and adaptability of cultural traditions,” she said. “[T]he Arabicate is not a static or monolithic concept, but rather, a dynamic process of interaction and negotiation between cultures.

“[I]instead of seeing Arabi-Malayalam and mappila pattu as liminal literature or a curious language,” concluded Sutton, “recasting them as a cultural shaping of the Arabicate process links them to the wider world of cultural imagining of a new sphere, rather than something that exists between Hindu and Muslim or between Malayalam and Arabic. Something more than a ‘contact language.’ It’s important to understand, nuance and embed them in particular processes instead of cutting them off as aberrations or esoteric.”

In his paper, “Arabicate Literary Culture in the Malay World,” Peacock investigated the impact of the Arabic language on the languages and literary traditions of the Muslim Malay world. “The Muslim world of Southeast Asia comprised a world in which Indic, indigenous and Islamic traditions and literary cultures met, with a tradition of literacy long predating the arrival of Islam according to epigraphic evidence,” he observed.

“Indeed, the outward manifestations of pre-Islamic culture long endured in many regions (especially, but not exclusively, Java) through interest in Islamized versions of Hindu-Buddhist legends and, most notably, the survival of Indic scripts into modern times. Yet the Arabic script was adopted (albeit not uniformly) across most of the archipelago, and Arabic-script Malay became the prime vector for the transmission of Islam in the region from the fifteenth century.

“Nonetheless, many of the cultural influences in this Islamized Malay derived from Persia, most likely via India,” added the historian, who noted that the gradual displacement of Persian by “Arabicate” influences was a process that appeared to take hold only in the nineteenth century.

“Arabicate influences in the Malay world were circumscribed both by chronology and genre,” concluded the historian. “[I]n the early period of Islamization, evidence suggests a much stronger Persian influence, at least in terms of literary culture, alongside the enduring popularity of the old Indic stories. The survival of Indic-based scripts for Malay for a considerable period after conversion to Islam, and for other languages even later, down to modern times, suggests that the Arabic script had a rather more limited prestige than it obtained in many other parts of the Islamic world.

“Unsurprisingly,” he continued, “it was especially in the field of religious texts that Arabic influences start to become evident, whether through the emergence of the highly Arabicized Kitab Malay, or through the extensive use of Arabic in Sufi literature, such as the poems of Hamza Fansuri.”

Arabic-script Javanese translation of an Arabic work by Abu Layth al-Samarqandi donated to UCLA Library
in spring 2024 by Peter Theroux. (Photo provided by Mr. Theroux.)

In terms of genre, noted Peacock, “Arabic histories were neither translated, adapted nor influential, despite or because of the existence of a significant Malay historiographical tradition… Similarly, Arabic poetry, beyond the Qasidat al-Burda and a handful of practical texts aimed at facilitating memorization, had almost no circulation in the archipelago, and almost no influence on Malay verse. Even a profoundly Islamic poet, with a good grasp of Arabic, like Raja Ali Haji, continued to employ traditional Malay verse forms.

“The Malay world thus was a region that could be characterized as Sanskritized, Persianate and Arabicate, to different degrees in different places and times,” concluded the historian.

Published: Wednesday, January 8, 2025