Arabic, A Christian Language

To whom does a language belong? One might think it the possession of all who speak it. But as anyone who has learned a foreign language can attest, one receives such a language as an ill-fitting garment, awkward until broken in through sustained and strenuous effort. Or perhaps a language is the possession of those to whom it is native. Yet it often happens that the original character and meaning of ordinary speech is long forgotten, even by the language’s native speakers. In such transformations as “God be with ye” to “goodbye,” and in such unaccountable inventions as “shoddy” and its migration from noun to adjective, the dead assert their claim upon the languages of the living. Languages belong as much to those who made them as to those who use them, as much to the past as to the present, as much to the dead as to the living.

Consider a language spoken by Christians for more than fifteen hundred years. Its early masters composed exquisite poetry, pioneering a tradition that still flourishes today. Many of the great works of Christian thought were composed in this language; many of the most significant texts of philosophy, medicine, and astronomy were preserved in it. The Bible could be read in it for centuries before it could be read in English, French, German, or Spanish. Today it is spoken and written across Europe and North America, as well as Asia and Africa; it features prominently in modern political thought and advocacy. I am speaking, of course, of Arabic.

The public presence of Arabic in the United States and Europe has become a flash point once again in the aftermath of Hamas’s attack on Israel and Israel’s response. In such times, it is important to think carefully about Arabic’s character and significance. The histories of Arabic and Islam are often conflated, on the assumption that Arabic is an “Islamic language.” There are various reasons for this assumption, ranging from the Qur’an’s self-identification as an “Arabic Qur’an” (12:2) written in “clear Arabic” (16:103, 26:192–5) to the structure of contemporary university departments. Near Eastern Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Islamic Studies are not infrequently functional synonyms, and scholars of the Middle East often choose it as their subject because they perceive it as non-Western and non-Christian.

There is a dark side to this conflation. It is observable on both the political left and the political right, and it contributes to the effacement of the Middle East’s Christian communities—the oldest Christian communities in the world. The British pundit Douglas Murray recently called Allahu akbar, which means “God is greater” or “God is greatest” and is used by Arabic speakers in a wide variety of contexts in daily life, a “war cry.” Others have suggested that the Arabic word intifada—a perfectly ordinary noun derived from a verb meaning “to shake off” or “to awaken” and used to describe more than twenty protest movements over the past century in countries including Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Bahrain, Lebanon, and Sudan—denotes a desire to commit genocide against Jews. An acquaintance of mine recently made a similarly revealing mistake. In her anger with a Palestinian priest who had been critical of Israel, she suggested that his God was more similar to Allah than to the Christian God. She corrected herself afterward, acknowledging that Allah is simply the Arabic word for “God,” but she could hardly have phrased her initial remarks as she did if her primary association with the word Allah were not Islamic.

I do not mean to deny the deep and abiding relationship between Islam and Arabic, nor the vast, rich, and multifaceted Islamic literature in Arabic. That would be preposterous on its face. But I do mean to suggest that the appearance of a connatural association between Arabic and Islam arises from ignorance, not only of the history of the Arabic language, but of the ways in which Arabic is experienced by its speakers today. My own primary experience with Arabic is as the language of my Christian family. Egyptian on my father’s side, our family has likely been Arabic-speaking for a millennium or more, and Christian for far longer. There was never a time when I did not understand Arabic to be a language spoken by Christians. Over the last century, historians, orientalists, and grammarians have increased not only our knowledge of the existence of pre-Islamic, Arabic-speaking Christians, but also our knowledge of Christianity’s influence on the Arabic language and on early Islamic thought. In short, scholars have been unearthing a startling history: Christians helped make Arabic.

Let’s begin where my acquaintance began, with Allah. As the Princeton historian Jack Tannous writes, “there is evidence for pre-Islamic Christianity among Arabic speakers in Palestine and regions along and east of the Jordan River, and also in Iraq, Syria, the area in northern Mesopotamia known as the Jazira, and the Negev and Sinai Peninsula.” Christian inscriptions in Arabic from the century and a half or so before the rise of Islam in the seventh century show that Arabic-speaking Christians in the Middle East had begun to refer to God as al-Ilah. The precursor of today’s Arabic word for “God,” al-Ilah is the word “god” (ilah) plus the definite article (al). It literally means “the God.” Al-Ilah is likely a loan translation of the Greek ho theos or the Syriac Alaha (both meaning “the God”)—the titles used for God in the New Testament and in early Christian Greek and Syriac literature. In other words, as Christianity spread to the Arabic-speaking world, so did Christianity’s ways of speaking. Christianity gave Arabic its word for God.

This extraordinary fact gestures to a forgotten history. There is much more. Long before the birth of Muhammad, pre-Islamic Arabic poetry featured references to biblical narratives and figures, indicating Christian sympathies and commitments. Pre-Islamic Arab tribes in what is today Syria and Iraq—the Lakhmids and Ghassanids—converted to Christianity and left behind dozens of monasteries as testaments to their faith. One monument to this pre-Islamic Arabic past remains with us today: Scholars have long suggested that the Arabic script itself may have been created by Christians before the rise of Islam.

Not only did Arabic-speaking Christians predate Islam, but Christianity exerted an influence on early Islamic thought and on the Qur’an itself. It has been estimated that a quarter of the Qur’an’s verses deal with biblical material. Apart from the Qur’an’s many references to biblical figures and Christian (and Jewish) concepts, to find a striking example of Christian influence on the Qur’an, we need look no further than the figure of the devil. In the Qur’an, Satan is called also by the name Iblis. Though many medieval grammarians proposed an Arabic origin for the word, other grammarians and most contemporary scholars regard this as impossible. Perhaps the word entered Arabic through the influence of Syriac-speaking Christians; it is more likely, however, that Iblis is a corruption of the biblical Greek word for “devil,” diabolos, and entered Arabic through Arabic-speaking Byzantine Christians. A great deal of the Qur’an’s technical religious vocabulary likely had similar origins in neighboring languages—Syriac, Greek, or Ge’ez (Classical Ethiopic).

As pre-Islamic Arabic-speaking Christians shaped the linguistic and conceptual world in which Muhammad was to make his religious proclamation, so, too, the Islamic conquest of Christian lands in the seventh century brought Middle Eastern Christians from various ethnic and linguistic backgrounds into closer cultural proximity. In their introduction to a recent translation of the celebrated eighth-century religious dialogue between the Christian patriarch Timothy I and Caliph al-Mahdi, Frs. Samir Khalil Samir and Wafik Nasry write that the “Arab-Christian Heritage . . . drew from rich and varied cultural fonts including Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Maronite, Armenian, and Latin cultures.” Indeed,

this heritage was not limited to one single expression of a certain nationality or denomination, nor to a single cultural background. Rather, this heritage is comprehensive and derived from the diversity of national, ethnic, and denominational backgrounds of the Arab Christians.

As medieval Christian communities in the Middle East adopted Arabic as their language of everyday life and religious worship, Arabic came to play the same role for them that Greek had played in late antiquity: It became an international Christian language. Pre-Islamic Arabic-speaking Christians had helped shape the Arabic language; after the Muslim conquests, the Arabic language would in turn foster a broader and more cosmopolitan Middle Eastern Christianity.

Arabic-speaking Christians also played a role in the development of Arabic intellectual life, including in the disciplines of science, philosophy, and theology. In addition to the contributions of Christians to logic, philosophy, and theology in medieval Baghdad, many of the key figures involved in translating Greek texts into Arabic in the early Abbasid Caliphate—helping to create what is known as the medieval Islamic Golden Age—were Christians. Even the Islamic theological science known as kalam shows signs of Christian influence. Michael Cook has suggested that a prominent mode of argumentation in kalam—the dialectical technique of reducing the opponent’s claims to absurdity—was borrowed from Syrian Christian theologians who used the technique in disputes about the natures and person of Christ after the Council of Chalcedon. Further, many of the philosophical texts translated into Arabic and written in Arabic by Christians exercised enormous influence over prominent Muslim thinkers, such as Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd (Avicenna and Averroes, as the Latin tradition names them), who in turn were considered authorities by Latin theologians and philosophers such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas.

The substance and ubiquity of these contributions should not surprise us. Although Christians today represent only about five percent of Middle Easterners, it is likely that Christians were the majority population throughout the Middle East until the thirteenth century, six hundred years after the advent of Islam. Indeed, more Christians lived in Muslim-ruled lands in the Middle Ages than lived in any other empire, including the Byzantine Empire, which was formally Christian. Though many native populations in the Muslim-ruled world preserved their indigenous languages (speakers of Syriac and, to a lesser extent, Coptic stand out), they also adopted Arabic as a lingua franca for intellectual discourse, disputation, poetry, and worship. Christians have spoken Arabic, and Arabic speakers have been Christian, from the very beginning.

This tradition of Christian Arabic religious expression and scholarly production continued into the modern period and was especially prominent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Christians made up as much as 20 percent of the population of the Middle East. The nineteenth-century Bustani–Van Dyck translation of the Bible into Arabic, which is used by the Coptic and Syriac Orthodox Churches as well as Middle Eastern Protestants, was produced by Levantine Christians in collaboration with nineteenth-century American missionaries. This translation influenced Arabic prose style and literary sensibilities, and key figures involved in its production, including the Protestant political theorist, grammarian, and encyclopedist Butrus al-Bustani, would go on to be founding figures of the Nahda, an Arabic modernist cultural renaissance that began in Egypt and the Levant in the late 1800s.

Christian influence is present at every turn in Arabic language and thought. Christianity’s relationship to Arabic is unique, fundamental, and worth investigating in its own right and for its own sake. This is not to suggest that Christianity has a “closer” relationship to Arabic than does Islam, whatever that would mean. But the time when we might have thought of “Arabic” and “Islamic” as convertible terms has long since passed. Arabic is a Christian language.

Onsi A. Kamel is a PhD student at Princeton University.

Image by ActuaLitté, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.