Some Thoughts on Taha Hussein's "On Pre-Islamic Poetry"

[John Halliwell]

Hi everyone,

 

Tomorrow I plan to send out the translation of two of our articles discussing Taha Hussein's influential ideas on the occasion of the anniversary of his passing. For now, I wanted to share a mini-intellectual voyage which my own reading of Hussein's "On Pre-Islamic Poetry" led me on; maybe by doing this, someone besides George Weyman will be interested enough to read what I've translated.

 

 

Back in my grad school days, I actually wrote a paper on Hussein’s work On Pre-Islamic Poetry. I didn’t analyze all of his arguments (which others have done exhaustively anyways), but looked specifically at his linguistic arguments, primarily his point that, since the Arabs prior to Islam all spoke very distinct dialects, how can this poetry all be in classical Arabic? The great 20^th-century Arabist Charles Ferguson indirectly provided a potential answer. (Ferguson, incidentally, wrote the first and most influential review of the famous Hans Wehr dictionary; as Wehr notes in the introduction to his third edition, many of Ferguson’s suggestions were subsequently incorporated into later editions) Ferguson believed that, prior to Islam, all the Arab tribes shared a koine dialect – that is, in addition to their tribal dialect, they spoke an artificial type of Arabic that was mutually-intelligible to all other Arabs, and which allowed them to construct a common oral literary tradition. Ferguson then goes on to argue that it is from this koine (which is similar although not identical to the Arabic of the Qur’an) that all modern Arabic dialects would evolve. In response to this theory, another prominent Arabist named Kees Versteegh produced his own counter-theory to the origins of the modern dialects: the dialects are all essentially creoles. In all human societies, creoles are formed through universal principles. For instance, the original marker for the future tense is dropped from the original language, and the pidgin (the proto-creole as it were) uses a verb of motion in its place. Hence, in Egyptian Arabic, we have raah yiktib (“he will write”) instead of sawfa yaktub – the verb raah meaning “to go” in classical and Egyptian Arabic. And then that is usually shortened to simply ha- ; hence, hayiktib! The point is that, whereas Ferguson saw the common features of the ‘ammiyyas as being ascribable to a common source (the koine), Versteegh saw them as attributable to simply the universal strategies of how humans break down and then reassemble a complex language. I for one don’t understand why Versteegh attacked Ferguson for this; their theories are not mutually exclusive. In any case, I think both shed important light into the nature of Arabic, both classical and modern. Another important source I looked at which in my opinion created a serious crack in Hussein’s theory was “God and Man in the Qur’an” by the Japanese scholar Toshihiko Izutsu. Izutsu provides a brilliant expose on how the Qur’an radically altered the meanings of key words in Arabic culture such as: kufr, jahl, taqwa, and zann. To my mind, at least, it provides formidable proof that what we know as pre-Islamic poetry did in fact spring from a linguistic-cultural milieu much different than the Islamic one. I think Hussein’s thesis rightly created an earthquake in scholarly circles because it raised serious questions about the nature and evolution of Arabic as we know it. Even if much of the academic establishment no longer accepts his ideas on this issue, at least it has allowed us to more fully appreciate the historical sources of this ancient Semitic language.

John

[John Halliwell]

Arabic translation of my previous email for those who prefer to read in Arabic:

 

لما كنت طالباً في الدراسات العليا، كتبت تقريراً حول كتاب طه حسين المعنون "في الشعر الجاهلي". ولم أقم بتحليل جميع حججه (وفي أي حال، قد فعل هذا آخرون كثير)، ولكنني نظرت في حججه اللغوية، وعلى رأسها سؤاله الاستنكاره أن كيف يكون هذا الشعر المزعوم جاهلياً كله مكتوب في اللغة الفصحى الموحدة لما كان العرب قبل ظهور الإسلام ينطقون بعدة لهجات متابينة؟ وعلى طريقة غير مباشرة قد قدم عالم اللغة العربية البارز تشارلز فيرجيسون إجابة (يجدر الذكر بأن فيرجيسون ألف أول مراجعة والأكثر نفوذاً حول قاموس هانز فيهر؛ وكما يذكر فيهر نفسه في مقدمة الطبعة الثالثة لمعجمه، قد تم دمج اقتراحات فيرجيسون لاحقاً)

اعتقد فيرجيسون أن العرب الجاهليون بالإضافة إلى لهجتهم الخاصة بقبيلتهم تكلموا لهجة "كويناي"، أي لهجة مصطنعة ومفهومة من قبل جميع ناطقي لغة الضاد والتي مكنتهم من بناء تراث أدبي شفوي مشترك. ومن ثم جادل فيرجيسون بأن جميع اللهجات العربية المعاصرة قد تطورت من هذه الكويناي (والتي تشبه لغة القرآن وإن اختلفت عنها).

ورداً على نظرية فيرجيسون، قدم عالم بارز أخر في العربية والمدعي كيس فيرشتيغ نظريته البديلة حول أصل اللهجات المعاصرة، حيث احتج على أنها في الحقيقة تكون اللهجات العربية لغات مزيجة (كريأولات). ففي جميع المجتمعات البشرية، تتطور الكريأولات حسب مبادئ توجيهية كونية. فمثلاً يسقط حرف المستقبل من اللغة الأصلية وتبدله اللغة الخليطة (البيجين الذي قد يطور إلى كريأول في ما بعد) بفعل من أفعال الذهاب. إذا، في اللهجة المصرية، نقول راح يكتب بدلاً من سوف يكتب، والذي عادة يختصر إلى "ح": حيكتب!

الحاصل أن فيرجيسون نسب الملامح المشتركة للعاميات المختلفة إلى لغة أصلية مشتركة (أي، الكويناي) حيث نسبها فيرشتيغ إلى الاستراتيجيات الكونية التي يلجأ الإنسان إليها في تحليل لغة معقدة ثم إعادة تركيبها. وأنا شخصياً لا أفهم لماذا هاجم فيرشتيغ فيرجيسون على هذه النقطة حيث لا تمنع أي نظرية الأخرى. وفي كل حال، أرى أن الاثنتين مع بعض تلقيان ضوئاً مهماً على طبيعة العربية كلاسيكيتها ومعاصرتها.

ومن الكتب الأخرى التي في رأي توسع الصداع في نظيرة طه حسين هو كتاب "الله والإنسان في القرآن" للعالم الياباني توشيهيكو إيزوتسو والذي يقدم عرضاً عبقرياً حول كيف أن القرآن غير بشكل أساسي كلمات محورية في المجتمع العربي مثل "الكفر" و"الجهل" و"التقوى" و"الظن". ولي أنا على الأقل، تقدم حجج إيزوتسو أدلة فظيعة على أن الشعر المنسوب إلى العصر الجاهلي فعلاً نبع عن بيئة لغوية وثقافية تختلف كثيراً عن البيئة الإسلامية.

وحقاً مثلت نظرية طه حسين زلزلاً في الأوساط الأكاديمية لأنها دفعت إلى الأمام أسئلة خطيرة حول طبيعة وتطور اللغة العربية كما نعرفهما. وإن لم يقبل معظم العلماء اليوم أفكاره حول هذه القضية، فعلى الأقل قد سمح لنا أن نقدر المصادر التاريخية لهذه اللغة السامية القديم حق تقديرها.

[Tom Trewinnard]

Thanks for this John, a fascinating insight into theories about the evolution of Arabic. 

I'm left a little confused as to Ferguson's argument here - is he saying that 'amiyyas are ascribable to a common koine? Or is it rather, as seems to be presented earlier, that the koine was derived from mutually intelligible dialects (as is my understanding of koineization)?

If it's the latter, I can see why Ferguson and Versteegh may have clashed: Ferguson is arguing that it is the koine which emerges from the dialects, whereas Versteegh seems to see dialects as a natural linguistic evolution emerging from a common source. The two theories seem to run contrary on this point. This may be my misreading, however, and I must confess to having no wider reading of Versteegh or Ferguson.

Looking forward to the translations!

Tom

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[John Halliwell]

My discussion was highly condensed as I wanted to be able to fit it in the comments section fo the event page, so I'm sure there are several points which are not totally clear.

 

We need to differentiate between two sets of dialects: the set of dialects that existed prior to Islam, and the dialects we now have spread across twenty-something countries.

 

Ferguson argues that, prior to Islam, there was one koine - a standardized dialect which was not necessarily the mother tongue of anyone. With the conquests of Islam, this koine went outward with the conquerors where it evolved into Moroccan Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Syrian Arabic, etc (Ferguson might argue that some or all the modern Gulf dialects are not descendants of the koine but of the original dialects; can't remember what he said exactly).

 

Ferguson argues for his point by discussing fifteen grammatical features common to all dialects (at least, outside the Gulf) such as: illee for the relative pronoun, the verb gaaba (to fetch) which unlike any other verb has melded a verb and preposition (originally: jaa'a + bi), etc. Ferguson accordingly deduces that the only logical conclusion is that these dialects all came from a common source, and that this sort must be the koine which he speculates.

 

Versteegh says, au contraire, the commonalities among the ammiyyas can be explained by the fact that they are all really creoles which share common strategies in forming the language. Hence, although the ammiyyas have different markers for the future, all their markers are derived from verbs of motion.

 

[Note that Versteegh belongs to a later generation of scholars; I don't know if Ferguson was around to read the former's criticisms of his thesis or not.]

 

Versteegh's argument is more convincing, but he never demonstrates why the ammiyya's can't both be descended from the same koine which then evolved through the process of creolization.

 

Also: I don't know the reasons for it, but both Izutsu and a British Arabist named Alan Jones have noted briefly [ and somewhat condescendingly acutually] in their works that scholars no longer reject the authenticity of the pre-Islamic corpus in toto. Hence, working backwards, we need some sort of theory to explain why there aren't dialectcal differences among authors of different jahiliy tribes; hence, in my opinion, we need to keep Ferguson's theory around.

 

Does that make any more sense?

 

John

[George Weyman]

Enjoyed this discussion. 

For the amateur academics among us, there is a great reading list on the broader subject of 'diglossia' (ie. the relationship between ammiyya and Fusha in the Middle East) which Ferguson developed as a theory of the linguistic landscape of the Arabic speaking world. See section number 8 here: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sant1114/MPhilSocAnth.pdf 

Cheers,
George

8.  Language and Agendas of Standardization

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991.  "The Production and Reproduction of 

Legitimate Language."  In Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic 

Power.  Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Fishman, Joshua.  1975.  Language and Nationalism: Two 

Integrative Essays. Rowley, Mass : Newbury House Publisher.

Woolard, Kathryn and Bambi Scheiffelin.  1994.  “Language 

Ideology.”  Annual Review of Anthropology 23: 55-82.13

Arabic: Alvarez-Cáccamo, Celso.  1998.  "From 'Switching Code' to "Codeswitching': towards a Reconceptualisation of Communicative 

Codes."  In Peter Auer ed., Code-Switching in Conversation: 

Language, Interaction and Identity.  London: Routledge, pp. 29-50.

Badawi, Said and Martin Hinds.  1986.  A Dictionary of Egyptian 

Arabic: Arabic-English.  Beirut: Librairie du Liban (introductory 

material).

Bassiouney, Reem.  2009.  “Code Switching.”  In Reem Bassiouney, 

Arabic Sociolinguistics.  Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 

28-87.

Booth, Marilyn.  "Colloquial Arabic Poetry, Politics, and the Press in 

Modern Egypt."  International Journal of Middle East Studies.  

24(3), August 1992.

Ferguson, Charles, "Diglossia," Word, v. 15, 1959, pp. 324-340.

Gumperz, John and Eduardo Hernandez-Chavez.  2003 [1972].  

"Bilingual Code-switching."  In Roxy Harris and Ben Rampton eds, 

The Language, Ethnicity and Race Reader.  London: Routledge, 

pp. 291-302.

Haeri, Niloofar.  1997.  “The Reproduction of Symbolic Capital: 

Language, State, and Class in Egypt” [comments by Jan 

Blommaert, John R. Bowen, James Collins, Madiha Doss, Allen D. 

Grimshaw, Dell Hymes and Helma Pasch and reply by Haeri].  

Current Anthropology 38 (5): 795-816.

Haeri, Niloofar.  2003.  Sacred Language, Ordinary People: 

Dilemmas of Culture and Politics in Egypt.  New York: Palgrave 

Macmillan.

Holes Clive.  1995.  Modern Arabic: Structures, Functions and 

Varieties.  London: Longman.  (chapter 9, 'Language Level').

Holes, Clive.  1993.  'The uses of variation: a study of the speeches 

of Gamal Abdul-Nasir' in Eid M. and Holes C.D. Perspectives on 

Arabic Linguistics Vol 5, Banjamins, Amsterdam, pp 13-45.

Holes, Clive.  2005.  "Dialect and National Identity: The Cultural 

Politics of Self-Representation in Bahraini Musalsalat."  In Paul 

Dresch and James Piscatori eds, Monarchies and Nations: 

Globalisation and Identity in the Arab States of the Gulf.  London: 

I.B. Tauris, pp. 52-72.

Mellor, Noha.  2005.   "MSA: The Language of News," and "Values in 

Language."  In Mellor's The Making of Arab News.  Oxford: 

Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 109-142.

Suleiman, Yasir.  1994.  "Nationalism and the Arabic Language: A 

Historical Overview." In Yasir Suleiman ed., Arabic Sociolinguistics: 

Issues and Perspectives.  Surrey, Great Britain: Curzon Press.

One of the following for Arabic:

   Abdel-Malek, Kamal.  1990. A Study of the Vernacular Poetry of 

Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm. Leiden : Brill. (pp. 1-75).14

Booth, Marilyn.  1990.  Bayram al-Tunisi's Egypt: Social Criticism and 

Narrative Strategies.  Exeter: Published for the Middle East Centre, 

St. Antony's College, Oxford by Ithaca.

Somekh, Sasson.  1991.  Genre and Language in Modern Arabic 

Literature.  Wiesbaden : Harrassowitz. (pp. 1-72).

Suleiman, Yasir.  2003.  The Arabic Language and National Identity.  

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 

For Turkish: Aytürk, İlker.  2009.  “H. F. Kvergić and the Sun- Language Theory,” 

Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft 159, no. 1 

(2009): 23–44.

Aytürk, İlker.  2004. “Turkish Linguists against the West: The Origins 

of Linguistic Nationalism in Atatuürk’s Turkey,” Middle Eastern 

Studies 40, no. 6 (2004): 1–25.

Aytürk, İlker.  2008. “The First Episode of Language Reform in 

Republican Turkey: The Language Council from 1926 to 1931.” 

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series 18, no. 3: 275–93.

Ertürk, Nergis.  2010.  “Phonocentrism and Literary Modernity in 

Turkey.”  Boundary 2 37 (2): 155-185.

Lewis, Geoffrey.  1999.  The Turkish Language Reform: A 

Catastrophic Success.  New York: Oxford University Press.

Mardin, Şerif.  2002.  “Playing Games with Names.”  In Deniz 

Kandiyoti and Ayşe Saktanber eds., Fragments of Culture: The 

Everyday of Modern Turkey.  London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 115-127.

Mardin, Şerif.  1961. “Some Notes on an Early Phase in the 

Modernization of Communications in Turkey,” Comparative Studies 

in Society and History 3 (1961): 250–71.

Further Reading: Abu-Absi, Samir.  1991.  "The 'Simplified Arabic' of Iftah Yaa  Simsim: 

Pedagogical and Sociolinguistic Implications."  Al-'Arabiyya,  24: 111-

121.

Abuhamida, Zakaria.  1988.  "Speech Diversity and Language Unity: 

Arabic as an Integrating Factor."  In Ciacomo Luciani and Ghassan 

Salam_ eds., The Politics of Arab Integration.  v. IV.  London: 

Croom Helm.

Bassiouney, Reem.  2009.  Arabic Sociolinguistics.  Edinburgh: 

Edinburgh University Press.

Cachia, Pierre.  1989. Popular Narrative Ballads of Modern Egypt  

Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Cachia, Pierre.  1990. "The Use of the Colloquial in Modern Arabic 

Literature."  In P. Cachia,  An Overview of Modern Arabic 

Literature.  Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Fishman, Joshua.  1997.  In Praise of the Beloved Language : a 

Comparative View of Positive Ethnolinguistic Consciousness.  Mouton 

de Gruyter: Berlin.

Fishman, Joshua.  2003 [1972].  "The Impact of Nationalism on 

Language Planning."  In Roxy Harris and Ben Rampton eds, The 15

Language, Ethnicity and Race Reader.  London: Routledge, pp. 

117-127.

Haeri, Niloofar.  2000.  "Form and Ideology: Arabic Sociolinguistics 

and Beyond."  Annual Review of Anthropology 29: 61-87.

Mahmoud, Yousseff.  1986.  "Arabic after Diglossia," in J.A. Fishman 

et. al., eds., The Fergusonian Impact, v. 1.  New York: Mouton de 

Gruyter: 239-251.

Mitchell, T.F.  1986.  "What is Educated Spoken Arabic."  

International Journal of the Sociology of Language. 61.

Sharabi, Hisham al-.  1988.    Neopatriarchy: a Theory of Distorted 

Change in Arab Society.    Oxford: Oxford University Press 

(particularly section on neopatriarchal language).

Suleiman, Yasir.  2004.  A War of Words: Language and Conflict in 

the Middle East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wilmsen, David.  1996.  “Codeswitching, Code-Mixing, and Borrowing in 

the Spoken Arabic of a Theatrical Community in Cairo.”  Current 

Issues in Linguistic Theory 141: Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics IX.  

Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Woolard, Kathryn and Bambi Schieffelin.  1994.  “Language 

Ideology.”  Annual Review of Anthropology, 23, pp. 55-82.

Essay: Modern nations put a high premium on creating standardized languages 

that are to be adopted by their citizens through various means (i.e. through 

some combination of “the carrot and the stick”).  What was at stake culturally 

and politically in standardizing languages in the Middle East?  Discuss with 

reference to the Arabic-speaking world and/or Turkey

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