Ibn Khaldun on Arabic Dialects and Classical Arabic

Ibn Khaldun (Tunis)

Ibn Khaldun never ceases to amaze. His Muqaddima is not just the first great work of synthesizing history but also a pioneering work of sociology. Arnold Toynbee, who attempted something similar himself (at much greater length and arguably with less success), famously said of him, in every author's dream of a book-cover blurb:

"Undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever been created by any mind in any time or place . . . the most comprehensive and illuminating analysis of how human affairs work that has been made anywhere."--Arnold J. Toynbee, Observer

Of course, since Ibn Khaldun lived from 1332-1406, he wasn't able to use Toynbee's quote on his book tour.

Born in Tunis of a family that had fled al-Andalus (Spain) during the Reconquista, he was educated at Tunis and spent a career in North Africa, Granada, and finally Cairo. As I noted a few years ago, after Tunisian independence a statue of French colonial missionary Cardinal Lavigerie was replaced with a statue of favorite son Ibn Khaldun.

A frequent theme on this blog through the years (45 posts  with the label so far) has been the divergence between spoken Arabic dialects and the written language (Classical, Modern Standard, fusha), the phenomenon linguists call diglossia. Many classical Arab writers complained about it, but few tried to explain it. Ibn Khaldun tried to explain everything, of course.

As the excellent Algerian linguist/blogger Lameen Souag notes in a recent post on his Jabal al-Lughat blog, notes that Ibn Khaldun addressed the issue: "Ibn Khaldun: Arabic Dialects are Independent Languages." He translates the relevant section of the Muqaddima, and you need to read the whole post, but essentially he comes down to what I think linguists call a substratum and which he calls "mixing" with non-Arabic: languages:

You may observe this in the towns of Ifriqiya and the Maghreb and Andalus and the Mashriq:

• As for Ifriqiya and the Maghreb, the Arabs there mixed with the non-Arab Berbers as they spread their civilisation among them. Hardly a town or a generation was isolated from them. Thus non-Arabness came to predominate over the Arab tongue which they had had. It became a different, mixed language, within which non-Arabness predominated for the reasons outlined. So it is further from the original tongue.
• Likewise the Mashriq. When the Arabs prevailed over its nations, the Persians and the Turks, they mixed with them. Their languages then spread among them through the labourers and farmers and captives whom they took as servants and nannies and wet-nurses. As a result, their own language was corrupted by corruption of their (linguistic) habits, until it became a different language.
• Likewise the people of Andalus, with the non-Arab Galicians and Franks.

All the people of the towns from these regions came to have a different language, specific to them and distinct from that of Mudar [=Classical Arabic], and distinct each from the other - as we shall recall. It is as if it were a different language due to their generations' mastery of the linguistic habit of it. And God creates and decrees what He will.

A Tale of Two Statues

In my recent post on Zaytuna and the reopening of the ancient mosque-school in the Tunis medina, I ran a picture of Zaytuna alumnus Ibn Khaldun's statue at the entrance to the Tunis medina. There is an interesting story involving that statue, and its orientation.

First, you need to understand the geography. Avenue Habib Bourguiba, the great boulevard that runs through downtown Tunis like a colonial Champs Elysees, runs from the Lake of Tunis via Place 14 Janvier 2011 (formerly Place 7 Novembre 1987, formerly where Bourguiba's statue stood till 1987) in a grand European sweep to the old city. At the French Cathedral it becomes, for its last couple of blocks, the somewhat narrower Avenue de France, and then it reaches the old city, the medina, a typical warren of winding streets and allies. The entrance to the medina, the Bab al-Bahr (the gate toward the sea), thus marks the seam between the medieval Arab city and the French colonial European one.

The Since-removed Statue of Cardinal Lavigerie

In the French era, a statue stood at the Bab al-Bahr. It was of Cardinal Charles Lavigerie, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Carthage, founder of the Missionaries of Africa (known as the White Fathers, for their white clerical robes). He stood there, cross raised, right at the entrance to the street that leads to Zaytuna. When it was erected in 1925 it provoked demonstrations and protests by the Muslim students at Zaytuna, but it remained until independence.

In the Bourguiba era, another statue was erected at this end of the avenue: this time outside the gate, in front of the French Catholic cathedral. This was the statue of Ibn Khaldun. Not far from where the cardinal intent on converting Muslims had once stood in challenge to the nearby Zaytuna, so now the great Muslim scholar and product of Zaytuna stood by the Catholic cathedral. Of such dueling symbols post-colonial history often consists.

Zaytuna's Old Mosque-School Reopens in Tunis Medina

Zaytuna Mosque (Wikipedia)

This week the ancient mosque-school associated with Tunisia's Zaytuna mosque was reopened, after having been closed by Habib Bourguiba in 1964. Zaytuna, the Great Mosque of Tunis and the second oldest mosque (after Kairouan, also in Tunisia) in the Maghreb, was a great center of learning in the Middle Ages. Its religious university predated Cairo's al-Azhar, and was the preeminent theological and legal school in the Maghreb, a major center for the Maliki school of law. (Zaituna means "olive tree," one reputedly having once been growing in the courtyard.)

In the Bourguiba era the old school associated with the mosque at the heart of the Tunis medina (the old city) was closed and the name Zaytuna transferred to the Shari‘a Law School of the University of Tunis, while the ancient mosque itself remained the religious center of Tunis and Tunisia. Despite a pretense of continuity the modern university bore little resemblance to the ancient school,

Ibn Khaldun at Gateway to Medina

Now, Islamic learning will return to the ancient center in the Medina, apparently both to demonstrate a rejection of the excessive secularism of the Bourguiba and Ben Ali eras, but also to provide a government-sanctioned traditional Islamic counterpoint to the Islamist and Salafi movements that are growing in strength in Tunisia. More on the story here.

One of Zaytuna's products in the classical age was also perhaps the greatest mind to have been born in the city of Tunis, though later a fixture in many other places: Ibn Khaldun, The great historian (1332-1406) is sometimes acclaimed as the father of sociology, though he's a lot more readable than most later sociologists. Also, in what must be every author's dream of what they'd like to see as a book-jacket blurb, Arnold Toynbee, in A Study of History, referred to Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddima as "undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place." (No qualifiers, but what you need to know about the "of its kind" is that Toynbee considered his own book a lot like Ibn Khaldun's.) Appropriately, Ibn Khaldun's statue stands at the gate of the Tunis Medina, just outside of the medina (his birthplace) and the way to Zaytuna. But that statue gives me an idea for my next post . . .