Later, decadence and a long programme of Catholic reconquest eroded Arabic influence. Yet its legacy continued to be felt until the late fifteenth century, when the Inquisition was set up. The year 1492 proved momentous in Spanish history: Granada was captured by Ferdinand, king of Castile; the Christians expelled the Jews from Spain (or forcibly converted them); and Christopher Columbus discovered America. The importance of the first of these events is obvious, but the other two were also critical: the religious pluralism of Spain was abruptly brought to an end, with Christianity established as the only acceptable faith; and the discovery of the New World was symptomatic of the increasing strength of Christian Spain, which made Muslim retaliation pointless, as no Islamic state could muster a response to the Spanish Christians’ might. 27 Spanish national identity was given focus: now it really meant something to be ‘Spanish’. The Muslims in Spain were compelled to renounce their Arabic culture in the sixteenth century, and were finally expelled in 1609, although by then there were graver threats to the country’s majesty.
Under Arab rule, Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities had lived side by side. Their coexistence was not quite harmonious, but it worked. Languages commingled:Andalucian Arabic, classical Arabic, Latin, Hebrew and a primitive form of Castilian. As a result, those who were not Muslims offered little resistance to Arabic words and thought. The Islamic legacy can be seen today in the Great Mosque at Cordoba, in Seville, Toledo and Valencia, and in Granada’s Alhambra (literally, ‘The Red’).
Arabic learning was formidable. Alchemy was popular in the ancient world, and the language of alchemy can be seen in written works of the fourteenth century, reflecting the achievements in the field of figures like Roger Bacon and Nicolas Flamel. The word itself first appears in a literary context in Piers Plowman (c. 1360). Chaucer refers to an alembic (which comes from al-anbiq, a ‘still’) in Troilus and Criseyde, which was written in the 1380s. He mentions arsenic in The Canterbury Tales, and is the first English author to refer to an almanac. The distinction between science and magic was not always made sharply. Words that now belong to science once belonged to alchemy. One example is test, as in ‘test tube’ and ‘test specimen’, which originates in testa, the Latin name of the pot in which alchemists cooked up their potent mixtures. Other words of Arabic origin that come out of alchemy, though they now relate mainly to mathematics, are zero, cipher, zenith and nadir, all of which blazon the Arabs’ powers of abstract thought.
English visitors to Spain were impressed by the Muslims’ arithmetical skills and their practical application of these skills in land surveying, crop rotation, and the planting of orchards. Chronic water shortages necessitate technological ingenuity: the Muslims in Spain were masterly constructors of canals, irrigation works and even aqueducts, while a mixture of practical and aesthetic concerns informed their passionate interest in the design of gardens. Logic, geometry, anatomy and music were other areas of close study, while their expertise in chemistry, shaped by Greek and Persian traditions, informed a sophisticated understanding of medicine. They may even have developed a prototype of the modern fountain pen, almost a thousand years before such a device was patented in Britain.
A key figure in transmitting the more arresting details of their expertise back to England was Adelard of Bath, a twelfth-century scholar who studied mathematics and physics, under the influence of Arabic doctrine, at Laon in France and in Syria, as well as probably in Spain. He translated important Arabic works of mathematics and philosophy, and produced a textbook about the abacus (the name of which comes from the Hebrew abaq, meaning ‘dust’, and originally signified a board covered with sand in which one could draw figures with one’s finger). He also wrote a treatise on the astrolabe, a kind of primitive computer that made it possible to work out the altitude of the celestial bodies and was a valuable aid to navigation. Adelard tapped into the Arabic interest in astronomy and astrology; in the deserts Arab travellers had needed a good knowledge of the stars, and clear desert skies had helped astronomers draw up the rudiments of the impressive celestial maps that later earned them tributes from Copernicus and Kepler. (Lest we forget the cultural importance once attached to astrology, pause for a moment to reflect on the roots of such familiar words as martial, saturnine, mercurial and jovial.) Arabic proficiency in this area led to the building of the first European observatory, in Seville, around 1190; when it was completed, this 320-foot minaret, the Giralda, was the tallest structure in the world, and it still dominates Seville’s skyline.
The difficult journey to the shrine of St James at Santiago de Compostela was an alternative route into Spanish culture for adventurous Englishmen at this time. Ansgot of Burwell is the first Englishman known to have visited the shrine, some time around 1095, and many more pilgrims followed. The first translation of the Qur’an – into Latin, with pedantic notes in the margin – was made by an English archdeacon at Pamplona, Robert of Ketton, in 1143.28 Moreover, Robert was one of a network of translators whose work helped spread the rewards of both ancient and contemporary learning right through the rest of Europe. The process was by no means rapid, but it was indicative of the feeling that Arabic learning needed to be understood – even if only to be rebutted, as by Peter of Cluny in his polemical and somewhat briskly titled The Abominable Heresy or Sect of the Saracens, written around 1150.29
Subsequently, regard for Arabic scholarship has fluctuated. One notable flowering occurred during the middle years of the seventeenth century, when the academic study of Arabic flourished. William Laud, while chancellor of Oxford University, advanced the language’s standing there, collecting important manuscripts. Meanwhile at Cambridge a keen understanding of Arabic was initially seen as helping to defend the position of Christianity. For scholars intent on scientific progress, Arabic was crucial to unlocking the secrets of Islamic scholarship in this field. The publication of Edward Pococke’s Specimen Historiae Arabum in 1650 stands as a moment of particular note: Pococke’s book was a brilliant celebration of Islamic culture’s previously neglected achievements in fields such as zoology, philosophy and geography.30
Yet, while many of the elements of Arabic that have found their way into English have been technical in character, many more have been bound up with the romance of the East, that highly selective delight in its otherness. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when it was still immensely useful for a trader to know Arabic, the study of the language was also promoted by enthusiasts who admired the copiousness of its vocabulary. There has been a popular myth that every Arabic word can denote itself, its opposite and a kind of camel. Among the peoples of the Arabian Peninsula, zabab can mean ‘messenger’ or ‘huge deaf rat’; another example, quite well known, is a word I cannot transliterate (roughly, it is rass) which can signify eating a lot, eating a little, or a camel with a good deal of hair behind its ears. The sense that the expressive possibilities of Arabic are infinite has perennially inspired those who have experienced the Arabic-speaking world.
The travel writings compiled by Samuel Purchas, which appeared between 1613 and 1626, contain a notably large number of Arabic and Persian words, ranging from the familiar sherbet to the more exotic bezesteen, a Turkish marketplace. Purchas also introduces oasis, which, though borrowed by English from the Greek of Herodotus, stems from a long-lost Egyptian word. Yoghurt is first used by Purchas, and so is sofa. The latter’s meaning looks close to the one we now enjoy, but when we find Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writing in 1717 about ‘sofas of marble’ we gather that the word did not at the time mean what it does today. In fact it was initially used of an area of floor that had been equipped with carpets and cushions to make it comfortable. As it happens, the OED’s first citation for the word in its usual modern sense dates from the same year as Lady Mary’s ‘sofas of marble’, and this meaning soon became the norm. When a character in a novel by Samuel Richardson – or indeed Casanova in his diary – collapses on a sofa, we can be pretty sure it is a soft couch rather than the partly cushione
d ground. Lady Mary writes also of going into a spectacularly decorated harem; in this case the word is not so new. First cited in Sir Thomas Herbert’s Travels (1634), it denoted initially a section of a dwelling reserved as a sanctuary for women. Later it acquired the sense that English-speakers now tend to use. This sense is present in Arabic, but there the enclosure and the women it contains are distinguished only very subtly, if at all.
Creative writers have revelled in using Arabic words to light up their prose. James Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba (1824) is dotted with words from the Middle East, such as kismet, muezzin, shalwar and the Turkish baklava. So, a little more surprisingly, are the novels of Thackeray, where a character may imagine himself puffing on the water pipe known as a narghile, and where we find references to a harem of friendships and an otto of whisky (a play on the better-known attar). More recent examples are Frank Herbert’s six Dune novels, published between 1965 and 1985, which redeploy a number of Arabic words and suggest a solid knowledge of the Qur’an as well as a particular interest in Iraq.
A keener, less reverent, knowledge of the word of Allah resulted in the noun fatwa dramatically entering public consciousness in 1989 when Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran ruled that Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses was blasphemous. The word was commonly assumed to mean ‘death sentence’; in reality, a fatwa is simply a judgement passed – typically by a jurisprudential scholar called a mufti – under sharia law. Current world events are familiarizing people who speak not a word of Arabic with concepts such as this body of Muslim law, the school called a madrasa where it may be taught, the oral traditions of Islam known as hadith, the hajj that Muslims are expected to make at least once in a lifetime to Mecca, the imam or prayer-leader, and various types of veil and overgarment such as the niqab, the jilbab and the burqa.31 How long before we are equally conversant with shahada, the act of testimony by which a person becomes a Muslim, or hujja, the Prophet’s proof of his existence, articulated by the imams in their teaching?
Arabic was always, before all else, a sacred language, and Europeans who visited the Near and Middle East came across more common vernacular tongues, notably Turkic and Persian. The latter, an Indo-European language today spoken chiefly in Iran, was first directly encountered during the Crusades, when Europeans met the Seljuks of Anatolia, and it was in the urban centres of this same region, as Turkic increasingly displaced Persian in the thirteen and fourteenth centuries, that the language we would now identify as Turkish was heard. While superficially its legacy is modest, Persian made its presence felt subtly – as a language of scholarship and sophistication, and through its kindred tongues, such as Sogdian, ‘the lingua franca of the Silk Road … in the eighth to tenth centuries’.32 After Baghdad became the capital of the Abbasid caliphate in 762, the Muslim Empire was increasingly open to Persian cultural influences, and looked to the east rather towards the Mediterranean. The Persian legacy would include, among many other things, the shiraz grape, the paisley design (though its name is Scottish) and the parting shot, originally a ‘Parthian shot’.
Later, Persian filtered into India. The Mughals, whose empire was founded by Babur in 1526, pressed Persian and Arabic words into use in the native languages, and the status of many Persian loanwords in English was reinforced when they were re-encountered in India. Tandoor today denotes a clay oven, and has been borrowed into English from Urdu or Punjabi, but in the seventeenth century it was a table with a brazier under it, where people sat to keep warm on cold nights, and this word was learnt from the Persians, to whom the practice and the word had passed from ancient Assyria. Words like kiosk, hookah and divan were learnt in Turkey, and caravan was picked up in North Africa; but English-speakers met with Persian items such as bazaar, jackal, seersucker and shawl further east. Khaki was another; it had its origin in a Persian word for dust, but became well known only after the British commander Harry Lumsden garbed his Indian recruits in loose drab uniforms in the 1840s. Discoloured by imperial use, many such words eventually came to be used in thoroughly un-Eastern contexts: Thomas Hardy could write of the attar not of roses, but of applause; Macaulay of a bazaar at Tunbridge Wells; Thomas Jefferson of the janizaries of the British navy.
Viewed from above, the Persian contribution to English is close in character to that of Arabic. Colours, scents, materials and luxuries figure prominently. Thus candy comes from the Persian qand, meaning the juice of sugar cane, and taffeta can be traced to taftah, the Persian word for shining spun cloth of either silk or linen. Musk leaks from Persian through Greek and Latin; in the background seems to be the Sanskrit muska, meaning ‘scrotum’. Tulip is a Turkish corruption of the Persian dulband, meaning ‘turban’. Lilac comes from the Persian nilak, meaning ‘of a blue shade’; as one study of etymologies explains, ‘Before it started its wandering en route to English, the Persian form of the word underwent an assimilatory sound change by which the n shifted to l by way of anticipating the following consonant.’33 A later tribute is margarine, invented by Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès in 1869. Its name is far lovelier than its taste – if only we could dissociate the two – for the source of margarine is the Persian murwarid, meaning pearl. The name occurred to Mège-Mouriès as he saw myriad pearly droplets gleaming in the fatty acid which was used to make it.
Finally there is chess, a game which originated in either India or Iran and takes its name from French. Chess is far removed from the Persian word for the game, shatranj (the sound of which does seem to be preserved, however, in the Portuguese xadrez), but that is because in most European languages chess has been known by the name of one of its pieces, the king (shah). It is quite widely known that the chess terms check and checkmate derive ultimately from Persian: you call ‘Check’ to alert your opponent to the danger you are posing to his or her king (shah), and when you make your winning move the cry ‘Checkmate’ (shah mat) signals that ‘the king is dead.’ An explanation for the game being known to Europeans by the name of just one of its six types of piece is that early travellers to the Middle East brought back the most handsome figurines – finely carved kings – as mementos of their time there. Before the game was well known, its most potent piece was a totem of its appeal.
Chess is of course a game of war: pieces are seized, and a few are promoted; positions are fortified or surrendered; kings – much less mobile than their minions – need careful screening from attack; and victory begins with an opponent’s blunder. As a metaphor for empire-building and the intricacies of Middle Eastern culture, it is exquisite.
4. Volume
A collection of written or printed sheets bound together so as to form a book
From the Old French, and ultimately from the Latin volvere, ‘to roll’. The image of a roll of parchment lies behind the word’s use to denote a book. It is only since the nineteenth century that volume has conveyed the sense ‘strength of sound’.
We have moved a long way from the language of the Norman kitchen, but chess does link us back to the Norman exchequer, as well as to Middle English and two significant figures in its development. One of these is Geoffrey Chaucer, whose ailing Cook and moralizing Pardoner we have already met. In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, a defiant Criseyde declares, ‘Shal noon housbonde seyn to me “Chek mat!”’ Chaucer clearly expects his audience to understand this reference. In the earlier and less well-known Book of the Duchess, completed around 1369, the game provides him with an extended metaphor for the precarious give and take of courtly love. The metaphor, adapted from the popular thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose, has since been frequently reworked: characteristically, Chaucer both registers fashion and popularizes it.
The other notable figure is the printer William Caxton, whose achievements will be examined towards the end of this chapter. For now, it will suffice to say that Caxton initially targeted an elite, courtly market; it was with this market in mind that he printed his second English book, a translation of the earliest important European work about chess, which had been written by the Domi
nican monk Jacobus de Cessolis. It took Caxton some time to recognize that he could successfully sell books to other types of reader. His evolving sensitivity to the market for his products was part of a larger, subtle cultural shift in which new concepts of reading, writing and publishing developed. Furthermore, both he and Chaucer played vital roles in consolidating national identity and in nurturing a more cosmopolitan notion of English and its uses.
New words of the period reveal the growth of a noble, refined register – and of an English thus richer in nuance and scope. The language was being turned to an increasing range of uses – sermons and works of history, treatises and legal documents, drama, fiction and philosophical papers – and these disclose changing patterns of thought and behaviour, a greater cosmopolitanism, and a more literate, rational world view. Among other things, there was a more confident awareness of people as individuals. One aspect of this was a keener perception of authorship, of the creative role of figures such as Chaucer. Another was a higher valuation of youth, of its romantic potential and the rewards of youthful good health. This was bound up with a keener sense of the passage of time and a more accurate regulation of it. By the end of the fourteenth century the sound of a bell tolling the hours was a common one in English towns, and mechanical clocks were becoming objects of civic pride. The practices of timekeeping and time-saving made the airy promises of eternity seem less important than the regular, rational affairs of industry and trade.1
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