4. Almost Arabic

IN SEPTEMBER 2002, WE VISITED Tlemcen, Algeria, a university town of 150,000 people that was hosting a UNESCO conference on multilingualism. The conference attendees were the first group of visitors the town had hosted since the beginning of Algeria’s decade-long civil war in 1990. Located some twenty-five miles from the Mediterranean, Tlemcen is an elegant city with a distinct French layout but Spanish flair. The hotels and public buildings, with their painted ceramic tiles and arched porticos, couldn’t be more Andalusian.

Al-Andalus is 150 miles from Tlemcen, across the Mediterranean. Yet as we would see, the Andalusian influence in North Africa runs deep. On our first evening, we attended a dinner concert at a hotel called Les Zianides, where we sat at the table of a certain Dr. Muhammad Ben Amar, one of the conference’s local organizers. During the meal, a traditional North African orchestra played a nuba, an hour-long poem set to music. The style of the nuba music was completely foreign to us. Yet the sound of the crowd clapping their hands and snapping their fingers was familiar. “That’s Andalusia!” Muhammad exclaimed, as if it was self-evident.

The city of Tlemcen actually provides a window on the intertwined histories of North Africa and Spain. From the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, four kings of the Tlemcen-based Zianides dynasty were actually from Al-Andalus. The great Algerian Sufi mystic Sidi Boumediène—whose tomb is now a tourist attraction in Tlemcen—was born near Sevilla.

The history of Muslim Spain is the history of Islam itself.—Africa played a central role in it. After the Prophet Muhammad set off the Muslim campaign of conquest and conversion in the seventh century, Muslim armies moved west across North Africa. By the eighth century, they had settled in Morocco and began eying Visigothic Spain, across the Mediterranean, as the next stage of their conquest.

One fine morning in April 711, a Moroccan general named Tariq ibn Ziyad set sail across the ten-mile-wide strait that separates Europe from Africa. Leading a small flotilla with five hundred troops and their mounts, Tariq landed near a tall cliff then known as the Pillars of Hercules (now Gibraltar). The name Gibraltar is a deformation of Jabal Tariq (or Mount Tariq)—in honor of Spain’s first Arab conqueror.

The Muslim incursion into Hispania wasn’t exactly a medieval version of D-day. Resources were tight. It took Tariq two months to ferry twelve thousand men to Spain in the four boats he had borrowed for the trip. On the other hand, the Muslims didn’t face much resistance. The Visigoth kings—or, more precisely, some of the squabbling pretenders to the Visigoth throne—had actually welcomed the Muslims to Hispania to help them defeat their rivals.

But Tariq changed the plan. The Visigoths’ squabbling had weakened them, so when Tariq got to the río Barbate, south of Cadíz, he turned on King Roderic’s forces and wiped them out. No one even bothered to recover Roderic’s body, which was left on the battlefield to rot.

The Visigoth reign in Iberia was over.

After the victory, Tariq’s forces advanced into Iberia and conquered city after city, meeting little resistance. The Muslims took the Visigoth capital of Toledo, then seized the Roman city of Hispalia (today’s Seville), then Saragossa. By the end of the summer, the Muslims had a firm grip on the peninsula. In 718, they set up their capital in Córdoba.

The Muslims entertained ideas of continuing north and conquering all of Europe. They even marched as far as present-day Poitiers, France. But in 732, they met their match in the Frankish military leader Charles Martel, who defeated them at the Battle of Poitiers. After that, the Moors decided to stick to the south: they settled for southern Spain, southern France, and Sicily.

In the north of the peninsula, a chain of small Christian kingdoms managed to hold their ground against Muslim raids for the next three centuries. According to the historians W. Montgomery Watt and Pierre Cachia, the Muslims were never especially committed to conquering the north of the peninsula, partly because they didn’t want to live in its cold, damp mountain climate. According to the historian Philip K. Hitti, one Muslim judge in Toledo described northerners as “ill-mannered, dull-witted and foolish” and attributed their defects to “lack of sun.”

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The Arab presence in the Iberian Peninsula would last eight centuries. It was a unique phenomenon in Western Europe. Spain and Portugal are the only countries in Europe where Arab culture grew and thrived as a native culture. The Arabic language would go on to become so widely spoken in Spain that it almost displaced the Roman dialects.

The Arabs called their new territory Al-Andalus. Theories abound on the origins of the name. It is commonly believed to be a deformation of Vandalusia (land of the Vandals), named after the Germanic tribe that had fled the Visigoths and established a kingdom in North Africa. But the Spanish philologist Alberto Porlan claims that the name actually comes from a small islet near Gibraltar called Chazirat Al-Andalus. According to yet another theory by the German historian Heinz Halm, Al-Andalus is a deformation of the Visigothic landa hlauts, which refers to a Gothic system of land distribution by lottery.

As for the Christians, they called the Muslim invaders Moriscos (Moors), thinking they were from Mauritania. But even the use of the word Arab was inaccurate. Like Tariq himself, most of the Muslims who came to Spain from North Africa were not Arabs but Berbers who spoke Tamazight.

The wide and lasting influence of Muslim culture in Spain is surprising on one account. Few Moriscos actually settled in Al-Andalus. Those who did were mostly single men. They married local women and quickly blended into the population. In 756, there were only 60,000 Muslims living among four million “Romans.” According to the linguist Antonio Alatorre, of the 200,000 Arabs living in Córdoba in 1311, only 500 were actually of “Arab” origin. The other 199,500 were Christian converts to Islam or Christians who had adopted Arab customs or language.

Until the eleventh century, Muslim rulers were tolerant of non-Muslims, requiring them only to pay a jizya, a form of head tax that amounted to a tribute from nonbelievers. Yet the practice of taxing nonbelievers encouraged assimilation as a tax-evasion strategy: Christians converted to Islam to avoid paying the tribute. That’s how Guzman became Ben Qusman, García became Ibn Guarsiya, Martinez became Ibn Marandish, and Fernandez became Ibn Faranda.

Over the centuries, Al-Andalus spawned a mélange of religions, ethnicities, and languages, and with this a whole new set of words to describe new social realities. A large portion of the Christian population living under the Arab caliphates was called Mozarabic, from the Arabic Musta‘rab, which means “Arabized.” Despite their name—which suggests the opposite—Mozarabs spoke a form of Ibero-Romance, not Arabic. When a Mozarab converted to Islam, he was called muladí, from the Arabic muwalladin (the adopted ones). To most Spaniards today, muladí means “renegade.”

Conversely, the Muslims who found themselves in Christian territory became known as mudéjars, from the Arabic mudajjan, meaning “those who were allowed to remain in Christian territories.” Today mudéjar refers to the type of architecture common in northern Spain between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, which combined elements of Gothic architecture with Arab techniques: brick and geometric motifs replaced stone and statues.

Yet in spite of their small numbers, the Arabs of Al-Andalus had a lot more success imposing their language and culture than either the Phoenicians or the Visigoths had centuries before them. Their success even rivaled that of the Romans. One reason for this was that the Roman population of the peninsula had never accepted the Visigoths as their own. Centuries after Visigoth reign ended, the Iberians still distinguished “Romans” from “Godos.”

The Moriscos, on the other hand, brought a powerful, attractive civilization with them. The Christians were aware that Arab culture had a lot to offer. The Arabs knew about music notation and measures centuries before these were introduced to Christian Europe. They invented clocks and water catchment techniques—as demonstrated by the numerous Spanish terms for irrigation that are direct borrowings from Arabic, such as atarjea (duct), acequia (irrigation ditch), aljibe (cistern), noria (waterwheel), arcaduz (pipe), zanja (ditch), and azud (weir). The Arabs cultivated grapes and introduced rice, sugarcane, and saffron as well as apricots, peaches, pomegranates, and oranges. The Arabs grew exotic plants in botanical gardens and developed pharmacology.

Over the centuries of Muslim rule, Spain became an integral part of Muslim civilization, with its own string of accomplishments. Among other things, Muslim Spaniards were at the forefront of developments in astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, and agronomy.

There were obvious benefits to belonging to the Arab world. The reach of Arab culture was phenomenal. In the ninth century, Arab merchants were hawking their wares in China, Russia, and Africa. By the tenth century, the Arabs possessed a vast empire that stretched from Morocco to Central Asia, as far as the Punjab, covering six million square miles in all. The territories the Arabs conquered were ancient civilizations in their own right, so the Arabs cherry-picked the best of what each civilization had to offer, brought it home—and usually improved it.

Arab civilization continued to expand and develop. Arabs stumbled across papermaking in China, which they introduced in Spain in the twelfth century. From Spain it traveled into France. Paper, which was made from rags, old rope, and hemp, was much cheaper than papyrus, paper of strips of a bamboo, parchment, or vellum (strips of animal skin), so this discovery went a long way in facilitating the spread of Arab knowledge in Europe.

Advances in mathematics and the use of numerals were among the most dramatic accomplishments of Arab savants, many of whom were in Spain. Before the Arabs brought these to Europe, Europeans used Roman numerals, which were clumsy (48 + 2 = 50 being written XLVIII + II = L, for example). In India, the Arabs had come into contact with a totally new concept, zero, as well as a new method of writing numbers: what we now call Arabic numerals. The Arabs spent about two centuries figuring out how to use the zero to simplify calculations and mathematical operations.

The Arabs also excelled in medicine. The oldest treatise on ophthalmology was written in Arabic in the ninth century. The Canon of Medicine, by Ibn Sina (Avicenna) between 1010 and 1030 remained the standard medical textbook in Europe until 1650. In Spain, the Arabs had schools of pharmacy and certified physicians who wrote about smallpox and measles and knew how to cauterize wounds. They demonstrated how the blood circulates between the heart and the lungs and designed the first hospitals, called himaristan, including some that specialized in mental health, where they practiced music therapy.

Nowhere was the refinement and sophistication of the Muslim world more obvious than in Al-Andalus’ capital, Córdoba. As early as the eighth century, the Arabs constructed a great mezquita (mosque), using stones left over from the Hispano-Roman basilica on whose site it was built. It was an architectural accomplishment beyond the reach of even the best Visigoth architects.

The mosque is standing today. When we entered it, we found ourselves in a mesmerizing forest of columns, some 856, each topped with a double arch of alternating brown and cream bricks. At the end of the fifteenth century, a number of the columns were cut away to make room for a Renaissance cathedral built, literally, in the middle of the mosque. But the surrounding mosque was preserved—and the whole complex is so vast we got lost in it, despite the fact that it forms a square. Though a marvel in itself, Córdoba’s mezquita demonstrates how much Christians on the peninsula valued the great achievements of Muslim culture, even after they went on to oust the Muslims themselves.

By 1000, Córdoba had half a million inhabitants, twelve times more than Paris. It was the largest city of the Islamic world, larger even than Baghdad. The city had seven hundred mosques, seventy libraries, nine hundred baths, and miles of paved and lighted streets. As the historian Philip K. Hitti put it, “When the University of Oxford still looked upon bathing as a heathen custom, generations of Cordovan scientists had been enjoying baths in luxurious establishments.”

Medieval Córdoba was a hub of intellectual activity. It had literary salons and universities that taught astronomy, mathematics, medicine, theology, and law. Scholars flocked there to study the works of great men of science and philosophy. The most famous philosopher of the Arab world, Ibn Rushd (Averroës), was born in Córdoba in 1126. He introduced the works of Aristotle, previously available only in Greek and Arabic, to Europe.

In the tenth century, while most of Europe’s scholars were still counting on their fingers, Arab scholars in Córdoba were working on algebra (from al-jabr, meaning “reduction to the root”), and they recognized tangents and cotangents, as well as sine and cosine. One of the first Europeans to master Arabic numerals and arithmetic was the French philosopher and mathematician Gerbert d’Aurillac, who came to Spain around 965 (and who later became Pope Sylvester II). Following in his footsteps, European scholars flocked to the court of Toledo to copy the teachings of Al-Khwarizimi, whose name is the origin of logarithm and algorithm.

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Ojalá (I hope so) is a common colloquial expression in Mexican Spanish. A casual interjection used in all sorts of situations, it originated as a deformation of the Arabic wa sa llah (God willing). Whereas French was shaped by the contact between Vulgar Latin and Germanic, the language that most influenced the Latin vernaculars of the Iberian Peninsula was Arabic. Many other European languages also borrowed words with Arabic origins. In English chemistry, scarlet, crimson, and tariff are but a few examples. But modern Spanish absorbed a total of four thousand Arabic borrowings, or four times the average of European languages.

Aceite (olive oil) comes from the Arabic for olive, al-zeitun. A number of new words for colors entered Spanish vocabulary, like azul (blue) and añil (indigo). One famous Arabism, now the name of the United States’ most famous prison, Alcatraz, means “sea eagle” in Arabic. And the world-famous cry of Spanish bullfighting olé! comes from the Arabic wa llah, meaning “by God.”

Because so many other European languages were influenced by Arabic, it can be hard to pin down the exact origins of the Arabic words that entered Spanish—some, in fact, were adopted via other European tongues. But one distinctive feature of Spanish and Portuguese Arabisms provides a clue to their origins: the retention of the Arabic article al. Sicilians, who also lived with a long Arabic presence, adopted many Arabic words but left out the articles. The result: the Spanish word for cotton is algodón (from Arabic al-qutun), but in Italian it’s cotone—derived from the same root but without the article. The Spanish azúcar (sugar) came from Arabic al-sukkar, whereas other languages adopted the Arabic noun without the article: sugar in English, sucre in French, and zucchero in Italian.

In 1602, Miguel Cervantes joked about this feature when Don Quixote explained to his sidekick, Sancho Panza: “This word, albogues [a type of clarinet], I’m telling you, is Moorish, just like all these words that begin in al, like almohaza [currycomb], almorzar [to breakfast], alhombra [the red one], alguacil [bailiff], alhucema [lavender], almacén [store], alcancía [box], and others like it.”

Cervantes was right about all of them except almorzar, which comes from Latin. In fact, Spanish has many words starting with al that have nothing to do with Arabic: alma (soul), alba (dawn), algo (something), alegre (happy), alegoría, and alerta.

Given how common the Arabic borrowings with the article al were in Spanish, it’s probably safe to assume that many European borrowings from Arabic, like alchimia, alcohol, alkaline, and admiral, entered through Spain. But no one actually knows for sure.

Borrowings are almost always a tribute to the novelties a specific culture produces and the areas in which that culture excels. Because the Arabs were great agronomists who mastered refined irrigation techniques, many Arabisms are words for edible plants, such as arroz (rice), limón (lemon), zanahoria (carrot), jazmín or naranja (orange). Another forte of Arab culture—public administration and military technology—supplied Spanish with the borrowings barrio (district of a town), aduana (customs), and alcalde (mayor).

Oddly, some of the Arabisms that found their way into Spanish were originally Latin words. The most famous is alcázar (fortress), which came from the Latin for castle (castrum). The Spanish word for tuna, atún, comes from al-tun in Arabic, which was a borrowing from the Latin thunnus.

The influence of Arabic was felt not only on vocabulary: Arabic also had a direct impact on the semantics of the Latin vernacular that developed in Spain. The Spanish word hasta (until) is a direct borrowing from Arabic (the Latin equivalent is usque). The well-known hidalgo (petty noble), who bore the brunt of the wars in the centuries to come, is the contraction of hijo de algo or de alguien (son of something or of somebody). This usage is a calque (or loan translation) of Arabic semantic, where ibn means “son.” The linguist Antonio Alatorre also points out that infante (child of a king, prince) is another semantic Arabism.

Arabic displaced Latin as the language of prestige in Al-Andalus, and even among the Christian kingdoms in the north that remained outside Muslim reach. During Muslim rule, all treatises, as well as most law texts and contracts, were written in Arabic. It was the language of public administration, science, trade, military technology, and law.

Arabic was so prestigious that many Andalusian writers used Arab characters, rather than the Roman alphabet, to record their works, even when they wrote in Roman vernacular. The same thing happened in other parts of the Arab would: Persian, Urdu, Wolof, Malay, and Berber were written in Arabic script even though their oral form is not related to Arabic. The Spanish language has even retained a special term to describe this quirky writing system: aljamía, which comes from the Arabic word for “foreign.” The result is that a large part of the body of Romance documents (poetry as well as contracts and wills) produced in Spain between the eighth and thirteenth centuries looks Arabic but sounds Romance when read out loud. This feature, unique in Western Europe, shows how deeply rooted Arab culture was in Spain.

It is possible that the Arabic influence forged one feature of modern Spanish (as well as Portuguese) that distinguishes it from other Romance tongues: its simplicity. Spanish is by far the most phonetic and most transparent of all Latin languages, including Italian. The Arabic spelling, which is remarkably systematic and phonetic, undoubtedly influenced the evolution of Spanish. The languages were in constant contact, after all. For centuries, Spanish scholars had the double duty of learning both Latin and Arabic, more so than any other scholars in Europe. When Spanish scholars gave the vernacular its modern form around the thirteenth century, it is hard to imagine how they could have avoided being influenced by the aesthetics of Arabic.

The Arabs’ impact on place-names (for both cities and geography) in Spain was nothing less than remarkable, almost as great as that of the Romans. The most striking example is the former Roman camp of Caesar Augusta, which was first Arabized as Sarakusta and then, long after the Latin original had been forgotten, re-Hispanicized as Zaragoza. The name Seville went through a similar transformation: the Romans called it Hispalia, then the Arabs transformed it into Isbiliya, and this morphed as Sevilla.

On the long list of Arabic place-names in Spain, some of the most striking examples are Guadalquivir, from wadi al-kabir (Great River); Guadalajara, from wadi al-hajara (Stony River); and Madrid, from al-magrit (the Spring). The region south of Madrid made famous by the adventures of Don Quixote, la Mancha, got its name from the Arabic al-mansha, meaning “dry land” or “wilderness.”

Many place-names in Spain even combine an Arabic word with an Arabicized Latin term, such as Guadalupe (al-wadi and al-lupus, meaning Wolf River) and Guadalcanal, which combines al-wadi (water) with al-canal (water canal).

The Arab footprint is obvious in Spain’s architecture and also in cultural artifacts like flamenco and bullfighting, as well as poetry.

As we saw in Tlemcen, typical Andalusian music is the same on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar. In Spain, in particular, people learn very young to palmear (clap) and to chasquear (snap fingers) in elaborate ways that are very common on the south shore of the Mediterranean, as we heard ourselves when we visited Tlemcen. Spaniards also use musical styles that most other Europeans have difficulty imitating. One variation of flamenco is saeta, a type of a cappella song sung during the processions of the Holy Week (preceding Easter) in Seville. This very emotional song, reminiscent of the call of the muezzin, is clearly Arabic in origin. It survived the centuries thanks to the Gypsies, who kept it alive.

Bullfighting is another Arab cultural borrowing. Nobody knows the exact origins of bullfighting. Apparently, there were more aurochs (large wild cattle, now extinct) on the Iberian Peninsula than anywhere else in Europe, and this surplus might have generated an old custom that predated even the arrival of the Romans. But the Arabs undoubtedly made two contributions to the art of bullfighting. They introduced new mounting techniques and the muleta, the cape originally meant to distract the bulls’ attention so they wouldn’t gore the horse.

Poetry—or rather, the love of poetry—is also an imprint of Arab culture in Spain. Since it is a sin in Islam to make images of God, believers were literally fixated on “the word.” That led to the creation of a new form of visual art, Arabic calligraphy, central to the ornamentation of mosques. But it also channeled creative energy toward language. Arabic was a language of poetry even before it became the language of a religion, and poetry remained a revered art in Muslim Spain. This may explain why poets and playwrights are held in such high esteem in Spanish culture, not merely as members of the literati but also as popular figures. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, known for defending the common people, became famous throughout the Spanish-speaking world long before he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. In fact, he read his poems in front of whole stadiums.

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Like the Visigoths before them, the Arabs in Spain would fall partly because of infighting among their own rulers. In the first decades of the eleventh century, when the caliphate of the Umayyad collapsed, Al-Andalus disintegrated into twenty or so petty kingdoms and principalities known as taifas, and these just kept on fighting. By this time, most of the Andalusian population spoke or understood Arabic, although they still probably spoke the Roman vernacular as well.

By the twelfth century, the caliphates and emirates were struggling to repel hordes of crusading Christians from the north. Yet curiously, even as the Arabs’ territory shrank to the Emirate of Granada, or about half the size of today’s region of Andalusia, Arab culture continued to grow for two more centuries. And the Arabic language was remarkably resilient. King Alfonso VIII of Castile (r. 1158–1214) minted currency with Arabic characters. In the new capital of Toledo, which the Christians conquered in 1085, the great King Fernando III (r. 1217–1252) had to force his notaries to write contracts in Castilian—they still preferred Arabic nearly 150 years after the Christians’ conquest.

But the fundamental reason this book is The Story of Spanish and not The Story of Arabic is simply that after the Umayyad caliphate collapsed in 1031, Arab rule gradually lost its appeal to Christians. The two caliphates that followed, the Almoravids and the Almohads, were fundamentalist Muslims who were harsh and intolerant of Christians—a departure from earlier Arab rulers. Their very name is a summary of what was in store: Almoravid is from Al-Murābiūn, meaning “hermit,” describing a type of devout soldier-monk; Almohad is from al-Muwaidun, meaning “the monotheists” or “the unitarians.” Christians under their authority had to convert or leave.

In the end, many Christians converted, but many more fled to the Christian kingdoms in the north. There, they added manpower to the northern kingdoms, just as these kingdoms were gearing up to “reclaim” Spain from the Muslims.

This campaign, of course, would spread their language across the peninsula. But the question at this point, still unanswered, was: Which northern kingdom would spread its language?