Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of maps
- Preface and acknowledgments
- Glossary
- 1 Is Hebrew an endangered language?
- 2 The emergence of Hebrew
- 3 Hebrew–Aramaic bilingualism and competition
- 4 Three languages in Hellenistic and Roman Palestine
- 5 From statehood to Diaspora
- 6 The Arabian and African connections
- 7 The spread of Islam
- 8 The Jews of France
- 9 The Jews of Spain and their languages
- 10 Loter-Ashkenaz and the creation of Yiddish
- 11 The Yavanic area: Greece and Italy
- 12 Jews in Slavic lands
- 13 Linguistic emancipation and assimilation in Europe
- 14 Britain, its former colonies, and the New World
- 15 Islam and the Orient
- 16 The return to Zion and Hebrew
- Appendix Estimated current status of Jewish languages1
- Notes
- References
- Index
7 - The spread of Islam
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of maps
- Preface and acknowledgments
- Glossary
- 1 Is Hebrew an endangered language?
- 2 The emergence of Hebrew
- 3 Hebrew–Aramaic bilingualism and competition
- 4 Three languages in Hellenistic and Roman Palestine
- 5 From statehood to Diaspora
- 6 The Arabian and African connections
- 7 The spread of Islam
- 8 The Jews of France
- 9 The Jews of Spain and their languages
- 10 Loter-Ashkenaz and the creation of Yiddish
- 11 The Yavanic area: Greece and Italy
- 12 Jews in Slavic lands
- 13 Linguistic emancipation and assimilation in Europe
- 14 Britain, its former colonies, and the New World
- 15 Islam and the Orient
- 16 The return to Zion and Hebrew
- Appendix Estimated current status of Jewish languages1
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
The Muslim conquest of Syria Palestina
Yemen is part of the Arabian Peninsula, so its rapid conquest by Islam was not surprising. But what is more in need of explanation is the rapidity with which the Muslims conquered such a large portion of the ancient world (see Map 6). At his death, in 632 CE, Muhammad controlled the Arabian Peninsula, but eighty years later the Umayyad caliphs ruled over the Middle East, from the river Indus in the east, and were starting to conquer Spain in the west. Muhammad’s successors, the Umayyads and the Abbasids, ruled over that territory until 945, and Islam and Arabic have remained dominant after that in all of it, except Spain, until this day. What accounts for the speed with which these territories fell to Muslim rule?
Hugh Kennedy, who has one of the most convincing explanations of this, and whose account I will follow, asks how small armies (never larger than 20,000 men and often smaller) were able to conquer major empires so rapidly and to maintain their identity while persuading the conquered peoples to adopt Islam and later Arabic. Within a century Greek- and Aramaic-speaking Syria, Aramaic- and Persian-speaking Iraq, Greek- and Coptic-speaking Egypt, Pahlavi-speaking Persia, and Latin-, Greek-, and Berber-speaking north Africa had all come under Islamic rule, and were in the process of conversion to Islam and becoming Arabic-speaking.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Languages of the JewsA Sociolinguistic History, pp. 95 - 116Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014