The Early Islamic Empire’s policy of multilingual governance By Petra Sijpesteijn

https://www.academia.edu/145354742/The_Early_Islamic_Empire_s_policy_of_multilingual_governance?email_work_card=title Explaining the process of Arabicization remains one of the main challenges in the study of the history of the early Muslim empire. Arabic was used immediately as a symbol of rule and authority in the areas conquered by the Muslims, and the use of Arabic increased over time. At the same time, the Muslim administration continued to produce and interact with documents in Coptic, Greek, Pahlavi, Latin, and Sogdian even centuries after the conquest. Other historical processes, such as personnel changes in the administration and the development of governance infrastructures, impacted language use and interfered with later accounts recording linguistic transformations in the caliphate’s chancery and beyond. Using documents from Egypt to Khurasan produced by the administrations of the Umayyads and the early ʿAbbāsids — that is to say, from the 640s to the mid ninth century ce — with a focus on the languages that these documents were written in and how these languages relate to each other, together with historical accounts and theoretical insights from empire studies, this chapter will examine the question of language use and language policy in the early Islamic empire as an element of the greater discussion about Arabicization. ...