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111-638: The Upper March (in Arabic : الثغر الأعلى , al-Thaghr al-Aʿlā ; in Spanish: Marca Superior ) was an administrative and military division in northeast Al-Andalus , roughly corresponding to the Ebro valley and adjacent Mediterranean coast, from the 8th century to the early 11th century. It was established as a frontier province, or march , of the Emirate , later Caliphate of Córdoba , facing

222-655: A campaign against the Basques of Pamplona in 755, but the detachment sent was annihilated. This was the moment chosen by the Umayyad prince Abd al-Rahman ibn Mu'awiya ibn Hisham , who had fled Syria some years before to escape from the Abbasids , to disembark on the southern coast of present-day Spain. He went on to capture important southern strongholds such as Málaga and Seville . On Abd al-Rahman's arrival, Andalusian forces were divided, with both commanders claiming

333-575: A collection of related dialects that constitute the precursor of Arabic, first emerged during the Iron Age . Previously, the earliest attestation of Old Arabic was thought to be a single 1st century CE inscription in Sabaic script at Qaryat al-Faw , in southern present-day Saudi Arabia. However, this inscription does not participate in several of the key innovations of the Arabic language group, such as

444-435: A corpus of poetic texts, in addition to Qur'an usage and Bedouin informants whom he considered to be reliable speakers of the ʿarabiyya . Arabic spread with the spread of Islam . Following the early Muslim conquests , Arabic gained vocabulary from Middle Persian and Turkish . In the early Abbasid period , many Classical Greek terms entered Arabic through translations carried out at Baghdad's House of Wisdom . By

555-811: A count in the Ebro region in Visigoth times, and the reputed founder of the Banu Qasi clan, to convert in 714. What is certain is that the existence of the Banu Qasi was recorded from 789, in the person of supposed grandson, Musa ibn Fortun al-Qasawi, and that the two most powerful local families in the Upper March in the late 8th and early 9th centuries, the Banu Qasi and the Banu Amrus were both native converts to Islam. Further Muslim expansion ended through

666-1081: A dialect of Arabic and written in the Latin alphabet . The Balkan languages, including Albanian, Greek , Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian , have also acquired many words of Arabic origin, mainly through direct contact with Ottoman Turkish . Arabic has influenced languages across the globe throughout its history, especially languages where Islam is the predominant religion and in countries that were conquered by Muslims. The most markedly influenced languages are Persian , Turkish , Hindustani ( Hindi and Urdu ), Kashmiri , Kurdish , Bosnian , Kazakh , Bengali , Malay ( Indonesian and Malaysian ), Maldivian , Pashto , Punjabi , Albanian , Armenian , Azerbaijani , Sicilian, Spanish, Greek, Bulgarian, Tagalog , Sindhi , Odia , Hebrew and African languages such as Hausa , Amharic , Tigrinya , Somali , Tamazight , and Swahili . Conversely, Arabic has borrowed some words (mostly nouns) from other languages, including its sister-language Aramaic, Persian, Greek, and Latin and to

777-464: A failed sieges of Zaragoza and Lleida did result, as had the 874 expedition, in the widespread destruction of crops and created disharmony within the Banu Qasi clan, leaving Muhammad ibn Lubb isolated. However and attempt by Isma'il ibn Musa and the sons of Fortun ibn Musa to defeat Muhammad in battle led to their defeat, capture and forced their surrender of Tudela and several castles A further Umayyad expedition in 882 particularly directed against Zaragoza

888-487: A lesser extent and more recently from Turkish, English, French, and Italian. Arabic is spoken by as many as 380 million speakers, both native and non-native, in the Arab world, making it the fifth most spoken language in the world, and the fourth most used language on the internet in terms of users. It also serves as the liturgical language of more than 2 billion Muslims . In 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked Arabic

999-690: A millennium before the modern period . Early lexicographers ( لُغَوِيُّون lughawiyyūn ) sought to explain words in the Quran that were unfamiliar or had a particular contextual meaning, and to identify words of non-Arabic origin that appear in the Quran. They gathered shawāhid ( شَوَاهِد 'instances of attested usage') from poetry and the speech of the Arabs—particularly the Bedouin ʾaʿrāb  [ ar ] ( أَعْراب ) who were perceived to speak

1110-594: A result, many European languages have borrowed words from it. Arabic influence, mainly in vocabulary, is seen in European languages (mainly Spanish and to a lesser extent Portuguese , Catalan , and Sicilian ) owing to the proximity of Europe and the long-lasting Arabic cultural and linguistic presence, mainly in Southern Iberia, during the Al-Andalus era. Maltese is a Semitic language developed from

1221-462: A script derived from ASA attest to a language known as Hasaitic . On the northwestern frontier of Arabia, various languages known to scholars as Thamudic B , Thamudic D, Safaitic , and Hismaic are attested. The last two share important isoglosses with later forms of Arabic, leading scholars to theorize that Safaitic and Hismaic are early forms of Arabic and that they should be considered Old Arabic . Linguists generally believe that "Old Arabic",

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1332-572: A semi-independent state. However, his power in the Upper March was ended when he and his Basque allies suffered a crushing defeat against the combined armies of Asturias and Pamplona in 859 or 860 at the Battle of Monte Laturce . After fleeing the battle, in which he lost the bulk of his army, Musa was deprived by the emir of all his titles. He died following an expedition against his son-in-law, Azraq ibn Mantel, at Guadalajara in August 862, during which he

1443-470: A single language, despite mutual incomprehensibility among differing spoken versions. From a linguistic standpoint, it is often said that the various spoken varieties of Arabic differ among each other collectively about as much as the Romance languages . This is an apt comparison in a number of ways. The period of divergence from a single spoken form is similar—perhaps 1500 years for Arabic, 2000 years for

1554-507: A type of Arabic. Cypriot Arabic is recognized as a minority language in Cyprus. The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon of diglossia , which is the normal use of two separate varieties of the same language, usually in different social situations. Tawleed is the process of giving a new shade of meaning to an old classical word. For example, al-hatif lexicographically means

1665-507: A variety of regional vernacular Arabic dialects , which are not necessarily mutually intelligible. Classical Arabic is the language found in the Quran , used from the period of Pre-Islamic Arabia to that of the Abbasid Caliphate . Classical Arabic is prescriptive, according to the syntactic and grammatical norms laid down by classical grammarians (such as Sibawayh ) and the vocabulary defined in classical dictionaries (such as

1776-476: A wider audience." In the wake of the industrial revolution and European hegemony and colonialism , pioneering Arabic presses, such as the Amiri Press established by Muhammad Ali (1819), dramatically changed the diffusion and consumption of Arabic literature and publications. Rifa'a al-Tahtawi proposed the establishment of Madrasat al-Alsun in 1836 and led a translation campaign that highlighted

1887-737: Is a Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world . The ISO assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic , including its standard form of Literary Arabic, known as Modern Standard Arabic , which is derived from Classical Arabic . This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as al-ʿarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā ( اَلعَرَبِيَّةُ ٱلْفُصْحَىٰ "the eloquent Arabic") or simply al-fuṣḥā ( اَلْفُصْحَىٰ ). Arabic

1998-590: Is a minimum level of comprehension between all Arabic dialects, this level can increase or decrease based on geographic proximity: for example, Levantine and Gulf speakers understand each other much better than they do speakers from the Maghreb. The issue of diglossia between spoken and written language is a complicating factor: A single written form, differing sharply from any of the spoken varieties learned natively, unites several sometimes divergent spoken forms. For political reasons, Arabs mostly assert that they all speak

2109-559: Is a sister language rather than their direct ancestor. Arabia had a wide variety of Semitic languages in antiquity. The term "Arab" was initially used to describe those living in the Arabian Peninsula , as perceived by geographers from ancient Greece . In the southwest, various Central Semitic languages both belonging to and outside the Ancient South Arabian family (e.g. Southern Thamudic) were spoken. It

2220-478: Is believed that the ancestors of the Modern South Arabian languages (non-Central Semitic languages) were spoken in southern Arabia at this time. To the north, in the oases of northern Hejaz , Dadanitic and Taymanitic held some prestige as inscriptional languages. In Najd and parts of western Arabia, a language known to scholars as Thamudic C is attested. In eastern Arabia, inscriptions in

2331-408: Is credited with establishing the rules of Arabic prosody . Al-Jahiz (776–868) proposed to Al-Akhfash al-Akbar an overhaul of the grammar of Arabic, but it would not come to pass for two centuries. The standardization of Arabic reached completion around the end of the 8th century. The first comprehensive description of the ʿarabiyya "Arabic", Sībawayhi's al - Kitāb , is based first of all upon

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2442-472: Is credited with standardizing Arabic grammar , or an-naḥw ( النَّحو "the way" ), and pioneering a system of diacritics to differentiate consonants ( نقط الإعجام nuqaṭu‿l-i'jām "pointing for non-Arabs") and indicate vocalization ( التشكيل at-tashkīl ). Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi (718–786) compiled the first Arabic dictionary, Kitāb al-'Ayn ( كتاب العين "The Book of the Letter ع "), and

2553-520: Is interpreted as a move by a pro-Frankish faction. However, in 816 a Christian army including Franks and Asturian allies and led by Velasco the Gascon was defeated by Emirate armies in 816. This defeat would lead to the ascendancy, originally as clients of Córdoba, of a native Basque dynasty allied by blood to the Muwallad lords of the Upper March as rulers of the nascent state of Pamplona . In 781,

2664-574: Is not present in the spoken varieties, but deletes Classical words that sound obsolete in MSA. In addition, MSA has borrowed or coined many terms for concepts that did not exist in Quranic times, and MSA continues to evolve. Some words have been borrowed from other languages—notice that transliteration mainly indicates spelling and not real pronunciation (e.g., فِلْم film 'film' or ديمقراطية dīmuqrāṭiyyah 'democracy'). The current preference

2775-855: Is official in Mali and recognized as a minority language in Morocco, while the Senegalese government adopted the Latin script to write it. Maltese is official in (predominantly Catholic ) Malta and written with the Latin script . Linguists agree that it is a variety of spoken Arabic, descended from Siculo-Arabic , though it has experienced extensive changes as a result of sustained and intensive contact with Italo-Romance varieties, and more recently also with English. Due to "a mix of social, cultural, historical, political, and indeed linguistic factors", many Maltese people today consider their language Semitic but not

2886-572: Is the third most widespread official language after English and French, one of six official languages of the United Nations , and the liturgical language of Islam . Arabic is widely taught in schools and universities around the world and is used to varying degrees in workplaces, governments and the media. During the Middle Ages , Arabic was a major vehicle of culture and learning, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy. As

2997-590: Is the variety used in most current, printed Arabic publications, spoken by some of the Arabic media across North Africa and the Middle East, and understood by most educated Arabic speakers. "Literary Arabic" and "Standard Arabic" ( فُصْحَى fuṣḥá ) are less strictly defined terms that may refer to Modern Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic. Some of the differences between Classical Arabic (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) are as follows: MSA uses much Classical vocabulary (e.g., dhahaba 'to go') that

3108-413: Is to avoid direct borrowings, preferring to either use loan translations (e.g., فرع farʻ 'branch', also used for the branch of a company or organization; جناح janāḥ 'wing', is also used for the wing of an airplane, building, air force, etc.), or to coin new words using forms within existing roots ( استماتة istimātah ' apoptosis ', using the root موت m/w/t 'death' put into

3219-524: Is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the industrial and post-industrial era , especially in modern times. Due to its grounding in Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic is removed over a millennium from everyday speech, which is construed as a multitude of dialects of this language. These dialects and Modern Standard Arabic are described by some scholars as not mutually comprehensible. The former are usually acquired in families, while

3330-445: The Lisān al-ʻArab ). Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) largely follows the grammatical standards of Classical Arabic and uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no longer have any counterpart in the spoken varieties and has adopted certain new constructions and vocabulary from the spoken varieties. Much of the new vocabulary

3441-577: The Banu Salama , and this led to the return of Amrus from Toledo into the Upper March. Amrus expelled Bahlul and fortified Tudela. Another rebellion in Zaragoza, this time led by Furtun ibn Musa of the Banu Qasi, was likewise crushed by Amrus in 802, and he was then given control of Zaragoza and the Upper March. The Upper March in the 9th century, based on Zaragoza, had other urban settlements at Tudela, Huesca, Tortosa and Calatayud. Al-Hakim I used

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3552-730: The Battle of Poitiers (732), Yusuf ibn Abd al-Rahman was appointed governor of Narbonne according to the Chronicle of Moissac , where he was in command of military operations. During four years he is said to have raided and pillaged the Lower Rhone, and in 735 he took Arles. Between 716 and 756, al-Andalus was ruled by governors sent from Damascus or appointed on the recommendation of the Umayyad regional governors of Ifriqiya to which it belonged administratively. Like many of his predecessors, Yusuf struggled to control infighting between

3663-673: The Duero valley, leaving few Muslims in the northwest of the peninsula. Alfonso I , the Christian king of neighboring Asturias , which spanned the northern coast of Iberia from Galicia to the Basque territory , raided the former Berber lands and captured the cities of León , Astorga and Braga , killing their Muslim garrisons. Taking their populations north, he left the Duero valley a sparsely populated no man's land bordering what would become

3774-651: The Guadalquivir valley and to its south and east south and, rather than trying to conquer Christian lands or make their rulers accept Umayyad primacy, he and his successors concentrated on keeping the outlying areas of the Emirate under their control by setting-up three marches or thugur , (singular thagr ). In the west was the Lower March ( aṯ-Ṯaḡr al-Adna ) based at Mérida , a Middle March ( aṯ-Ṯaḡr al-Awsaṭ ) ruled from Toledo and later Medinaceli , while in

3885-568: The Xth form , or جامعة jāmiʻah 'university', based on جمع jamaʻa 'to gather, unite'; جمهورية jumhūriyyah 'republic', based on جمهور jumhūr 'multitude'). An earlier tendency was to redefine an older word although this has fallen into disuse (e.g., هاتف hātif 'telephone' < 'invisible caller (in Sufism)'; جريدة jarīdah 'newspaper' < 'palm-leaf stalk'). Colloquial or dialectal Arabic refers to

3996-476: The county of Castile , Fortun accompanied the Emir, but Lubb is believed to have remained loyal to Ordoño. However, after Ordoño's death in 966, Lubb was reconciled with the Emir. Lubb was based in the town of Arnedo , having lost control of Huesca. Huesca was governed in 870 by Musa ibn Galind, probably a grandson of Iñigo Arista of Pamplona via his son Galindo who had abandoned Pamplona for Córdoba, and hence akin to

4107-494: The northern Hejaz . These features are evidence of common descent from a hypothetical ancestor , Proto-Arabic . The following features of Proto-Arabic can be reconstructed with confidence: On the other hand, several Arabic varieties are closer to other Semitic languages and maintain features not found in Classical Arabic, indicating that these varieties cannot have developed from Classical Arabic. Thus, Arabic vernaculars do not descend from Classical Arabic: Classical Arabic

4218-419: The "learned" tradition (Classical Arabic). This variety and both its classicizing and "lay" iterations have been termed Middle Arabic in the past, but they are thought to continue an Old Higazi register. It is clear that the orthography of the Quran was not developed for the standardized form of Classical Arabic; rather, it shows the attempt on the part of writers to record an archaic form of Old Higazi. In

4329-730: The "purest," most eloquent form of Arabic—initiating a process of jamʿu‿l-luɣah ( جمع اللغة 'compiling the language') which took place over the 8th and early 9th centuries. Kitāb al-'Ayn ( c.  8th century ), attributed to Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi , is considered the first lexicon to include all Arabic roots ; it sought to exhaust all possible root permutations —later called taqālīb ( تقاليب ) — calling those that are actually used mustaʿmal ( مستعمَل ) and those that are not used muhmal ( مُهمَل ). Lisān al-ʿArab (1290) by Ibn Manzur gives 9,273 roots, while Tāj al-ʿArūs (1774) by Murtada az-Zabidi gives 11,978 roots. Yusuf ibn Abd al-Rahman al-Fihri After

4440-454: The 11th and 12th centuries in al-Andalus , the zajal and muwashah poetry forms developed in the dialectical Arabic of Cordoba and the Maghreb. The Nahda was a cultural and especially literary renaissance of the 19th century in which writers sought "to fuse Arabic and European forms of expression." According to James L. Gelvin , " Nahda writers attempted to simplify the Arabic language and script so that it might be accessible to

4551-571: The 4th to the 6th centuries, the Nabataean script evolved into the Arabic script recognizable from the early Islamic era. There are inscriptions in an undotted, 17-letter Arabic script dating to the 6th century CE, found at four locations in Syria ( Zabad , Jebel Usays , Harran , Umm el-Jimal ). The oldest surviving papyrus in Arabic dates to 643 CE, and it uses dots to produce the modern 28-letter Arabic alphabet. The language of that papyrus and of

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4662-834: The 8th century, knowledge of Classical Arabic had become an essential prerequisite for rising into the higher classes throughout the Islamic world, both for Muslims and non-Muslims. For example, Maimonides , the Andalusi Jewish philosopher, authored works in Judeo-Arabic —Arabic written in Hebrew script . Ibn Jinni of Mosul , a pioneer in phonology , wrote prolifically in the 10th century on Arabic morphology and phonology in works such as Kitāb Al-Munṣif , Kitāb Al-Muḥtasab , and Kitāb Al-Khaṣāʾiṣ    [ ar ] . Ibn Mada' of Cordoba (1116–1196) realized

4773-503: The Banu Qasi ceased to hold the governorship of Lleida, and the Banu al-Tawil seized Barbastro, Alquézar and Monzón. One of Lubb's sons, Abd Allah, was murdered by his uncle Abd Allah ibn Muhammad, who became wali of Huesca and in 911 allied himself with family rival Muhammad al-Tawil. They passed through the lands of al-Tawil's Christian brother-in-law Galindo Aznárez II of Aragon to again attack Sancho's Pamplona realm, only to be crushed by

4884-440: The Banu Qasi presence on the Upper March. With the decline removal of the Banu Qasi, the sons of Muhammad al-Tawil jockeyed for control over several of the coras of the Upper March, but amidst internecine struggles, rebellions and their own failure to maintain popular support, they were progressively marginalized. Abd al-Malik ibn Muhammad al-Tawil had succeeded his father at Huesca and installed his brother Amrus at Monzón, though

4995-490: The Banu Qasi retained most of the cities of the Upper March and, with Lubb ibn Musa as head of the family, were largely autonomous. Lubb's death in 875 following that in 874 of his brother Fortun, who held Tudela, weakened the family. Isma'il ibn Musa , who had formed a marriage alliance with the Banu Jalaf of Barbitanyaas was the only remaining son of Musa but had to contend with his nephew Muhammad ibn Lubb for control of

5106-539: The Banu Qasi who had formerly held it. He was killed that year by Amrus ibn Umar of the Banu Amrus, who then formed a rebellious alliance against the Emir with Iñigo's eldest son and successor in Pamplona, García Íñiguez . However, in 871, the Emir's general in the Upper March defeated the rebels and captured Zakarayya ibn Amrus, uncle of Amrus ibn Umar, and executed him and his sons at the gates of Zaragoza. While

5217-683: The Berbers (the bulk of his power base) and the Arabs, and also had to deal with perennial feuding between 'Adnani and Qahtani Arab tribes comprising his forces. After the instability of the Berber Revolt in al-Andalus, an arrangement was concluded between different Arab factions to alternate in office. However, after taking over and completing his term, he refused to give up the reins of power, ruling unchallenged for nine years, while in Damascus

5328-535: The Caliph, begging to be restored, Abd al-Rahman instead sent an outsider, Ahmed ibn Muhammad ibn Ilyas of Valencia, and the sons of Fortun and Yahya left the Upper March for Córdoba. However, after Ahmed struggled to retain control against the rebel Banu Tujib, Abd al-Rahman restored Fortun to Huesca in 936/7 against the will of the city's residents. When Fortun accompanied the Caliph on a campaign against León, he turned control of Huesca over to his brother Musa, who in 940

5439-645: The Christian lands of the Carolingian Empire 's Marca Hispanica , the Asturo-Leonese marches of Castile and Álava , and the nascent autonomous Pyrenean principalities. In 1018, the decline of the central Cordoban state allowed the lords of the Upper March to establish in its place the Taifa of Zaragoza . In the half century after the initial Muslim invasion of the Iberian peninsula, much of

5550-546: The Christians. Musa's the eldest son Lubb ibn Musa , had apparently been appointed by the Emir Muhammad I as governor of Tudela in 859 and by becoming in 860 the ally of king Ordoño I of Asturias , he retained control of Tudela and, by 862 had either secured the release or rescue of his two brothers, who returned to the Upper March. When the Emir Muhammad undertook a campaign in 865–6 against the forces of Álava and

5661-606: The Emir Abd Allah appointed his friend, Abd al-Rahman al-Tujibi, of the Arab Banu Tujib family that had governed Catalayud and Daroca since 872, to be governor of Zaragoza and to have control of the Upper March. They in turn rebelled against Abd ar-Rahman III, and were briefly forced or coerced into alliance with Ramiro II of León . Córdoba brought them back into submission, and the Banu Tujib head, Abu Yahya,

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5772-460: The Emir captured and crucified several members of the family, and in 887 we find Masud ibn Amrus of the Banu Amrus controlling Huesca when he was murdered and supplanted by his distant kinsman Muhammad al-Tawil of the Banu Shabrit. In 890 al-Tawil defeated another Banu Qasi rebellion led by Isma'il ibn Musa, uncle of Muhammad ibn Lubb. Though al-Tawil claimed the lands of the defeated Isma'il,

5883-479: The Emir would not risk such an increase in his power, and instead granted them to Muhammad ibn Lubb, who had remained loyal during his uncle's rebellion. Muhammad ibn Lubb tried to reverse these family losses by carrying out a lengthy but unsuccessful siege of Zaragoza, held by the a Banu Tujib governor, and even when Muhammad was killed outside the city's walls in 898, the siege continued under his son Lubb ibn Muhammad , who became wali of Tudela and Lleida and lord of

5994-576: The Emirate and further episodes of rebellion followed by punitive Umayyad expeditions directed by Abd el-Rahman II, in 852 the new emir, Muhammad , named Musa as Wāli of Zaragoza and governor of the Upper March He was sometimes called 'the Third King of Hispania', alongside the Emir of Córdoba and the King of Asturias, as he controlled Zaragoza, Tudela, Calatayud, Huesca and Toledo , forming

6105-412: The Middle East and North Africa have become a badge of sophistication and modernity and ... feigning, or asserting, weakness or lack of facility in Arabic is sometimes paraded as a sign of status, class, and perversely, even education through a mélange of code-switching practises." Arabic has been taught worldwide in many elementary and secondary schools, especially Muslim schools. Universities around

6216-690: The Qur'an is referred to by linguists as "Quranic Arabic", as distinct from its codification soon thereafter into " Classical Arabic ". In late pre-Islamic times, a transdialectal and transcommunal variety of Arabic emerged in the Hejaz , which continued living its parallel life after literary Arabic had been institutionally standardized in the 2nd and 3rd century of the Hijra , most strongly in Judeo-Christian texts, keeping alive ancient features eliminated from

6327-576: The Romance languages. Also, while it is comprehensible to people from the Maghreb , a linguistically innovative variety such as Moroccan Arabic is essentially incomprehensible to Arabs from the Mashriq , much as French is incomprehensible to Spanish or Italian speakers but relatively easily learned by them. This suggests that the spoken varieties may linguistically be considered separate languages. With

6438-442: The Umayyads were definitively overthrown in 750. It has been pointed out that he actually ruled as king ( malik ), and not as governor ( wali ). After becoming ruler, al-Fihri conducted a census, as part of which Bishop Hostegesis prepared a list of tax and jizya payers. The bishop then made annual visits to make sure the taxes were collected properly. Yusuf had just broken an attempted revolt in Zaragoza (755) when he launched

6549-408: The Upper March to the west. Meanwhile, in the north and east, the Frankish kingdom had extended their power into Aquitaine and, under Pepin the Strong had moved into Septimania in the 750s, capturing Narbonne in 759, thus confining al-Andalus south of the Pyrenees. There was also a civil war fought in al-Andalus between the families deriving from northern and southern Arabia, leading in 747 to

6660-452: The Upper March were fundamentally altered by changes in the leadership of the states to the north and south. In 905, the Córdoba client Fortún Garcés of Pamplona was supplanted by the anti-Muslim Sancho I , while in 911, Abd al-Rahman III became Emir of Córdoba and began a policy of tightening central control over his fractious regional lords. When in 907 Lubb attacked Pamplona, he was ambushed and killed by its new king. With Lubb's death,

6771-423: The Upper March, while the two realms continued to compete for influence in the western Pyrenees, among the Basques . At the end of the century, two governors of Huesca would again reach out to the Franks, the Muwallad Basque rebel Bahlul Ibn Marzuq in 798, and Azan in 799, while in the latter year at Pamplona, Muhammad ibn Musa, apparently of Muwallad Banu Qasi family of Huesca, was assassinated in what usually

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6882-423: The allegiance of both Berbers and the Syrian junds . Generally, Yemeni units within the latter joined the Umayyad contender, while their Mudar and Qays rivals remained loyal to Yusuf. After attempting a failed compromise with Abd al-Rahman by which the Umayyad survivor would succeed him, Yusuf al-Fihri was defeated at the Battle of Musarah just outside Córdoba in March 756 by Abd al-Rahman, who thus became

6993-424: The ascendance of the Yemeni faction following the battle of Secunda (Sequnda, near Córdoba) and the installation at Zaragoza of a Yemeni, al-Sumayl ibn Hatim al-Kilabi, as governor over the northern Arab settlers of the Ebro valley. Two of their leaders, Amir al-Abdari and Hubab al-Zuhri, rebelled and besieged Zaragoza in 754. This rebellion was put down the next year by the army of Yusuf ibn Abd al-Rahman al-Fihri ,

7104-455: The ascendance of their Christian kinsmen in Pamplona, led to the ascendance of the Banu Qasi, and in 842, their leader Musa ibn Musa defied the Umayyads and rebelled against Córdoba with the assistance of his half-brother, Íñigo Arista of Pamplona . Despite the Umayyad capture of Zaragoza in 844 and a son of the Emir Abd-al Rahman II being appointed as governor until 852, Musa retained his autonomy in his ancestral lands. After reconciliation with

7215-524: The boundary of Muslim control, Graus , called Puertaspan ( Puerto de Hispania , 'Gateway to al-Andalus'); Huesca ( Washka ), based in Huesca and including the fort of Bolea; Lleida , which included Mequinenza and Fraga ; Zaragoza , both politically and economically the principal cora of the Upper March, centered on that city but also including Zuera , Ricla , Muel , Belchite , Alcañiz and Calanda ; Calatayud , including its eponymous city as well as Maluenda and Daroca ; Tudela , which included

7326-417: The cities of Tarazona and Borja and extended to the current La Rioja ; and the smallest, Barusa , organized along the Piedra river , with its capital in Molina de Aragón , and bordering the cora of Santaveria, in the Middle March. The northernmost of these coras , Barbitaniya and Huesca, formed a subdivision of the Upper March called the Distant or Farthest March ( aṯ-Ṯaḡr al-‘Aqṣā ). The Upper March

7437-539: The city over to Muhammad ibn Lubb al-Qasawi in 922. He was captured by the Banu Tujib in 932, submitted to Abd al-Rahman III, and was killed participating in the Caliph's 934/5 campaign against Zaragoza and its rebel Banu Tujib lords. Fortun ibn Muhammad al-Tawil had submitted to Abd al-Rahman at the same time as Amrus, but in 933 he was expelled from Huesca after forming a pact with rebel Muhammad ibn Hasim al-Tujibi and replaced by his brother Yahya ibn Muhammad al-Tawil, and though Fortun went to Córdoba and abased himself before

7548-404: The combined effects of a Berber Revolt in Iberia that commenced in 740 and, in the Middle East , the overthrow of the Umayyad Caliphate in the Abbasid Revolution of 747 to 750. The latter resulted in the creation of an Abbasid Caliphate that regarded al-Andalus as a rebel province needing to be recovered. The Berber revolt led to the withdrawal of those Berbers who had been allocated land in

7659-449: The conquest and settlement was left to the local initiatives of clans and tribes in loose coalition rather than being a centrally coordinated scheme. As a result, the fertile lands of Septimania north of the Pyrenees were occupied, and held until 759, but any occupation of the uninviting lands of Galicia and Asturias was temporary and superficial. Much of the land in the conquered areas had been owned by Christian landowners that resisted

7770-509: The conversion of Semitic mimation to nunation in the singular. It is best reassessed as a separate language on the Central Semitic dialect continuum. It was also thought that Old Arabic coexisted alongside—and then gradually displaced— epigraphic Ancient North Arabian (ANA), which was theorized to have been the regional tongue for many centuries. ANA, despite its name, was considered a very distinct language, and mutually unintelligible, from "Arabic". Scholars named its variant dialects after

7881-542: The east the Upper March had Zaragoza as its seat. Each march was responsible for defending its area against Christian attack and supporting any major expeditions the Emirate's principal armies might make against the Christian territories. The Upper March consisted of several coras (territorial subdivisions, from the Arabic kura ): Barbitaniya , stretching from the north of the present province of Huesca , with its capital in Barbastro , and also including Boltaña , Alquézar , Naval , Salinas de Hoz , Olvena , and near

7992-652: The emergence of Central Semitic languages, particularly in grammar. Innovations of the Central Semitic languages—all maintained in Arabic—include: There are several features which Classical Arabic, the modern Arabic varieties, as well as the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions share which are unattested in any other Central Semitic language variety, including the Dadanitic and Taymanitic languages of

8103-439: The emir succeeded in forcing the submission of Husayn in Zaragoza, who had murdered Sulayman in 780, but in 785 the latter's son, Matruh al-Arabi , rebelled and took Huesca and Zaragoza, before he in turn was murdered by his servants, the kinsmen Amrus ibn Yusuf and Shabrit ibn Rashid, in 791/2. The Emirate brought the loyalty of Amrus by granting him Toledo , but in 798 another Zaragoza rebel, Bahlul Ibn Marzuq, took Huesca from

8214-728: The eve of the conquests: Northern and Central (Al-Jallad 2009). The modern dialects emerged from a new contact situation produced following the conquests. Instead of the emergence of a single or multiple koines, the dialects contain several sedimentary layers of borrowed and areal features, which they absorbed at different points in their linguistic histories. According to Veersteegh and Bickerton, colloquial Arabic dialects arose from pidginized Arabic formed from contact between Arabs and conquered peoples. Pidginization and subsequent creolization among Arabs and arabized peoples could explain relative morphological and phonological simplicity of vernacular Arabic compared to Classical and MSA. In around

8325-607: The fact that they participate in the innovations common to all forms of Arabic. The earliest attestation of continuous Arabic text in an ancestor of the modern Arabic script are three lines of poetry by a man named Garm(')allāhe found in En Avdat, Israel , and dated to around 125 CE. This is followed by the Namara inscription , an epitaph of the Lakhmid king Imru' al-Qays bar 'Amro, dating to 328 CE, found at Namaraa, Syria. From

8436-438: The families of the Upper March from the monarchs of Cordoba to the south, Pamplona to the north and León to their west, and weakened by internal family struggles, the sole remaining Banu Qasi lord, Muhammad ibn Lubb, retained only Barbastro and some small towns nearby. One-by-one these expelled him in favour of the Banu al-Tawil, and by 928 Muhammad only held the small town of Ayera . He was assassinated in 929, bringing an end to

8547-477: The family and its lands. An Umayyad army under al-Mundir the heir presumptive of Muhammad I was sent north in 874, to attack Zaragoza first, then to Tudela and the various strongholds of the Banu Qasi and finally to ravage the lands of Pamplona, cutting down trees and uprooting crops. The expedition achieved little, as all the main cities and strongholds of the Upper March that the Banu Qasi held before remained in their hands. A subsequent expedition in 882 involving

8658-515: The family lands in the Upper Ebro. When the siege was finally broken, the Banu Tujib they seized Ejea from the Banu Qasi. Nonetheless, Lubb experienced a period of success, twice defeating al-Tawil's armies, capturing the latter and requiring an exorbitant ransom, and in 897 he defeated and killed his Christian neighbor, Wilfred the Hairy of Barcelona. In the early 10th century, the dynamics of

8769-634: The family led to their expulsion by the Banu Hud of Lleida, and that family in turn ruled the Zaragoza taifa until it was conquered by the Almoravids in 1110. The region was permanently wrested from Muslim control by Alfonso I of Aragon in 1118. Arabic language Arabic (endonym: اَلْعَرَبِيَّةُ , romanized :  al-ʿarabiyyah , pronounced [al ʕaraˈbijːa] , or عَرَبِيّ , ʿarabīy , pronounced [ˈʕarabiː] or [ʕaraˈbij] )

8880-521: The forces of the Emirate were dealing with the rebellion of Amrus, in December 871 and January 872 the four sons of Musa ibn Musa, with the support of García Íñiguez, quickly recovered power in Huesca, Tudela and Zaragoza with little resistance, followed by Monzon and Lleida. The initial strategy of Muhammad I was to lead an army into the Upper March in the spring of 873. He decided not to besiege or assault

8991-458: The fourth most useful language for business, after English, Mandarin Chinese , and French. Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet , an abjad script that is written from right to left . Arabic is usually classified as a Central Semitic language . Linguists still differ as to the best classification of Semitic language sub-groups. The Semitic languages changed between Proto-Semitic and

9102-579: The governor of al-Andalus, and when a group of soldiers already suspected of being rebel sympathizers blocked him from executing the rebels, Yusuf sent them on a suicide mission against the Basques of Pamplona. These moves left southern Iberia exposed and enabled the fugitive Umayyad prince, Abd al-Rahman I , to cross from North Africa and gain a foothold, eventually leading to his conquest of al-Andalus and establishment of an independent Emirate of Córdoba. The strength of Abd al-Rahman's Umayyad Emirate lay in

9213-597: The inclusion of new words into their published standard dictionaries. They also publish old and historical Arabic manuscripts. In 1997, a bureau of Arabization standardization was added to the Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization of the Arab League . These academies and organizations have worked toward the Arabization of the sciences, creating terms in Arabic to describe new concepts, toward

9324-560: The invasion: this was confiscated and granted to the Arab and Berber troops that had participated in the invasion, with the Arabs tending to settle in the south, leaving the more remote and relatively barren areas to the Berbers. However, those Christian nobles and communities that had submitted were granted treaties that allowed them to retain their lands, on the payment of a significant annual tax for as long as they remained Christian. The substantial advantages of conversion to Islam were supposed to have convinced Count Cassius , said to have been

9435-613: The language. Software and books with tapes are an important part of Arabic learning, as many of Arabic learners may live in places where there are no academic or Arabic language school classes available. Radio series of Arabic language classes are also provided from some radio stations. A number of websites on the Internet provide online classes for all levels as a means of distance education; most teach Modern Standard Arabic, but some teach regional varieties from numerous countries. The tradition of Arabic lexicography extended for about

9546-604: The late 6th century AD, a relatively uniform intertribal "poetic koine" distinct from the spoken vernaculars developed based on the Bedouin dialects of Najd , probably in connection with the court of al-Ḥīra . During the first Islamic century, the majority of Arabic poets and Arabic-writing persons spoke Arabic as their mother tongue. Their texts, although mainly preserved in far later manuscripts, contain traces of non-standardized Classical Arabic elements in morphology and syntax. Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali ( c.  603 –689)

9657-500: The latter died in 913 during an attack on Barcelona. and also regained Lleida when in 922 its residents turned against their lord, Amrus ibn al-Tawil. In 918, Sancho I of Pamplona captured Calahorra , previously held by the Banu Qasi for almost a century, and he besieged, and the next year captured and burnt Monzón, which the Banu Qasi never regained. Abd al-Rahman III in 924 led an army north and removed Muhammad ibn Abd Allah from control of Huesca, sending him to Cordoba. With pressure on

9768-420: The latter is taught in formal education settings. However, there have been studies reporting some degree of comprehension of stories told in the standard variety among preschool-aged children. The relation between Modern Standard Arabic and these dialects is sometimes compared to that of Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin vernaculars (which became Romance languages ) in medieval and early modern Europe. MSA

9879-430: The latter soon lost it to the Banu Qasi. Abd al-Malik's hold on Huesca was challenged by a series of rebellions by Banu Shabrit cousins, whom he killed, only to himself be killed and supplanted by his brother Amrus in 918. However, the Huesca citizenry rejected Amrus in favor of his brother Fortun ibn Muhammad al-Tawil. Amrus fled to Barbastro and Alquézar, and was later offered Lleida by its residents, only for them to turn

9990-508: The local Muwallad families, native Iberian that had converted to Islam, as governors. The decade-long governorship of Amrus bin Yusuf, from whom would descend the Banu Amrus clan, kept the Banu Qasi in check, though they retained their semi-autonomous status despite Amrus's occupation of Tudela, and their alliance and intermarriages with the kingdom of Pamplona also provided them with Basque soldiers. The capture and execution of Amrus, coupled with

10101-883: The many national or regional varieties which constitute the everyday spoken language. Colloquial Arabic has many regional variants; geographically distant varieties usually differ enough to be mutually unintelligible , and some linguists consider them distinct languages. However, research indicates a high degree of mutual intelligibility between closely related Arabic variants for native speakers listening to words, sentences, and texts; and between more distantly related dialects in interactional situations. The varieties are typically unwritten. They are often used in informal spoken media, such as soap operas and talk shows , as well as occasionally in certain forms of written media such as poetry and printed advertising. Hassaniya Arabic , Maltese , and Cypriot Arabic are only varieties of modern Arabic to have acquired official recognition. Hassaniya

10212-546: The marcher lords to have had a change of heart, and the city was closed to him. After an unsuccessful siege, Charlemagne withdrew through the Pyrenees, where his rear guard was ambushed at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass . This marked the end of significant Frankish attempts to expand into Iberia, and in 795 Charlemagne would establish the Marca Hispanica in the eastern Pyrenees to serve as a buffer between his realm and

10323-782: The need for a lexical injection in Arabic, to suit concepts of the industrial and post-industrial age (such as sayyārah سَيَّارَة 'automobile' or bākhirah باخِرة 'steamship'). In response, a number of Arabic academies modeled after the Académie française were established with the aim of developing standardized additions to the Arabic lexicon to suit these transformations, first in Damascus (1919), then in Cairo (1932), Baghdad (1948), Rabat (1960), Amman (1977), Khartum  [ ar ] (1993), and Tunis (1993). They review language development, monitor new words and approve

10434-490: The new Christian monarch, who in turn attacked Tudela in 915, capturing and later murdering Abd Allah. His succession was contested between his brother Mutarrif and son Muhammad, with the latter killing his uncle the next year to take the leadership of the family, while his cousin Muhammad ibn Lubb, a son of Lubb ibn Muhammad, established himself in the eastern Upper March, retaking Monzón from the sons of Muhammad al-Tawil after

10545-543: The north. The nobility of the Upper March remained fractious. In 774, Husayn of Zaragoza rebelled against Umayyad Córdoba, proclaiming for the Abbasids , and the Emir sent an army to subjugate the march. Then in 778, Sulayman ibn Yaqdhan al Arabi of Barcelona sent envoys to Charlemagne , offering his fealty along with that of Abu Taur of Huesca and Husayn of Zaragoza in exchange for his support in their rebellion against Córdoba. The Frankish monarch marched south and took Barcelona, but when he arrived at Zaragoza he found

10656-424: The one whose sound is heard but whose person remains unseen. Now the term al-hatif is used for a telephone. Therefore, the process of tawleed can express the needs of modern civilization in a manner that would appear to be originally Arabic. In the case of Arabic, educated Arabs of any nationality can be assumed to speak both their school-taught Standard Arabic as well as their native dialects, which depending on

10767-549: The overhaul of Arabic grammar first proposed by Al-Jahiz 200 years prior. The Maghrebi lexicographer Ibn Manzur compiled Lisān al-ʿArab ( لسان العرب , "Tongue of Arabs"), a major reference dictionary of Arabic, in 1290. Charles Ferguson 's koine theory claims that the modern Arabic dialects collectively descend from a single military koine that sprang up during the Islamic conquests; this view has been challenged in recent times. Ahmad al-Jallad proposes that there were at least two considerably distinct types of Arabic on

10878-466: The region made them irreplaceable and they were again restored. They reached the pinnacle of their power and brought the Upper March to an end in 1018, when after the formal overthrow of the Caliphs of Córdoba, Al-Mundhir ibn Yahya al-Tujibi declared independence, converting what remained of the Upper March into the Taifa of Zaragoza . They would control the taifa for just 21 years before a coup within

10989-410: The region may be mutually unintelligible. Some of these dialects can be considered to constitute separate languages which may have "sub-dialects" of their own. When educated Arabs of different dialects engage in conversation (for example, a Moroccan speaking with a Lebanese), many speakers code-switch back and forth between the dialectal and standard varieties of the language, sometimes even within

11100-458: The same sentence. The issue of whether Arabic is one language or many languages is politically charged, in the same way it is for the varieties of Chinese , Hindi and Urdu , Serbian and Croatian , Scots and English, etc. In contrast to speakers of Hindi and Urdu who claim they cannot understand each other even when they can, speakers of the varieties of Arabic will claim they can all understand each other even when they cannot. While there

11211-458: The sole example of Medieval linguist Abu Hayyan al-Gharnati – who, while a scholar of the Arabic language, was not ethnically Arab – Medieval scholars of the Arabic language made no efforts at studying comparative linguistics, considering all other languages inferior. In modern times, the educated upper classes in the Arab world have taken a nearly opposite view. Yasir Suleiman wrote in 2011 that "studying and knowing English or French in most of

11322-563: The standardization of these new terms throughout the Arabic-speaking world, and toward the development of Arabic as a world language . This gave rise to what Western scholars call Modern Standard Arabic. From the 1950s, Arabization became a postcolonial nationalist policy in countries such as Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Sudan. Arabic usually refers to Standard Arabic, which Western linguists divide into Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic. It could also refer to any of

11433-501: The towns where the inscriptions were discovered (Dadanitic, Taymanitic, Hismaic, Safaitic). However, most arguments for a single ANA language or language family were based on the shape of the definite article, a prefixed h-. It has been argued that the h- is an archaism and not a shared innovation, and thus unsuitable for language classification, rendering the hypothesis of an ANA language family untenable. Safaitic and Hismaic, previously considered ANA, should be considered Old Arabic due to

11544-521: The two coras in 959. By this time the Banu al-Tawil had long since lost their ability to mount a credible challenge for the control of the Upper March against the new dominant family, the Banu Tujib, and the last of the Banu al-Tawil is seen fighting in a tournament in Córdoba in 974. The influence of the Umayyad Emirs in all the marches had waned after the death of Abd al-Rahman II, but in 890

11655-531: The well-fortified Zaragoza, but was able to capture Huesca. Mutarrif ibn Musa of the Banu Qasi, who had governed Huesca from December 871, and his sons were taken to Cordoba and crucified in September 873, and the Emir installed Amrus ibn Umar in his place at Huesca. Muhammad also installed the Arab Banu Tujib family in Calatayud as a check on the Banu Qasi, then withdrew. Despite the presence of these opponents,

11766-451: The world have classes that teach Arabic as part of their foreign languages , Middle Eastern studies , and religious studies courses. Arabic language schools exist to assist students to learn Arabic outside the academic world. There are many Arabic language schools in the Arab world and other Muslim countries. Because the Quran is written in Arabic and all Islamic terms are in Arabic, millions of Muslims (both Arab and non-Arab) study

11877-412: Was captured in the defeat of Caliph's army at the Battle of Simancas in 939. He was released in 941 and restored in Zaragoza by 942, to serve as Cordoba's proxy in campaigns against Ramiro's allies in Pamplona. The Banu Tujib allied themselves in 983 with Almanzor , de facto ruler of Córdoba, but were again deprived and their head killed in 989 when they conspired with his son. However, their power in

11988-432: Was formally named as wali of Huesca and Barbastro, though the latter was given to his brother Yahya in 942, to be followed by another brother, Lubb ibn Muhammad in 951, and Lubb's son Yahya in 955. In 957/8, the Caliph experimented with power sharing, making Yahya ibn Lubb and Abd al-Malik ibn Musa, who had succeeded his father in Huesca in 954, joint rulers of both Huesca and Barbastro, but he again segregated their control of

12099-461: Was ruled by a Lord of the March ( Sāhib aṯ-Ṯaḡr ), named by the emir or caliph, who acted as civil governor ( amil , wali ) or military commander ( qa'id ), sometimes both. They in turn depended on the district governors, who were responsible for overseeing taxation, maintaining fortresses, defending their people, and accompanying the Córdoba emir or caliph on campaigns against the Christian states of

12210-424: Was unsuccessful, but a further attack starting in 884 finally broke Muhammad ibn Lubb's resistance The cumulative pressure of these repeated attacks forced Muhammad ibn Lubb al-Qasawi to sell Zaragoza in 885. And when in 886 the city was seized from the Emir's own governor by the Banu Tujib the Emir acquiesced, elevating this family as major regional rivals to the Muwallad families. The Banu Qasi again rebelled, and

12321-475: Was wounded and left unable to ride. He died a month later at Tudela. There followed a decade-long eclipse of the Banu Qasi. After Musa was deprived of governorship of the Upper March, at least three of his four sons were sent to Cordoba as hostages, although one of them, Fortun ibn Musa, quickly pledged obedience to the Emir, and later distinguished himself in the Muslim forces of the Upper March campaigning against

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