Translation as the Instigator of a New Arabic Discourse in Islamic Intellectual History

That Arabic ever became a language of translation is one of the peculiar quirks of history, as it began life as the youngest member of the Semitic family of languages and was confined to its homeland of the Arabian Peninsula. Although there were various kingdoms on the edges of the Arabian Peninsula that spoke this language, the vast majority of Arabic speakers were nomadic tribes, who were illiterate and roamed the land in search of essential resources in an inhospitable desert environment (Versteegh 2001: 9–22 and 37–52; Shah 2008:  262–264; Knysh 2016:  7–18). Thus, Arabic was restricted to an oral culture, which prided itself on the composition and transmission of a stylized form of oral poetry. Arabic oral poetry, being the primary form of artistic and cultural production in this society, became the medium for recording historical events, maintaining lineages, praising leaders, deprecating enemies, expressing love, and remembering the dead. Poetry was so important to this society that regional and seasonal competitions would be held to assess the talent of the leading poets, who were immortalized in the legendary ‘Golden Odes’ (al-Mu‘allaqat), which were said to have been written in gold and displayed in the Ka‘ba in Mecca (Allen 2000: 76–78; Irwin 1999: 3–7).