after the destruction of the Second Temple in
JerUsalem by the Romans (70 c.e.), which caused
a flow of reFUgees southward. Islamic sources
indicate that there was a Jewish community led
by rabbis in Yathrib (medina), which existed
alongside the settled Arab tribes there in the sixth
to seventh centuries. Dhu Nuwas, a Jewish king,
ruled southern Arabia for a short time in the sixth
century with the support of the Persians. Christi-
anity was familiar to the Arabs in several forms.
The Banu Ghassan tribes of Syria were allies of the
Byzantine Empire, and were members of the Syr-
ian Church. The Arab Lakhmid rulers of southern
Iraq generally held to the Nestorian sect of Chris-
tianity. There was also a strong Christian presence
in southern Arabia, centered on the city of Najran,
which was known for its monasteries, churches,
and shrines dedicated to Arab Christian martyrs.
Its leaders were allied to the rulers of Byzantium
and Ethiopia. Followers of the Zoroastrian reli-
gion, the official religion of the Sasanian Persian
Empire (224–651), could be found in southern
Iraq, along the Arabian coast of the Persian Gulf,
and in yemen. Most of these Zoroastrians were
probably Persians, but there is evidence that some
may also have been Arabs. According to early
Muslim accounts, one of the first of Muhammad’s
followers was Salman al-Farisi, a Persian from Iraq
who had converted from Zoroastrianism.
See also christianity^ and islam; idolatry;
jahiliyya; JUdaism and islam.
Further reading: Hisham ibn Kalbi, The Book of Idols,
trans. N. A. Faris (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1952); Gordon D. Newby, A History of the Jews of
Arabia: From Ancient Times to Their Eclipse under Islam
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988);
F. E. Peters, The Arabs and Arabia on the Eve of Islam
(Aldershot, U.K. and Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1999).
Arabic language and literature
Arabic is the fifth or sixth most widely spoken
language in the world today, after Mandarin
Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi, and possibly
Bengali. It is the official language of 21 modern
countries; nearly 160 million Arabic speakers in
the Middle East and abroad use it as their mother
tongue. More than 1 billion Muslims around the
world regard it as their sacred language because
it is the language of the qUran, the Islamic holy
book. Many Jews and Christians living in the
Middle East also speak it. Arabic has been used
continuously as a living, written, and spoken
language for nearly 1,400 years and has served
as the medium for the creation and transmission
of a great number of works on religion, history,
philosophy, science, and mathematics.
Classified by linguists as a member of the
Semitic family of the Afro-Asiatic languages,
Arabic is related to Hebrew, Aramaic, and the
Akkadian language of ancient Mesopotamia. It
originated in the Arabian Peninsula, where it
was a poetic language used by the bedoUin and
townspeople prior to the appearance of islam in
the seventh century. The main reason for its rise
as a world language is because it is the language
of the Quran, which declares itself to be a direct
“revelation” from God “in plain Arabic speech”
(Q 26:192–196). In addition to being a sacred
language, the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik b.
Marwan (r. 685–705) made Arabic the administra-
tive language of the early Arab empire, leading to
its codification as a literary language with its own
formal grammar by the end of the eighth century.
Thus, as lands and peoples from Spain and North
Africa to the banks of the Indus River fell under
the control of Arab Muslim governments, Arabic
became the language of their subjects, Muslims
and non-Muslims alike. The languages formerly
spoken by the native peoples in these regions
became isolated, minority languages, such as Cop-
tic in egypt and Aramaic in Mesopotamia (iraq),
or they were noticeably changed by the introduc-
tion of Arabic vocabulary, such as the Persian
language. Turkish, Hindi, and Urdu also have an
extraordinary number of Arabic loanwords as a
result of the spread of Islamic religion and civili-Arabic language and literature 53 J