Alessandro Bausani and ‘Muslim Languages’, Forty Years After

Abstract

Abstract Resorting to personal memories from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the author, who defended in 1971 at the University of Rome a thesis entitled Iranian Elements in Brahui, under Prof. Bausani’s direction (later revised and published under the title Iranian lexical elements in Brāhūī [Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1979]), reconstructs the political and cultural climate in which – at the end of the 1970s – a major subject of enquiry was the problem of the nature of the national unity among the countries of the Arab world. At the urging of Biancamaria Scarcia, Bausani decided to publish at the Institute of Islamic Studies of the University of Rome a volume of historical and linguistic essays coordinated by himself and B. Scarcia (Mondo islamico tra interazione e acculturazione [Roma: Istituto di studi islamici, 1981]). In this volume, Bausani published an essay on the concept of ‘Islamic language’ that took stock of his previous proposals made over more than twenty years (starting with his speech at the 1966 Ravello conference on a comparative history of the Islamic literatures). The author demonstrates that notwithstanding his use of linguistic terminology, Bausani’s main interest has always been the investigation of the possibility of identifying minimum distinctive traits present in the different literary typologies of various countries of Islamic culture.