Stories of Origin

Abstract

This section presents extracts from Ibn al-Nadīm’s Kitāb al-Fihrist, usually translated as “The Catalogue,” a text about the origins of three languages and their scripts—Arabic, Syriac, and Persian—which were relevant to the flourishing intellectual life in the Abbasid caliphate from 750 CE. In each of the three cases, the emergence of language is closely affiliated to human genealogy and interspersed with references to creation as divine, super-human (heroic), or human enterprises. Each origin narrative has its own peculiar background and reflects (or claims) the appropriation of information and beliefs from pre-Islamic times. The simplest story concerns Syriac, which is attributed to works by historical Syriac Christian authors. The longest and most complex story treats the development of Arabic as a complicated process to which various tribal confederations and prophets allegedly contributed. Several, often contradictory, reports taken from known Muslim authors document the multifaceted perspectives held by them, the importance of early Islamic genealogical activities, and the acceptance of narrative ambiguity side by side with the desire to establish reliability. Neither as simple as Syriac, nor as complex as Arabic, the origin narrative of Persian explains how a single, coherent language was the by-product of the emergence of Iranian kingship. In contrast to the other two stories, no specific text or author is mentioned. What links all three is the conviction that speaking and writing are closely intertwined as human cultural acts and define group identity. Additional points referring to the qualities of speaking and writing serve as specific markers of identity, legitimacy, and status.