Spread of Arabic Before the Advent of Islam

Last updated: April 16th, 2025 at 1:21 pm · Est. Reading Time: 4 minutes

Arabic language had matured into classical Arabic before advent of Islam. Classical Arabic was spoken and written all over Arabian Peninsula on the eve of Islam.

Arabic language developed in three stages. During first phase of its development it was mainly a spoken language and did not have alphabets of its own. Due to this limitation it was written in many scripts of Ancient North Arabic. Though such inscriptions are widely spread in Arabia, assessment of geographic distribution of Arabic during this phase is difficult. Scholars have confusion how to clearly identify Arabic in such inscriptions. The discoverers of the famous ‘Igl bin Haf’am inscription from Qaryat al Faw, for example, consider it the oldest Arabic inscription, written in Sabaic script.¹ Jallad doubts this assertion. He is of opinion that it is not Arabic, rather another language resembling Arabic.²

During second phase of its development Arabic had acquired alphabets of its own but it was not exactly the same as was Classical Arabic. Scholars have given it a fancy name of Palaeo-Arabic.⁵

As archaeologists don’t find any time gap between Old Arabic and Classical Arabic, we can safely assume that the transition of former into the later language was swift and seamless.

Inscriptions written in Ancient North Arabian scripts are hardly present if any, from 5^th century CE onwards. It means Arabic emerged as a language of prestige, as once were the Ancient North Arabian languages. It no longer remained limited to illiterate nomads. Arabic, however, remained a language of day to day communication. It could not eclipse Syriac as the language of church or Greek as the language of business and politics in north Arabia. That is the reason Zabad inscription is trilingual in Arabic, Syriac and Greek. Rise of Christianity in north Arabia accounts for Syriac and Greek challenge to Arabic.

Linguistic atmosphere was different in south Arabia. Arabic became a spoken and written language there, as Thawban inscription indicates, it did not become a language of prestige. Political elite kept writing in Ancient South Arabian.⁶ Official announcements in the form of inscriptions written in Ancient South Arabian are abundant right up to the advent of Islam.

Classical Arabic, the language of the Qur’an, was already understood all over Arabia by sixth century CE. It was Poetic koiné of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. Despite gaining its own alphabets, Arabic remained mainly a spoken tongue, and rarely attested in archaeological findings. We don’t have enough archaeological record to know exactly when Palaeo-Arabic molded into Classical Arabic. Anyhow, widespread distribution of Classical Arabic in archaeological records immediately after advent of Islam attests that this became the main medium of both verbal and written communication after advent of Islam.

It seems unlikely that the eventual standardisation of Classical Arabic script associated with the rise of Medinan state would have spread across Arabia and eliminated instantly all earlier writing traditions of Arabic. Indeed, isolated examples of earlier phases of Arabic continued past the advent of Islam.⁷

Here, one explanation will not be out of order. Arabic never had monopoly over linguistic communications in Arabia in late pre-Islamic period, nor it ever had in later times. Syriac, Aramaic, Himyarite, and Greek all had their share in pre-Islamic Arabia. Actually, Arabic did not make complete take over in south Arabia even after advent of Islam. South Arabian dialects, called Sayhadic, have survived in different forms up to modern ages.

Footnotes

A. F. L. Beeston, “Namara and Faw”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 42, no. 1 (1979): 1.
Ahmad Al-Jallad, “On the genetic background of the Rbbl bn Hf’m grave inscription at Qaryat al Faw,” Bulletin of the school of oriental and African studies 77, no. 3 (2014): 445 – 465.
Christian Robin, ‘Alī Ibrāhīm al- Ghabbān, and Sa’īd Fayiaz al-Sa’īd, “Inscriptions antique de la région de Najran (Arabie Séoudite meridionale): nouveaux jalons pour l’historie de l’éctiture, de la langue et du calcenrier Arabes,” Competes rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions & Belles-Letters 183 no. 3 (2014): 1039.

Discovery of pre-Islamic inscriptions in Palaeo-Arabic alphabets from locations starting from Najran in the south, and extending to Mecca, Medina, Tabuk, Dutat al Jandal, even as far north as Qasr Burqu and Umm al Jimal, boosts our confidence that Old Arabic was widely spoken and understood language across Arabia by fifth century CE. If we add the abodes of pre-Islamic Arabic poets, like Tarafa, and Afway al-Awdi, to the map of Arabic alphabet inscriptions, it covers the whole Arabia.³ .⁴For the distribution of late pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions see: Ahmad Al-Jallad and Hythem Sidky, “A Palaeo-Arabic Inscription on a route north of Ṭā’if” Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 33 no.1 (Nov. 2022): fig. 6, table 10. For the east Arabian origin of Tafafa see: Tarafa, Diwan Tarafa (‘Amr Ibn Al ‘Abd Ibn Sufyan Ibn Sa’d Ibn Malik), ed. Arthur Wormhoudt, (Oskaloosa, Iwoa: William Penn College, 1979). For the Yemeni origin of al-Awdi see: Muqbil al Tam Aamer Al Ahmadi, “Al Afwah al-Awdi, The poet whose work is maligned,” Arab Heritage Magazine 12 no 81/82 (Mar. 2001): 209.
For Christian leaders of Najran writing in Ancient South Arabian as late at 519 CE see the letter of Simon of Bath Ashram: Irfan Shahîd, The Martyrs of Najran: New Documents, (Bruxellles: Société Des Bollandistes, 1971), 62.
For an example of such a text see: Al-Jallad, The digraph ي ا in the Qur’anic consonantal text and the identification of a new letter shape for final hc., in the 7^th – 8^th Century Arabic script. Al-‘Uṣūr al Wusṭā 29 (2021): 1 – 23.

Further Reading

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