Pronouncing Arabic by T. F.

Mitchell
Review by: Alan S. Kaye
Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 112, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1992), pp. 137-138
Published by: American Oriental Society
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 Reviews of Books
the cult of the book, in the cult of eloquence, in the
methodology of instruction, in self-teaching, in all
phases of the humanist community, both the amateur
and the professional, in the relationship between hu-
manism and law, in the art of the notary and the episto-
lary art, in the florilegia and the formularies of letters
and formal legal documents, in many-sidedness, in the
cult of fame and glory, in the practice of ridicule and
wit, in individualism generally and in many other as-
pects . . . (pp. 348-49).
Makdisi refutes the "common spirit" theory (that is supposed
to have hovered over the Mediterraneanworld in the Middle
Ages), not just by a clever reference to the colonial poetics of
Rudyard Kipling ("East is East and West is West, And never
the twain shall meet"), but by the more compelling argument
that the common spirit was not at the north and south, east and
west of the Mediterranean simultaneously, and that "both
movements [scholasticism and humanism] find their raison
d'etre in classical Islam, from their genesis to their full devel-
opment, involving a long historical process. In the Christian
West both movements came upon the scene in the second half
of the eleventh century, without an adequate Western histori-
cal background . . ." (p. 349).
When otherwise perfectly serious scholars, whom Makdisi
identifies simply as "Eurocentric historians," are willing and
able to refer to "a spontaneous movement of the human mind"
for the origin of universities, or to a "mysterious urge" for the
rise of humanism, an innate socio-psychological barrier must
be in operation much stronger than the possibility of scholarly
open-mindedness. Makdisi is rathertimid in his indictment:
Except for some scholars of broad vision, Western his-
torians have thus been at odds on the matter of influ-
ence from classical Islam on the Christian West,
leading them to span the spectrum, from positing the
common spirit theory, to declaring the utter otherness
of two opposed spirits. Although contradictory, both
theories aim at the same result. For with either theory,
there would be no use to discuss even the possibility of
influence from Islam on the West; with either theory,
the parallels are simply parallels, nothing else (p. 349).
What Makdisi leaves blank between his carefully constructed
paragraphsis the source and significance of the tension, of the
negation of any outside influence-particularly that of Is-
lam-on the "West." That, however, is the power of a myth.
And precisely for that reason, Makdisi's magnificent book
will, once again, face resistance in having its argument con-
sidered seriously by Eurocentric Medievalists.
HAMID DABASHI
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
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137
Pronouncing Arabic. By T. F. MITCHELL.Oxford: CLARENDON
PRESS, 1990. Pp. xii + 167. $49.95.
Every Arabist working today knows (or should know) some
of the outstanding research published over the past four de-
cades by one of Great Britain's most erudite specialists in
Arabic linguistics, T. F. Mitchell, Professor of Linguistics
Emeritus at the University of Leeds, formerly at the School of
Oriental and African Studies, University of London. This
book was already in the making some thirty-eight years ago as
Mitchell's WritingArabic (Oxford University Press, 1953) al-
ready made reference to it. Happily for Arabic studies, it is
now a reality. One will instantly recognize both Mitchell's
Firthianbackground, including a solid knowledge of phonetics
a la Daniel Jones, and his reliance on the excellent and pio-
neering The Phonetics of Arabic by W. H. T. Gairdner (Ox-
ford University Press, 1925). As Mitchell notes in appendix B
(pp. 156-58), almost all the Arabic phonetic terms used are
discussed by Gairdner (1925), such as 'imalah 'closing and/or
fronting of fathah', 'itbaq 'full emphaticization or emphasis',
and so on.
Mitchell's prose is both accurate and illuminating, and thus
the book can be highly recommended for students and special-
ists, too. It might seem strange to witness the use of the term
"guttural"(p. 32 and passim; Arabic halqf) in a modem lin-
guistic treatise, referring to the natural class of /x, gh, h, c, h,
and '/; however, I believe this term is still justifiable, since
those consonants share a similar morphophonemic behavior
by preferring, e.g., a fathah as the vowel of the imperfect
stem. As Mitchell writes (ibid.), this tendency is more observ-
able in colloquial dialects than in Classical Arabic, yet any
Arabist who is familiar with Hebrew morphophonology will
readily admit that the term "guttural"makes sense for many of
the Semitic languages. Mitchell (ibid.) also correctly points
out that the gutturals as a group have incompatibility in their
root-patterningcapabilities.
The Arabic pronunciation described by Mitchell reflects an
educated Egyptian (i.e., Cairene, very much in the "Azhari"
tradition) interpretation of the Arabic graphemes with, of
course, some influence of the spoken colloquial dialect, which
Mitchell characterizes as "a more relaxed reading style"
(p. 154). One such instance which is very common is the
omission of the final -h of the pausal pronunciation of the td'
marbfitah.It is, however, in matters of accentuation (pp. 102-
17) where one most easily notices the Egyptian vernacular
influence imposed on both Modern StandardArabic and Clas-
sical Arabic (however, Qur'dnic recitation and chant, i.e.,
tajwfd, are beyond what Mitchell tries to do in the book, al-
though the faatihah 'opening sara of the Koran' (not fatfihah,
p. 154) is dealt with. Mitchell discusses this continuum of ver-
nacular influence by pointing out: "In general, from a phonetic
standpoint, the degree of divergence from vernacular practice
may be used to assess the 'grade' of Classical pronunciation-
138 Journal of the American Oriental Society 112.1 (1992)
the greater the divergence, the more Classical the perfor-
mance" (p. 102).
Egyptian pronunciation is chosen by Mitchell because, in
addition to Egypt's being the most populous Arab country,
with a corresponding admirationof and respect for its pronun-
ciation tradition, there is a norm based on the speech of the
Culamad' of Al-Azhar, Dar al-cUlum, and various other organi-
zations and universities. As is well known, the facts of which
syllable to stress in polysyllabic Arabic words differ remark-
ably throughout the Arab world. For an Egyptian from Cairo,
for instance, even the same word has a different stress pattern
(due to different syllabic structure)depending on whether it is
a pausal form or not: mu'allimun 'teacher' (masculine, nom.
sg.) but mu'dllim. I shall not dwell here on these tricky de-
tails, except to note that native Arabic speakers from different
areas in reading standard Arabic katabatd 'they (fem. dual)
wrote' may stress any of the four syllables and still be correct
(Egyptians from Cairo pronounce katabdtd; cf. the Cairene
pronunciation kdtdibata'they (fem. dual) corresponded with'.
These facts are but part of the story of why I deemed Modern
StandardArabic to be ill-defined, but all colloquial dialects to
be well-defined (see my "Modern Standard Arabic and the
Colloquials," Lingua 24.4 [1970]: 374-91, 412). Indeed one
can spot a Lebanese pronunciation in katabata, a Jordanian
one in katdbatd, and an Upper Egyptian one in kditabatd.
Another typical case of the interference of colloquial
Cairene on Modern Standard Arabic pronunciation is in the
matter of the unvoicing of final consonant clusters, "particu-
larly noticeable with final liquids" such as hus~n 'beauty'
(p. 98). This is probably a very old feature in Cairene, and one
can see a parallel with other Arabic dialects such as Nigerian
Arabic [juwdpm I (the raised m refers to a nasal plosion) 'an-
swer' (MSA jawdb) and Maltese biep 'gate' (MSA bdb). Con-
cerning the latter development of devoicing, it should be kept
in mind that Maltese has other non-Maghribine features, too
(and thus, in my view, cannot be considered a North-African
Arabic dialect although, to be sure, it does have many affini-
ties with the Maghribine dialects), such as Arabic /q/ > Mal-
tese /D/, written as q (as in Cairene and elsewhere), and Arabic
P! > Maltese 0, which is not written in the language.
I save for last a discussion of the hamzatuIwasl (pp. 93-98)
since this is an importantproblem in comparativeArabic dialec-
tology. While I can agree, for the most part, with Mitchell's ob-
servations on words such as 'iDndni 'two', 'ibn 'son', 'ibnah
'daughter', 'ist 'buttock', 'imra' 'man', 'imra'ah 'woman' (note
that 'alimra'ah 'the woman' is also possible in addition to the
cited 'almar'ah, p. 93), I have pointed out the evidence for a
word such as 'ism 'name'(ibid.) as its hamzatuIwasl has shifted
over to the hamzatu lqatc category. See my "The Hamzat al-
Wasl in ContemporaryModem Standard Arabic," JAOS III
(1991): 572-73. It is interestingto note the vowel-shortening of
md 'what'in ma smuk'what'syour name?' in addition to the very
classical elision of the glottal stop of 'ism (p. 95).
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Mitchell's book is absolutely first rate, and there are many
other points I would have liked to discuss in a longer review,
such as his discovery of clicks in Arabic dialects (as in Zulu,
Hottentot, and Bushman) (see p. 44 for the report concerning
the Al-Karnakdialect of Qena, Upper Egypt). Two of his pho-
netic claims, however, await further research (p. 56). First, he
states that Moroccan Arabic, e.g., has a pharyngeal stop as a
variant of /q/, yet there is no IPA symbol for such a consonant
because, as almost all have claimed, pharyngeal stops are
(supposedly) impossible to produce. Secondly, he maintains
that "in much of Syria, Kuwait, and Iraq, ' is usually glottal-
ized, i.e., pronounced with a simultaneous glottal stop, but in
Egypt, North Africa, and much of the Levant, ' is simply the
voiced counterpartof h" (p. 56). I am skeptical about this be-
cause if this were true, then one could (very frequently) tell a
Syrian from an Egyptian, simply by this one difference of
glottalization-a feat which is, in my opinion, not easily
accomplished.
ALAN S. KAYE
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON
The Isma'ilis: Their History and Doctrines. By FARHAD
DAFTARY. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1990.
Pp. xviii + 804.
In 1973 the new Encyclopaedia of Islam published an article
by Wilferd Madelung on the "Isma'iliyya." At the time this ar-
ticle seemed both a model summaryof all that had been discov-
ered about the history and doctrines of this obscure and difficult
Shi'ite sect and an outline for a much largerstudy of it. Because
the Ismailis have existed in so many differentforms, and at both
the center and at the peripheryof the Islamic world, few scholars
other than Madelung were conversant with all of these phases
and manifestations. Nevertheless, the importance of tracing all
this in a single account is undeniable: the Ismailis are a prime
example of a continuous sub-movement within the Islamic con-
text over at least a millennium.
As useful as the EI article was, however, it provided only
an outline of the subject, almost as if to indicate the promise
of a full-length study. With the recent appearance of this
major work by Farhad Daftary, that promise has now been
achieved. Here at last is a complete account of the Ismailis,
bringing together in one volume the history of such individual
groups as the Carmatians, the Fatimids, the Assassins, the
Khojas and Bohras, to name only major phases.
Madelung had already indicated a rich collection of earlier
partial studies. Daftary, whose academic training was not orig-
inally in Islamic history, therefore found many facets of
Ismaili studies reasonably well documented. To these, how-