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Language of Empire: Politics of Arabic and Persian in Abbasid World
This essay aims to contribute to current studies of language and empire by considering Arabic and Persian in the ninth and tenth centuries. Following the lead of Edward Said on colonial empires and translation, I focus on the political aspects of language and translation in "premodern" trans-Asian societies, which have not yet recieved the nuanced attention they deserve. Accentuating the act of adopting and supporting a language as political, I argue that the wax and wane of imperial languages were predicated on two usually simultaneous dynamics: intra-imperial interests and, to use Laura Doyle's term, inter-imperial competition.