The Caliphate

The medieval Latin name for the Arabs and then for the whole Islamic world, Sarraceni. The name is older than Islam: Ptolemy’s Sarakēnoí and Ammianus’s Saraceni were nomads of the Arabian frontier, and its real etymology is unresolved. Isidore of Seville, writing on the eve of the conquests, recorded the folk explanation his age preferred, that they are “called Saracens either because they claim descent from Sarah” or from a Syrian origin; other writers derived them from Hagar, as Agareni, or from Ishmael. When the conquests came, Latin did not coin a name for the new power; it stretched this old tribal label over everything from Cordoba to Samarkand, and in the crusade chronicles Sarraceni is simply the standing name of the enemy, as fixed in the Gesta Francorum as Turci.

The page already holds this entry’s exact mirror: Middle Persian Tāzīg, one border tribe’s name stretched over all Arabs, handed on to Armenian and Chinese. Latin did the same from the opposite direction, and the etymological legend it attached shows what the stretch was for: a genealogy from Sarah or Hagar filed the new civilization into the only universal history the West had, the biblical one, as a nation of Abraham’s other line. The name was in the encyclopedias before the caliphate existed, waiting; when Islam arrived, the Latin West did not learn a new word for it, and for eight hundred years it fought, traded with, and translated a civilization it never once called by its own name.

Tāzīg is the Middle Persian word for an Arab, and after the conquest, for the Muslim Arabs and their realm. It is generally derived from the tribal name Ṭayyiʾ, the north Arabian tribe on the Sasanian frontier, extended with the Iranian adjectival suffix -īg: the Arabs nearest Persia lent their name to all Arabs everywhere, the same mechanism that made a corner tribe of Greeks into the Graeci. The word belongs to the Zoroastrian Pahlavi books, written in Book Pahlavi script, which has no Unicode encoding; the entry therefore carries transliteration only, per the same rule as Demotic.

This unassuming adjective is one of the great travellers of the atlas. It went east along the Silk Road to be transcribed as Chinese Dàshí, crossed the mountains into Armenian as Tačik, and continued in Persian itself as Tāzī, so that from the Tang court to the Caucasus the caliphate was known by a Sasanian word for a border tribe. Its later career is stranger still: in Central Asia the word drifted from meaning “Arab” to meaning “Muslim” to meaning the settled Persian-speakers among the Turks, and it survives today as the name of the Tajiks and of Tajikistan. A name that began as Persia’s word for the Arabs ended as the world’s word for a Persian-speaking people; no other form on this page has wandered so far from its first referent, or landed anywhere so unexpected.

The Byzantine name for the Arabs and the Islamic power, Sarakēnoí, the Greek original behind the Latin West’s Sarraceni. Like the Latin, it is older than Islam, a Ptolemaic name for Arabian nomads promoted to cover an empire; from the conquests of the 630s it is the standing term of Byzantine chronicle and polemic, running through Theophanes and his successors for the whole eight centuries in which the empire and the caliphates shared a frontier. John of Damascus, writing inside the caliphate itself as a Christian official of Umayyad Damascus, gave the medieval world its folk etymology: Sarakēnoí as if Sárras kenoí, “empty of Sarah,” the descendants of Hagar the sent-away, whence the parallel names Agarēnoí and Ismaēlîtai.

The page’s Persian and Latin entries stretch old tribal names over the new civilization from outside; this entry does the same from the border itself, and adds the theology. The “empty of Sarah” etymology is philologically worthless and historically priceless: it shows Byzantium, like the Latin West after it, able to place the caliphate only inside the biblical family tree, as the other line of Abraham’s house. The empire that fought the caliphate longest also transmitted its name farthest, west into Sarraceni and onward into every medieval European tongue; Christendom’s whole vocabulary for Islam descends from a Greek pun about a slighted matriarch. The neighbors were never strangers; that was the problem the name kept solving.

al-Khilāfa (الخلافة) is the Arabic name of the office and, by extension, the state: the verbal noun of the root kh-l-f, “to come after, to succeed,” whose agent noun khalīfa names the successor himself. Abu Bakr took power in 632 as khalīfat rasūl Allāh, “successor of the Messenger of God,” and the abstract khilāfa became the standing name for the institution and the realm it governed, used throughout Arabic historiography for the whole line from the Rashidun through the Abbasids. The word carries a Qur’anic resonance older than the office: the Qur’an calls Adam a khalīfa set upon the earth, and later caliphs were not above preferring the more expansive reading, “deputy of God,” to the modest “successor of the Prophet.”

What distinguishes this endonym from every other on the atlas is that it names neither a land, a people, a city, nor a founder. Rhōmanía is a geography, Ērānšahr a people’s realm, Zhōngguó a position on the map; al-Khilāfa is a constitutional claim, the assertion that legitimate rule descends by succession from the Prophet. That is why it could pass intact from Medina to Damascus to Baghdad while dynasties rose and fell, and why rival courts at Córdoba and Cairo could each claim the same name for themselves; a name that asserts a right can be contested in a way no place-name can. Most states on this atlas are named for where they are or who lives in them. This one is named for an argument about who should rule, and the argument outlasted the state by centuries.

Dàshí (大食) is the Chinese name for the Arabs and the caliphate, in use from the mid-seventh century through the Song. The Tang histories record the first Arab embassy arriving at Chang’an in 651, within twenty years of the Prophet’s death, and carry accounts of the Dàshí realm, its dress, its worship, and its conquest of Persia. The characters read “great eat,” but the meaning is no more Chinese than Fúlǐn’s: they transcribe the Iranian Tāzīg, the Persian word for the Arabs, delivered to China by the same Iranian middlemen who had carried Rome’s name east. By Zhao Rukuo’s Zhufanzhi of 1225 the Dàshí are a whole world with dependencies catalogued one by one, Baghdad and Mecca among them.

The symmetry with the Byzantines’ page is exact and telling: China named both great empires of the medieval west, Fúlǐn and Dàshí, in Persian, because Persian was the language of the road between. The two names even met in battle once, at the Talas river in 751, the only time the caliphate’s and China’s armies faced each other, a collision the annals record under this borrowed Persian word. China had no direct word for the Arabs because it had almost no direct contact; what it had was the Silk Road, and the road spoke Persian. On this atlas Chang’an consistently sees the west through an Iranian interpreter, and Dàshí is the interpreter’s word, kept for six centuries.

Tačik (Տաճիկ) is the Classical Armenian name for the Arabs, used in the plural, Tačikkʿ, for the Muslim power that replaced Sasanian Persia on Armenia’s southern horizon. It appears in the bishop Sebeos, whose history, written around 661, is the earliest surviving substantial account of the rise of Islam in any language, and it remains the standard Armenian word for the Muslim neighbor through the medieval period. The word is an early borrowing of Middle Persian Tāzīg, taken over with the affricate that marks the older stratum of Iranian loans in Armenian; Armenia learned its name for the Arabs, like so much of its political vocabulary, from Persian.

The entry is the exact sibling of Hoṙom on the Byzantines’ page, and the pair say something about where Armenia stood. Both of Armenia’s imperial neighbors, the Christian empire it shared a faith with and the caliphate it answered to, are named in words learned from a third power that had ruled it before either. And like Tāzīg everywhere it travelled, the word refused to stay put: as Muslim rule over Armenia passed from Arabs to Turks, Tačik drifted with it, until in later Armenian it meant the Turk next door. The word tracked not a people but a relationship, whoever currently ruled the Muslim world as seen from Armenia. Armenia’s names for its neighbors are a small archive of its history: conquered in Persian, they name Christians and Muslims alike in the conqueror’s old words.

Tāzī (تازی) is the Classical Persian continuation of Middle Persian Tāzīg, with the final consonant worn away: the ordinary word for an Arab, and adjectivally for things Arabian, in the Persian literature of the medieval courts. Its most charged appearances are in the Shāhnāma, where Ferdowsi, composing the epic of pre-Islamic Iran under Islamic rule, names the seventh-century conquerors with the old Sasanian word; the laments put in the mouths of the last Persian commanders before the fall speak of the army of the Tāzīān. The word also settled into the vocabulary of fine things Arabian, above all asb-i tāzī, the Arabian horse, whence the tazi hound and horse of the eastern lands.

The entry’s interest is in who is speaking. Persian was by the tenth century the second language of the caliphate’s own civilization, written by Muslims for Muslim courts; yet its word for the Arabs remained the one coined when Persia was Zoroastrian and the Arabs were a border tribe. Ferdowsi could use it with the grief of the conquered, his patrons with the neutrality of habit, a horse-dealer with admiration, all in the same generation. Where Chinese Dàshí and Armenian Tačik are names used across a border, Tāzī was used inside the house, by the empire’s own Persian-speaking subjects about their rulers’ nation. The conquered kept their own name for the conquerors, and the conquerors’ own courts came to speak it.