When the Arabs began their con-quests and their policy of expan-sion some one thousand three hundred years ago, they came to every land they conquered with the language which, thanks to its richness and breadth, took the place of the national languages or changed them fundamentally. Arabic took the place of Syriac, of Egyptian Coptic, and of African Berber, while Iran, during the 250 years following the Arab conquest (from 750 to 1000 A.D.), was deeply influ-enced by Arabic, which through-out that period remained almost the sole language of letters in that country. When the Persian language came back to life as a language of literature after the end of the tenth century A.D., it had been powerfully grafted with Arabic and had adopted a large portion of the Arabic vocabulary.

The reason for this was not that the conquering Arabs forced their language upon the inhab-itants of those lands; rather, the cause of Arabic's ascendancy over the languages of the inhabitants goes back to the ease with which its abundant vocabulary can express the sub-tlest philosophical and scientific meanings and shades. One can imagine no greater tribute to the Arabic language than that great truth: when the Tatar conquerors swept down upon the lands of the Muslims, carrying everything before them on their way from Khwarizm to Baghdad, Arabic not only stood fast but conquered the conquerors themselves. To this day the Tatar and Turkish languages contain a large share of Arabic words.

The great influence that Arabic

has had on the languages of India likewise forms a part of this remarkable linguistic phenomenon. India's contact with the lands of the Arabs goes back several centuries before the appearance of Islam. Arab merchants used to buy scents and aromatics from the coasts of Sind, Gujarat, and Malabar, so that Arabized Sanskrit words — such as those for ginger, pepper, musk, sandalwood, and the water-lily — entered the very body of the Arabic language in the pre-Islamic age. It is highly probable that some Arabic words seeped into the Indian languages too in the same way before the dawn of Islam. In any case, the first cultural imprint of Arabic that took on a lasting character came when the Arabs conquered the land of Sind under the com-mand of Muhammad ibn Qasim in the year 710 A.D. The Baghdad traveler al-Istakhri, who visited the land of Sind in the late eighth century A.D., relates: "The lan-guage of Mansura — now known as Bahkar — and of Multan and its districts is Arabic and Sindi; as for the language of the people of Makran, known today by the name of Baluchistan, it is Persian."

This testimony is confirmed, sev-enteen years later, by the famous Arab geographer Ibn Hawqal, who says: "The people of Mansura and its outskirts speak Arabic." And al-Maqdisi, writing in 985 A.D. when he came to Multan, set down the following: "Daybul (Thatta) lies on the sea-coast, and around it are about a hundred villages, most of whose inhabitants are non-Muslims. The sea washes the walls of the city. The inhabitants are

all merchants, and they speak the two languages, Sindi and Arabic." Thus we see that the first of the Indian languages to be taken by the spell of Arabic was Sindi. The influence of the Arabic language seeped into the rest of the languages of northern India by another route — that of the Persian language, which was full of Arabic words when it became the language of the courts in the age of the Muslim emperors who ruled the greater part of northern India, with Delhi as their capital, for six full centuries beginning in the year 1206 A.D.

It may be said that Hindustani is the most widespread of the Indian languages among the inhabitants of India generally, with its two branches, Hindi and Urdu. It arose from the Indo-Aryan dialect known by the name of Sauraseni, which was current around Delhi. Naturally, many Turkish, Persian, and Arabic words entered it thanks to contact with the Islamic world, and this imprint and its results appear plainly in the two modern languages, Hindi and Urdu. Here we find another astonishing proof of the vitality of the Arabic lan-guage: although Persian enjoyed all the advantages of the lan-guages of courts, and although it exerted a great influence on the form of literature in northern India, the Arabic words that have entered Hindi and Urdu are far more numerous than the words of Persian origin. Indeed, the upshot today is that if India were suddenly to decree the banning of the use of Arabic and the deletion of its words from her various languages, at least three of them would die