Ricerc@Sapienza

By introducing his notion of “Islamic languages”, Alessandro Bausani (1921-88) argued that in the late modern era, the dynamics hitherto connecting the languages of Muslims experienced a U-turn as a result of the impact of nationalisms and of the growing influence of colonial languages. However, more recently, an increasing number of Muslim actors have appropriated, in turn, former colonial languages for Islamic religious writings and discourses. The present article explores the francophone side of this trend, putting it in its sociological and ideological context, including theoretical discussions among insiders about the proper Islamic uses of French, and comparing them to analogous theorizations elaborated earlier by Anglophone Muslim writers.
Subsequently, a provisional survey of lexical, syntactic and orthographic peculiarities of the French of Islamic publications is proposed, by contrasting them to solutions currently adopted by other francophone writers, especially by secular scholars of Islam, when dealing with similar issues. At this stage of our research, the gap between these linguistic varieties does not seem considerable, and looks even smaller among writers with high proficiency of scholarly French, in spite of the recommendations of Muslim theorists of “the Islamization of linguistics”. Likewise, a comparison with the dynamics of “language Islamization” identified by Bausani helps measure to what extent recent Islamic uses of French depart from changes affecting other languages in precolonial times, in spite of deceptive similarities.