Malta 870-1054 : al-Ḥimyarī's account

Abstract

In the first quarter of 1990 the polemic in The Sunday Times between Dr. Mark Brincat and Professor Godfrey Wettinger on whether Christianity survived in Malta under the Arabs reformed the phalanxes of "traditionalists" and "revisionists" and appeared to have ended in a stalemate, with each side conceding very little to the other. However, it did give a salutary shake to the local history circle and it was also keenly followed by the general reader. I, therefore wish to draw the attention of scholars and amateurs to an Arab author who seems to be unknown locally. While delivering a series of lectures on the language spoken in Malta before the Arab conquest, I became intrigued by the lack of a clearly perceivable substratum in the Maltese language and I tried to look at the question in the light of comparative-historical and geolinguistic principles (cf. my Language and Demography in Malta, 1991, pp. 93-96). In my research on Sicilian Arabic, which I am treating as a working hypothesis to discover the roots of Maltese, I came across references to a few authors who have never been mentioned by the experts in the local field. The most remarkable of these is without any doubt Ibn 'Abd al-Mun'im al-Himyari, who wrote a geographical dictionary entitled Kitāb ar-Rawd al-mi'tar fi khabar al-aktār.