Siculo Arabic

by Dionisius Agius, Agius

First Published in 1996. Within a span of three hundred years Sicily underwent two processes of ethnic, cultural and linguistic transformation. Under the Arab rule it witnessed a period of change from Hellenization and Christianization to Arabization and Islamization. This study looks at
Arabization and Arabicization with Arabization means the process of conforming to a culture and an ethnic community, in this case Arab, while Arabicization a process of adopting Arabic as a language or dialect which was socially and economically advantageous at the time.

542 pages, Hardcover

First published July 4, 1996

About the author

Dionisius Albertus Agius (1945) , is a Professor of Arabic Studies and Islamic Material Culture at the University of Exeter. He is also a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Geographical Society. His research focuses on maritime culture and the Islamic world; ethnography of the material culture and heritage of the Western Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean; lexical development of maritime and nautical terminology. He have particular interest in the socio-cultural history and provenance of the traditional sailing water craft, the sea people and their activities, folklore belief and practices, resources and trade in the Western Indian Ocean. He have conducted extensive maritime ethnographic fieldwork on the coasts of the Arabian Gulf and Oman between 1990 and 2000, and the African and Arabian coasts of the Red Sea from 2002 to 2014