While most people know that
Arabic is the written and spoken language of more than 150 million inhabitants of
the Arab world, few realize that the Arabic script is also used by one-seventh
of the world's population.
Millions of people in Africa and Asia write
their languages in the Arabic alphabet. Farsi—the language of Iran—and Urdu—the language of Pakistan and some parts of India—are written in the Arabic
script. The Turkish language employed Arabic characters until the 1920's. In
addition, Arabic script is used today in Afghanistan,
Indonesia, Malaysia, sections of China
and even in the Muslim areas of the Philippines
and the former Soviet Union.
The reason for the extensive use of Arabic dates back to the emergence of the
Islamic faith in 622 A.D. The Qur'an, the Holy Book of Islam, was
revealed to the Prophet Muhammad and subsequently, recorded in Arabic. Thus,
for the Muslim Arab of that time, as well as today, his language and the
language of God (Allah) are identical. Arabic remains the primary
vehicle for prayer in Islam.
As the new believers, or Muslims, spread out from the Arabian Peninsula to create
a vast empire—first with its capital in Damascus then, later, in Baghdad—Arabic
became the administrative language of vast sections of the civilized world. It
drew upon Byzantine and Persian terms and its own immense inner resources of
vocabulary and grammatical flexibility. By the eleventh century A.D., this
language was the common medium of expression from Persia
to the Pyrenees—the language of kings and
commoners, poets and princes, scholars and scientists. Arabic became the
principal reservoir of human knowledge, including the repository for the
accumulated wisdom of past ages, supplanting previous cultural languages, such
as Greek and Latin.
Arabic belongs to the Semitic family of languages, of which Hebrew is also a
member; thus, the term "Semite" refers to anyone who speaks a Semitic
tongue. Arabic script reads from right to left and its alphabet contains
twenty-eight characters. While it is universally written, read and understood
in its classical form, spoken Arabic has undergone regional or dialectical
variations.
The Arabic language developed through the centuries in what is today Saudi Arabia until, in the era immediately preceding the
appearance of Islam, it acquired the form in which it is known today. Arab
poets of the pre-Islamic, or Jahiliyyah period, had developed a language
of amazing richness and flexibility, despite the fact that many were desert bedouins
(nomads) with little or no formal education. For the most part, their poetry
was transmitted and preserved orally. The Arabic language was then, as it is
now, easily capable of creating new words and terminology in order to adapt to
the demands of new scientific and artistic discoveries.
As the Empire spread, the Arabic language—and, indeed, culture—was enriched by
contacts with other civilizations: Greeks, Persians, Copts, Romans, Indians and
Chinese. During the ninth and tenth centuries, a great translation movement,
centered in Baghdad,
was in force, in which many ancient scientific and philosophical tracts were
transposed from ancient languages, especially Greek, into Arabic. Many were
enhanced by the new wisdom suggested by Arab thinkers; other texts were simply
preserved, only to re-emerge in Europe during
the Renaissance.
Modern European languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and
English owe a great debt to Arabic. The English language itself contains many
words borrowed from Arabic: algebra, alchemy, admiral, genius, ghoul, mare
sherbet, soda and many others
31/5/2008, 5:52 pm