The Qur'an and Its Study. Adnan Zarzour
discarded at any time.
Taha Husain said: Once the Arabs went into Persia and settled there, the local population started to learn their language. Arabic became the language spoken and written by most people. Indeed, many were the Persian scholars who contributed to the rise of Arabic Studies, and many were those that assumed leadership in such studies, to the extent that they became associated with them. We all know that the Persians were the ones who developed the studies of Arabic literary styles... Although the Persians loved their own language and began to write poetry in Persian as from the middle of the fourth century (the tenth century in the Gregorian calendar), Arabic continued to be the academic language until the end of the Middle Ages. Authors like Avicenna, al-Taftāzānī, al-Jurjānī, al-Ṭūsī and many others all wrote their books in Arabic. All this is due to the Qur’an.20
1.3 A Driving Force but Not a Ruling Authority
It cannot be overemphasised that the driving force that Arabic received through the Qur’an was certainly due to the majestic status of the Qur’an and its message. Moreover, the different communities that embraced Islam loved Arabic and started to prefer it to their own local languages. This means that the view advanced by some writers who maintain that Arabic relied on the ruling or invading authority to ensure its spread is false. These areas were previously invaded by foreign forces, and they yielded to the political authority of their invaders. Yet such vanquished communities continued to hold on to their own languages and heritage until the advent of Islam. They only discarded their old languages when they embraced Islam and the Qur’an. This is confirmed by the principle of sociology, and whereby Professor ‘Ā’ishah ‘Abd al-Rahman states:
It was not an attitude of those communities that they dispensed of their languages all of a sudden; nor were they forced to do so by force, as Philip Hitti says in his voluminous book History of the Arabs. There were no laws issued by the state to enforce such a change. The language struggle went through its natural stages dictated by the laws of sociology. It went through an initial stage of estrangement which differed from one country to another, according to the different situation of each country, its geographical location, intellectual and civilisational heritage and the nature of its own language...
However, this stage did not last long. The Qur’an was there to open the hearts of those who accepted Islam to also embrace Arabic.21
Professor ‘Abd al-Raḥmān comments on the victory scored by Arabic against foreign languages that were imposed on the communities of the area, including Roman, Greek, Persian and Byzantine, and on how Arabic dealt with national languages:
It was expected that these communities would combine Arabic as a religious language with their own national languages as the languages of daily life, since they had long preserved these languages against different invaders. Yet it was only within a couple of generations that Arabic became the common language of the different communities of a united nation. They discarded their national languages and adopted Arabic under no pressure from any quarter, just as there was no compulsion felt by anyone to embrace Islam. So, Arabic was fighting its own battle against the languages of the communities that decided to adopt the Islamic faith.22
The victory scored by Arabic in this battle was marked by enthusiasm at the time when Islam found its way into people’s hearts and minds. Hence, some writers attribute this victory to ‘the religious dominance of Islam’ which was adopted freely by overwhelming majorities in these communities. Professor ‘Abd al-Salām Hārūn states:
The religious dominance of Islam was such that in Egypt it ended, within a short period, the Coptic language which was a product of the old language of the Egyptian civilisation. It also ended the languages of the peoples of Carthage and other areas in North Africa and the Nabataeans in northern Iraq. It also severely curtailed the Byzantine language in the northern parts of Syria.23
Professor Ahmad Muhammad al-Hūfi said that both Coptic and Greek disappeared from Egypt. The first was the spoken language of the people and the second was the language of literature and government circles. He further comments on the fast spread of Arabic as the Muslim state continued to expand. He mentions that in North Africa the Berber language considerably retreated before the advance of Arabic, while ‘Persian was severely curtailed in Iraq and Persia, the Nubian dialect became confined to the Nubian provinces as did the Sudanese dialects which later disappeared in Sudan. None of these managed to reappear at a later period except Persian which was revived in the fourth century of the Islamic calendar (10th century CE).’24
1.4 The Protective Force
No book of Divine or human origin has played a role even remotely similar to that played by the Qur’an in preserving Arabic as a language. Indeed, no book has ever had such an influence in the history of any language. It is this role of the Qur’an that we call its protective force.
The Qur’an has always been an impregnable barrier against the spread of local dialects. This was particularly true during the period when the great Muslim state was fragmented into city and mini states. Had it not been for this glorious book, which God has undertaken to preserve intact, in its original form, until the end of life, Arabic would have suffered the same sort of division and splintering as Latin. It is due only to this immortal book that the linguistic and intellectual unity of the Arab countries continues. It is also due to the Qur’an that we are today able to read Arabic literature across sixteen or seventeen centuries, from the pre-Islamic era up to the present.25
S. Al-Ḥuṣarī said:
It must be noted that having become the common language in such a vast area, Arabic went through hard times over long centuries because of the political fragmentation, intellectual and social stagnation, and cultural backwardness the Arab world had suffered. These factors could have led to the weakening of material and moral ties between Arab countries, and would have opened the way for the dominance of local dialects. Indeed, Arabic was exposed to the risk of complete disintegration and branching into numerous languages that would differ greatly so as to make it impossible for their respective native speakers to communicate. This is exactly what happened to Latin...
Needless to say, had this happened, the Arabs would have become a host of different nations, and there would have been nothing worth calling Arab nationalism...
It was the Qur’an that stood as an impregnable barrier preventing such great risks. It was able to prevent such fragmentation because it is Arabic and because Islam makes it a duty of all Muslim men and women to memorise some of its verses to read several times a day in prayer.26
1.5 The Qur’an and the Failure of the Call to use Dialects
We may say briefly that the calls for replacing Arabic with local dialects, which are well documented by Dr Naffoosah Zakariyya,27 will always end in complete failure. This is by no means a casual prediction, for history shows that classical Arabic is immune to disintegration and withering away. The Qur’an remains intact, declaring that its language will be everlasting, just as the Qur’an is everlasting by God’s guarantee. He says: ‘It is We Ourselves who have bestowed this reminder from on high, and it is We who shall preserve it intact, (15: 9).
God’s undertaking to preserve the Qur’an, as His final message of religion, implies an undertaking to keep Arabic immune from disintegration and disappearance. Just as the Qur’an remains, so does its honoured language remain. There will not come a time when Arabic will be a dead or historical language, or when its understanding and usage will be limited to an elite or need an interpreter. By virtue of God’s guarantee, Arabic will remain the language of millions of people. We need only to remember that God has made the Qur’an easy to understand, as He says: ‘We have made the Qur’an easy to bear in mind: will anyone take heed?’ (54: 17).
We have no doubt whatsoever that classical Arabic will always win against all dialects in Arab countries. This is a foregone conclusion that does not require much deliberation. Some writers, such as Saeed Aql and Lewis Awad, have called for the adoption of local dialects as a written language. Such calls are made despite the failure of long cultural imperialism in Muslim countries like Algeria. Hence, we look at such calls as having ulterior motives, aiming ultimately