On Dec. 18th, International Arabic Language Day is happening. What makes this language special and actually unique in many ways, rather than the uniqueness of many other languages?

Primarily, Arabic is the 5th most spoken language, after Chinese, Spanish, English and Hindi. It is spoken by people of 26 countries in the Arab world, in addition to those who have specified it to be their second or third official languages, where their number altogether reaches 30, along with a huge population of Arab world living outside their boundaries well settled in the interiors of Europe, Africa and American continents, in addition to Asia and of course Australia, making it is known to read and write for 400 million people around the globe.

The UNESCO approved celebrating Dec. 18th as International Arabic Day since 2010, commemorating the approval of the UN of Arabic as one of its six official languages happened on 18th December of 1970, making almost every single process of the United Nations available and can be executed and entertained in Arabic too, along with just five of the whole languages of the existing human race.

Arabic writings have been known to have existed since the 5th and 6th centuries AD, certainly before the revelation of Quran and the explaining Hadees and other Islamic literature which amounts a large volume of world literature in common and literature of different genres in Arabic, all of which subsequently lead to the flourishing of the language dramatically and epically, being crossing the time machine and travelling through the continents on the shoulders of Muslim traders and conquests.

It is one of the oldest existing and fully functioning languages in human history as a whole, and the only unaltered and fully functioning language of the Semitic languages even today. Quran unequivocally declares that it will never be withdrawn from this earth, invalidated or effectively altered by any means by anyone in any point time, which in effect adds up to the surety and stability to Arabic, the language in which it was revealed. Interestingly, many other languages in the world use Arabic script as their script too, like Urdu, Persian, Kurdish, Malawi etc. Interestingly, many other languages in the world use Arabic script as their script too, like Urdu, Persian, Kurdish, Malawi etc.

Yes, Arabic is written from right to left, having a super exclusive peculiarity that the letters are not only assembled together which is very much common for languages, but are touched and amalgamated one to another too in a word, except a very few letters which will be seen together only and not amalgamated. It has 28 letters, and a numbering system of its own which should not be mistaken with Arabic numerals for they are the normal digits we use worldwide, and they are more specifically known as Indo-Arabic numerals.

Morphological and syntaxial peculiarities of Arabic

Arabic language is a derivative language, as all the aspects of human life or attributes of different situations are derived of one single root! Yes, derivation is a common phenomenon in languages, but never to the scale and multitude of Arabic, as the verb one, verb two and verb three, subject, object, all of them being with both active voice and passive voice are derived out of the same root, without changing the root letters. This is in addition to that the same root gives birth to the singular, dual and plural nouns; as well as to singular, dual and plural verbs with all of them applied in past, present cum future tenses and the command or request form – another exclusive significance of Arabic – using the derivatives of their same single mother, certainly without any change of root letters or requiring any auxiliary or preposition to execute or function.

Another exquisiteness of Arabic is that any attribute by or to anyone in the language will be understood, to as how many number of persons it is attributed to and to whom it was; whether a man or woman, without adding a single word after or before! This is along with the scope and capability of the verbs in Arabic to employ emphasis on a topic or about a person or a random noun; or to employ a command or request to a second person among the parts of speech, of course irrespective of whether it was by the subject, or addressed to or about the object no matter he/she/it was singular, dual or plural; all can be understood from one single word – both verb and noun!!

The whole Arabic language of this universe can be divided into just three – a feature most of the languages of the past and the present don’t have, and they are – The noun, verb and particle. The whole nouns of the world, both Arabic and non-Arabic, persons, places, incidents, calendrical dates, weeks and years and what not, with all its derivates from number of persons included in doing an action or having the properties of an attribute made to the differentiation of whether it is subject or object – as both are derived from the same root – all are part of the Noun compartment. The whole verbs, with all its derivates including the attributes for number of subjects included, whether happened in past, present or future; or it was a command or request form, differentiation into active and passive voices, and what else; all part of the Verb. By this, the stock register of the whole of Arabic language has come to a close, except the particles, which are all the prepositions, conjunctions, letters used to indicate prohibitions, emphasis, wishing, interrogatives, letters of attributes meted out to second person etc. all form the the third compartment – the Particle.

Another fabulous feature of Arabic is that not only the different aspects of one single verb or noun all of them are included and integrated into one single term itself, but beyond this all that an attribute of emphasis, the verb, the subject, the object and a second object; all five properties are included within one single word!! this is what we see in the word “La araynaakkahum” in chapter Muhammed, verse no. 30 in Quran. This can be understood having in mind that four out of five properties being in one single term – subject, verb, object and an attribute of emphasis, prohibition or wish, like that – of the previous example are not rare in Quran.

The cultural heritage of Arabic

Yes, Arabic is credited for most of the knowledge we know and yet to seek today from America to Japan and Norway to Australia, with most of their origins being facilitated for dissemination through its translation from Greek, Roman, Sanskrit and other civilizational footprints into Arabic at the House of Wisdom or Baithul Hikma (Britanica), and then by the Arabs themselves and others into Latin, making the Europeans read and learn in their own language, paving the way for amounting to a situation in the Colonial Europe that the world traveled to there to acquire knowledge, and quality education at least.

It’s not a secret today that the great icon of surgery, Abul Kasim Al Zahrawy or Albucasis had inscribed a large set among a staggering number of surgical equipment and tools with its exact properties and usages in his books. This is along with his credit of performing the first Thyroidectomy, all making him called ‘Father of Operative surgery’ (US Nat. Library of Medicine). Ibn Sina’s (or Avicenna) the Canon of Medicine was a principal guideline in the European medical classrooms 17th century (Library of Congress). Ibn Khaldun is known as the father of hysterography (Academia), Economics (Georgetown University) and Sociology (Rehan Shaikh on Slideshare). The book of Optics by Ibn Al-Haytham or Al-Hazen is a magnificent work of all time in that branch of science (nature), also besides his invention of ‘Qumra’, the ancient form of Camera.

Maryam Al-Astarlaby the woman behind the 10th century Astrolabes, who took the science of Astrolabes to the next level (TRT World), Abbas Ibn Firnas’s attempt to fly, and his contributions to Aviation (Researchgate) many hundred years before the Wright brothers, Al-Khwarizmi the founder of Algebra (Vedic Math School), Fathima al-Fihri who established the first Degree awarding continually operating oldest university in the world, the Qarawiyyin University in Fez, Morocco (University website), Ibn an-Nafis who is the first to describe the Pulmonary circulation, and is considered as the father of Circulatory Physiology (US National Library of Medicine.), and a Jurist of the Shafi’i school of Jurisprudence as well and so on and on…all contribute to the great Golden age of Islam that science and available technology flourished and guided the world yet to come, being all of which was written in Arabic itself.

The chronicles written in Arabic of the long list of Arab travelers are a treasure of the knowledge world and a gem of the world of voyages and travels (University of Chicago Press), like those of Ibn Batuta, Al-Masoody, Abdurrazaq, Sulaiman etc.

I leave the unending saga of the historically unparalleled contributions of Muslims in particular and the Abbasid period in general, all of which were totally handled in Arabic, to be explored more and more by the readers and seekers of knowledge, in order to create better understanding of that language, the people who speak it, the religion of Islam for which this language is fundamental and integral, and the world that accommodates Arabic as well as those who know how to speak and write it even though they are not the native of Arab world.

Abdulhadi Farooqi