L'étude de l'arabe

Abstract

Arabic is an important language in several respects, and there is a long history of contact between Muslims and the non-Muslim West which justifies the study of Islamic culture. The relations between the two are briefly described, as a background to the consequences of 19th century imperialism. The paper then examines the dual linguistic status of Arabic, as a language both of revelation and everyday intercourse. The unique rôle of the Islamic Adam as the first speaker of Arabic leads to a discussion of the power vested in Arabic by virtue of its religious function. To maintain its power an educational system was developed to train scholars to preserve the enormous archive of literary material which records the history of Islam and guarantees its survival, increasing the dependence of Islam upon Arabic. However, the religion does not suppress individuality, and the paper argues that Arabic literature is full of humanist observations on the strengths and weakness of mankind, all of us sons of Adam. The current situation of Classical Arabic is then reviewed: because it cannot change there cannot be (or not yet) a Reformation of the kind which happened in Europe, although contemporary written Arabic is gradually drifting away from the Classical standard. But the written language retains its power as the final recourse for all Islamic matters, and is now also playing a political rôle at the UN. Some recent studies of the use of Arabic in various domains are briefly mentioned, and the influence of Western linguistics on the teaching of Arabic, together with a fleeting glance at the effect of computers on the way the Qur’an is now experienced. The paper concludes by asking whether dialogue is possible or even necessary, with a negative answer. Instead a humanist approach is recommended, one in which Arabic culture is studied not for its intellectual challenges alone, but to enable us to recognise fellow sons of Adam across the borders of language.