Literacy has been an essential part of Islam since its inception (Lydon 2010). Indeed, the first verse that was revealed of the Holy Quran demanded that the Prophet Muhammad and the first chapter revealed was called al-Qalamor the Pen (Lydon 2010). This dispositioned Muslims to seek knowledge even if it were located in China. The words of Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, who advised Muslims to learn Arabic so as to sharpen their wisdom, resonate strongly with this Islamic disposition and indicate that the invocations of Allah echoed through the young and growing Muslim nation. In fact, the efforts of Muslims to transform these entreaties to read and to learn Arabic into a way of life fashioned a significant body of written works that covered scientific, literary and practical topics (Lydon 2010).In this regard, Lydon (2010) identifies that Muslim leaders, were quite distinguished from the leaders of other faith groups because they were devoted to equipping Muslims with Arabic, especially the recently converted. This ought to be seen as the earliest grassroots literacy campaign, which solidified Arabic's position as a Lingua Franca of the Muslim civilization for hundreds of years (Lydon 2010). Consequently, Lydon (2010) notes that while Islam developed a distinct pedagogical framework, its mission to promote Arabic literacy led to an inherent flexibility that resulted in the development of various teaching methods. For example, the renowned scholar Ibn Khaldun notes that in Muslim Spain, West Africa and Morocco students acquired Arabic literacy through the mastering of whole words whereas in Cairo and other parts of the Middle East this was done by learning individual letters of the alphabet (Lydon 2010).This is highly telling of the Muslims' active attempts to optimize acquisition and their commitment to entrenching knowledge of Arabic. Accordingly, the Muslim civilization was at the cutting-edge of many linguistic sciences such as, phonology, lexicography and grammar. Indeed, Arabic linguistics became an established science that attracted innovation and scholarship by the 800s CE (Meri 2006). Corpus collection, error analysis, random data collection and field research were common pursuits among the linguistic community of Al-Khalil Ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi, a lexicographer and philologist extraordinaire, best known for his codex Kitab al-'Ayn (Meri 2006).Naturally, with such attentions to advancing Arabic prevalent in the society, the early Muslims developed a curriculum for Arabic. Hall and Stewart (2010) surveyed West African Islamic manuscripts from 1625 - 1925. It was concluded that the presence and absence of particular texts in various collections was strongly indicative of an empirical process of text selection that determined which texts were to be studied by students and which were more suited for scholars. Accordingly, these texts constituted an essential curriculum for Arabic, in which lexicography, syntax, phonology, rhetoric and prosody were set subjects with recommended readings associated with them.Unfortunately, the apple seems to have fallen very far from the tree. Literacy in some parts of the Arabic-speaking Muslim world is as low as 40% (Hammoud 2006). In fact, the most literate Arabic-speaking nations toy with an 80% literacy rate (Hammoud 2006). However, more importantly, it would seem that non-Arabic speaking Muslim societies are far less inclined to learn Arabic today than in the past. For although, some would argue that the preservation of Islam is dependent on the continued promotion of Arabic (Ahmad 2001), the reality is that Arabic has lost its position as a Muslim lingua Franca with the rise of the Ottoman Empire. The position of Arabic among Muslims has been further weakened by various factors, such as the rise of English as the new lingua Franca; the huge translation movements of religious Arabic texts; the rise of nationalism and globalism. As such the question about the place of Arabic in Islamic Education in the non-Arab Islamic world is a pressing one. …