Not ready for study.
A Grammar of Standard Classical Arabic
An online textbook for learning Arabic
Preface
THIS BOOK IS A WORK IN PROGRESS. IT IS INCOMPLETE AND MAY HAVE TYPOGRAPHICAL AND OTHER ERRORS. IT IS NOT YET READY TO BE STUDIED FROM.
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
The primary texts of Islām (the Qurʾān and the Ḥadīt͡h) are in Arabic. So too is much of its scholarly literature. However, there are many Muslims for whom Arabic is not a native language, yet who are familiar enough with English to study textbooks written in this language. The goal of this book is to help them learn Arabic so that, together with a study of the appropriate expositional texts, they can start to understand the primary texts in their original language. We hope that this will, if Allāh wills, make them more connected to the primary texts and their teachings. Furthermore, they can be empowered to study the vast body of Arabic Islāmic literature.
Regarding the title of this book: the Arabic grammarians were describing the Arabic language of the time of the Prophet ﷺ and his companions. They were doing this by drawing upon a corpus that included transmitted texts and the dialectal speech of informants. We term the language of this corpus to be Classical Arabic, because of its considerable volume and its agreed upon significance and eloquence. In the process of the grammarians’ sifting through and describing the dialectal variation of Classical Arabic, a standard variety emerged and gained prevalence. Thenceforth, virtually all composed texts attempted to conform to the grammar of this standard. And it is the grammar of this Standard Classical Arabic (sca) that is the subject of this work.
The term Classical Arabic has been used by others to refer to the later (non-native) use of what we call sca. They may then refer to the language of the grammarians’ corpus as pre-classical Arabic or Old Arabic. Our choice of terminology is based on the contention that sca is but a variety of Classical Arabic, even if it was standardized toward the end or after the native era of Classical Arabic, and used by non-native Classical Arabic speakers.
sca, as a standard, is not precisely defined in its entirety. There is a core, which is more or less well-defined, but there are also fringe dialectal, and rare variations that are occasionally used in some texts. We cover some of these variations in this book, depending on how likely we deem the learner to come across them.
We also include in this book post-classical vocabulary, even though it is not, strictly speaking, sca. This is because one of our goals is to enable the reader to engage with Islāmic texts. However, we stop short of dealing with Modern Standard Arabic (msa). This is because the preponderance of its modern vocabulary would detract from the main focus of this book. And also because Western grammar works which focus on msa tend to use modern texts as a corpus to re-describe and re-codify its grammar. Which is fine, as a methodology, because their goal is to understand the meaning of msa texts. If we were to include msa, as thus defined, in this book, then we would have to explain the conflicts between it and sca. Which is something we are not ready, or equipped, to deal with.
This book is a learning or teaching grammar, as opposed to being strictly a reference grammar. Therefore, whenever we were able to, we have tried to explain topics, and give examples, in a manner that assumes an understanding of only preceding content. We have, at the same time, generally tried to group content coherently for convenient reference during learning.
We have also aimed to make this a self-instruction textbook so that a diligent student should, if Allāh wills, be able to study it independently. The target learner is someone who has not been exposed to grammatical terminology beyond a grade school level. While terminology is necessary for a rigorous non-immersive learning of language, we have tried to steer away from Latin-based terms like accusative, jussive, etc. Such terms, when first encountered by an uninitiated learner, may deter him from proceeding further. So we have in some places translated the meaning of Arabic grammar terms to English. In other places, we have used established English grammar terms where the terms are basic enough. We have even, in places, invented terms where we deemed appropriate. We have also used some grammatical terminology from Arabic directly, usually in cases where our target learner may have already been exposed to them from Qurʾān recitation rules, or where the term is complex enough that creating a term specifically in English wouldn’t make it any simpler. The drawback to this non-standard approach, however, is that the student may not be able to immediately relate the terminology he has learned in this book to established terminology in other grammar textbooks. To remedy this to some extent, we provide a glossary which maps the grammatical terminology used in this book to other, established, Latin-based and Arabic-based counterparts.
Because this is an instructional textbook, we have generally avoided quoting verbatim when drawing material from cited sources, But we haven’t shied away from sticking close to the cited text when we felt we could not better its expression or organization for our purposes. Citations are absent for basic topics, and also where we were not able to find an exact reference for some point that we are trying to make. In any event, any errors that remain in this book are our own.
Technical matters
- This book is produced using the Quarto authoring and publishing framework and set in the Charis, Vazirmatn, Kitab, and Amiri typefaces.
- Unless otherwise indicated, translations from the Qurʾān are by Ṣaḥeeḥ International™, sourced from https://quran.com.
- Unless otherwise indicated, the numbering of Ḥadīt͡h is that used by https://sunnah.com.
- The page numbers for citations may vary across different editions and publishers. We have attempted to specify the edition that we are using in the references.
the authors