Work in progress.
Not ready for study.

Preface

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 is a multitude of 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 at a beginner’s level so that, together with a study of the appropriate expositional texts, they are one step closer to understanding the primary texts in their original language. We hope that this will, if Allāh wills, make them feel more connected to the primary texts and their teachings. Furthermore, they can be empowered to study the vast body of Arabic Islāmic literature.

This book is a learning grammar and not a reference grammar. So, in the initial chapters, topics are introduced at only a basic level, without treating them exhaustively, before moving on to the next topic. That notwithstanding, past the first few chapters, we have generally tried to group content meaningfully for convenient reference during learning. In addition, since this is a beginner’s textbook, only the more common usages are explained.

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 without an instructor. The target learner is someone who has not been exposed to grammatical terminology like inflection, case, mood, etc. While terminology is necessary for a rigorous non-immersive learning of language, we have tried to steer away from Latin-based terms like accusative and jussive. Such terms, when first encountered by an uninitiated learner, may deter from proceeding further. (Learning a language can be hard enough without getting the feeling that your grammar book is accusing you of something!) 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. 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 in the appendix which maps the grammatical terminology used in this book to other, established, Latin-based and Arabic-based counterparts.

It may also be appropriate to inform the reader that we chose to present a simplified version of Arabic grammar. As such, the grammar presented here may not be entirely consistent with the comprehensive and harmonious framework developed by the Arab grammarians. We chose this approach because we felt that exposing the beginner to complex grammatical details at this stage would be more of a hindrance than a help in learning the language.

This book is a currently work in progress and is produced with the R bookdown package. The code and text for volume 1 are open-sourced and developed at github.com/adamiturabi/arabic-tutorial-book. The typeset output of volume 1 is published at adamiturabi.github.io/arabic-tutorial-book/.

the authors