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A Grammar of Standard Classical Arabic
An online textbook for learning Arabic
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 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 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.
Regarding the title of this book: the Arab grammarians were describing the Arabic language, 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 describing the dialectal variation of Classical Arabic, a standard variety emerged and gained prevalence. Thenceforth, virtually all texts that were composed 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.
While the grammar that we cover in this book is of sca, the vocabulary may include legitimate post-classical words and meanings. But we stop short of dealing with Modern Standard Arabic (msa). 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 can put the grammar of this definition of msa at odds with the grammar of sca.
This book is a learning or teaching grammar, as opposed to being strictly a reference grammar. Therefore, generally, topics are covered, and examples are given, in a manner that assumes an understanding of only preceding content. We have, however, generally tried to origanize 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.
It may also be appropriate to inform the reader that we chose to present a subset, and sometimes 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.
Technical matters
- This book is produced using the Quarto authoring and publishing framework and set in the Charis, Vazirmatn, 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.
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