ARABIC AND ITS IMPORTANCE

Arabic is the language that is broadly spoken in most of the Middle East and North Africa countries, the area which is known today as the Arab world. Arabic belongs originally to a Semitic family of languages, which includes Hebrew and Aramaic. This family is known of its history-recording for thousands of years, building one of the most extensive and oldest history archives known to man. Evolving to its present form, Arabic language was almost restrained to the Arabian Peninsula. It was only a century after the death of prophet Mohamad1 that Arabic has become the official language of a world empire stretched from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the borders of China to the east. For centuries, Arabic was conceded the language of science. It did not only contribute in the development of today’s basis of science but also helped in spreading knowledge from different civilizations2. Moreover, many other cultures used the Arabic calligraphy to write their own languages, as in the case of Urdu and Persian. Today, with the weakness of Muslim civilization3, the spread of Arabic usage decreased. The population of Arabic mother tong is only within two hundred million worldwide. Even within the Arab world, the language lost a lot of its popularity, most of the research is now conducted in either English or French. It was only within a century ago where many Muslim countries changed their calligraphy from Arabic letters into Latin, as in the case of Turkey, some South East Asian4, and Black African5 Countries. In spite of all this, Arabic is still internationally ranked in sixth position. That can only be due to the fact of being a language for a growing religion6, of almost one and half billion people around the world, and being the language of the non changing book, the Holy Qur’an.

Some of the Sources:
http://www.indiana.edu/~arabic/arabic_history.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_language
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1 A prophet sent by God to deliver the message of Islam.
2 Documenting knowledge from different cultures (china, Indian Subcontinent, Greeks, Persian, Byzantine).
3 Muslims conceder the last few centuries to be a fall back to the Muslim civilization due to the behavior of Muslims from drifting from their original teaching that promotes knowledge and science.
4 For example: (Indonesia, Malaysia, Fatan(part of Thiland).
5 For example: (Nigeria)
6 In spite of the Fastest Growing religion