Working on your Arabic

I think most of us recognise the importance of the Arabic language as the language of the Islamic revival.

The reasons for this are obvious – being the language of the Qur’an, Hadith and Islamic sciences, no serious attempt at understanding this beautiful tradition can progress without a thorough knowledge of Arabic. For those people who believe translations will suffice, I would need another post, which won’t materialise due to the sparse numbers (alhamdulillah!) of those who think that the Arabic language is unimportant.

There may be some in the middle, of course, who think it’s not a priority. It certainly may be argued that under the current circumstances, it’s unwise to invest disproportional resources into Arabic and Islamic studies. In my view, there aren’t enough resources being invested in that direction to start with, but that would be a matter for discussion too.

Anyway, the main point of this post is to present some websites that have extremely useful lectures, and/or other Arabic learning resources.

For people who have no Arabic, I strongly recommend attending a course like the ones offered by the Ibn Jabal Institute, and then spending a full summer abroad (at least two months). This will give you a good start. I should warn you, however, that courses by the institute are extremely intensive, and need dedication. It’s also worth keeping in mind that the human faculties of picking up languages start to become blunter in one’s late twenties. I personally think that the earlier one starts, the better. I hope to teach my children as they grow up, for instance, mainly through conversation. When one is older, however, the best means is by going through an intensive grammar course.

During the course of a sound Arabic education, one should also be introduced to the Hans Wehr dictionary - one of the best dictionaries of modern Arabic, which differs from classical Arabic only slightly. The link above gives the fourth edition which has more than 200 more pages than the 3rd edition available in most Islamic bookshops.

This should allow one to use websites such as that of the very easy to understand Syrian scholar Ratib Nabulsi. In the Arabic section, there are links on the right to Khutbas, lessons in Aqida, and many other educational materials. These are available in mp3 format of his very clear and simple diction, and also as pdf/word files, so that you can follow him through his talks. I would strongly recommend people who’ve just done grammar to use these resources, as they will bring untold benefits!

Once you’ve done that for many months, you can look into other scholars, or just conventional Arabic television, which is generally a lot faster, and much more challenging. For instance, Aljazeera has a youtube channel you can use: www.youtube.com/aljazeerachannel.

There are also great scholars with websites such as Shaykh Dedew: www.dedew.net.

Good luck! وبالله التوفيق