Classic Arabic is, for Muslims, the sacred language of Islam. In fact, the Koran would have been revealed to the prophet Mohammed in Classic Arabic, line by line, in an arc of time between 21 or 22 years, and in the definitive form, by God through the archangel Gabriel. This has produced in the course of history a passage from the language of the Koran  as an expression of the Divine Intelligence, and therefore untouchable, inimitable and untranslatable, to the Arabic language as an expression of perfection. Prof. Nadia Anghelescuis, lecturer at the University of Bucharest, in Romania, is trying to investigate how this identification came to be. And, the 24th of March, she held in Rome, at the Pontifical Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies (PISAI), a conference with the title “The Ancient Arabic Philologists before the Sacred Language”. The meeting is part of a cycle of conferences initiated by the PISAI to promote intercultural and interreligious dialogue between Christians and Muslims.     The professor, an expert in linguistics and Arab culture, affirmed that the ancient Arab authors, as many modern ones, retained that grammarians rendered the Arabic language literary, or better, contributed to giving it the form which was passed on to our days. Thus it was believed that their grammar reflected the language of the Koran, which was taught and has continued to be taught within and outside the Arab world. Then, there were the writers who rendered this language more malleable and capable of expressing everything which the evolution of society required of it to render. In the number of these writers, the professor added, were those philologists who contributed, in part, to the constitution of an intellectual language, and who recognized in the Arabic language the presence of the divinity.     Today, however, she explained, a linguistic debate is under way, which has involved many authors who would like a “deconsecration” of literary Arabic, affirming that the Koran is sacred and not the Arabic language. Moreover, in many areas of the “Non-Arab” Muslim world, everyday more often, criticisms are raised against the “ethnicization of Islam”, starting from the idea that a “sacred language” does not exist, as such, and Arabic is simply a vehicle of the sacred word. www.unigre.it 

Classic Arabic is, for Muslims, the sacred language of Islam. In fact, the Koran would have been revealed to the prophet Mohammed in Classic Arabic, line by line, in an arc of time between 21 or 22...leggi tutto