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Arabic in Cards

Arabic Beyond the Arabs

People who were not Arabs but wrote and lived in Arabic: Christians, Jews, and Muslims of other peoples.

22 cards
The Mozarabs A Cordoban who complained of Arabic Arabic names, Arabic dress

Why these cards?

Each card rests on a documented witness and quotes its source with the page. What we add from elsewhere is said on the card's page; names the print garbles are corrected in our text and kept as printed in the quotation.

Showing 22 of 22

The Mozarabs
A Spanish word that still records what Arabic did to those who spoke it
A Cordoban who complained of Arabic
The truest witness to the beauty of Arabic came from a man who feared it (854)
Arabic names, Arabic dress
Arabic was not only the language of books; it became the language of life
Two bishops who wrote in Arabic
Even the churchmen of al-Andalus needed Arabic to reach their flocks
"The meaning Jewish, the form Arabic"
The Jewish scholars of al-Andalus studied their own Hebrew in Arabic
Ibn Gabirol
An Arabic book whose original was lost, and which lived for centuries in Latin under a borrowed name
Judah Halevi and the Kuzari
The most famous defence of Judaism was written in Arabic
Maimonides and the Guide of the Perplexed
The greatest Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages wrote his major books in Arabic
Samuel ibn Naghrela
A Jewish vizier whose Arabic the writers of al-Andalus acknowledged
Habib the Slav writes in praise of his people
A Slav who wrote a book in Arabic answering those who denied his people's merit
Sibawayh, the Persian who wrote «al-Kitab»
A Persian from al-Bayda who became the master of Arabic grammar
Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ: Ruzbih, who carried Persian books into Arabic
Master of both tongues, eloquent in each
al-Zamakhshari: «I praise God that He made me one of the scholars of Arabic»
A Khwarazmian who opened his grammar by thanking God for Arabic
Ibn Jinni: «My learning among men is my lineage»
The son of a Byzantine slave who became one of the greatest masters of Arabic
al-Jawhari: from Farab in the land of the Turks to «al-Sihah»
«One of the wonders of the world»: from the land of the Turks, and a master of the Arabs' language
al-Farabi began with Arabic before philosophy
He reached Baghdad knowing many languages but Arabic, so he began with it
Avicenna: three years with the books of Arabic
Told he knew too little Arabic, the philosopher went back to it until he wrote a book on it
Mahmud al-Kashgari: a book on Turkish in Arabic
A Turk from Kashgar who explained his people's language in Arabic and dedicated the book to the caliph
Yahya ibn ʿAdi, a Christian who copied al-Tabari's Qur'an commentary twice by hand
A translator from Syriac into Arabic, and a copyist who never tired of the pen
The Copts: when Arabic became the language of Egypt and its Church
A Coptic bishop complains how few still know Coptic
Saadia of Fayyum: the Torah in Arabic
A Jewish scholar from the Fayyum who explained his people's scriptures and put them into Arabic
Ibn Ajurrum: a Berber who wrote the first grammar a student learns
The Ajurrumiyya: a short text from Fez that opened grammar to generations, east and west