What others said about Arabic Read in the original
Bearing witness to Islam and Arabic in a hostile context, speaking of Arabic as the language of all Muslims:
“…It has so far taken hold of the whole world that, were you to divide all the inhabited earth into three equal parts, scarcely one part could be found outside it. […] so that there is today no language, nor was there ever one, that has a place in so many parts of the world. I say nothing of the kinds of learning that the authors of that language have treated most brilliantly: to them we owe astronomy and the practice of medicine.”
Guillaume Postel
1510–1581
French scholar, the first to teach Arabic at the Collège royal in Paris, who travelled to Istanbul; his Arabic grammar was among the first printed in Europe.
Original text — Latin
…usque adeo orbem totum occupavit, ut si trifariam inque tria aequalia totam habitabilem dividas, vix una pars extra hanc possit reperiri. […] ut nulla sit hodie lingua, nec usquam olim fuerit, quae in tot orbis partibus locum habeat. Taceo genera disciplinarum praeclarissime ab illius linguae authoribus pertractata. Astrologiam, & rei medicae praxim illis debemus.
In Arabic
…وقد بلغ من امتدادها في الأرض أنّك لو قسمتَ المعمورة ثلاثة أقسامٍ متساوية، لما كدتَ تجد قسماً يخلو منها. […] حتّى لا تكون اليومَ لغةٌ، ولم تكن قطُّ من قبلُ لغةٌ، لها مكانٌ في هذا العدد من أقطار الأرض. وأسكتُ عن ضروب العلوم التي عالجها مؤلّفو هذه اللغة أحسنَ معالجة؛ فإنّا مدينون لهم بعلم النجوم وبالطبّ في ممارسته.
Source
Grammatica Arabica, Praefatio, leaf D ii, Parisiis: apud Petrum Gromorsum, c. 1538–1540
The English translation is Voice of Arabic's, made from the original.
Checked against the page images of the archive.org scan. The context is hostile: the omitted passage lists the lands Islam reached in polemical terms, so this is the testimony of an adversary. Both translations are ours.
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