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Arabic language

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
Major Semitic language of the Hamito-Semitic family of West Asia and North Africa, originating among the Arabs of the Arabian peninsula. It is spoken today by about 120 million people in the Middle East and North Africa. Arabic script is written from right to left. The language has spread by way of conquest and trade as far west as Morocco and as far east as Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and is also spoken in Arab communities scattered across the Western hemisphere. Forms of colloquial Arabic vary in the countries where it is the dominant language: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Arabic is also a language of religious and cultural significance in such other countries as Bangladesh, India, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, and Somalia. Arabic-speaking communities are growing in the USA and the West Indies. Consonantal roots A feature of the language…
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Full text Article Arabic language

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Ancient Semitic language whose dialects are spoken throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Though Arabic words and proper names are found in Aramaic inscriptions, abundant documentation of the language begins only with the rise of Islam , whose main texts are written in Arabic. Grammarians from…
| 151 words
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Full text Article Arabic Language

From Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World
© GALI TIBBON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Rare Fragment of a...
A people with the name of Aribi is first mentioned in a cuneiform inscription from the eighth century BCE , where it denotes a nomadic tribe. In later centuries tribes named q rb are mentioned in several sources, for instance in the Torah (Jeremiah 25:24). It is not known what kind of language these…
| 4,520 words , 1 image
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Full text Article Arabic language

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
Major Semitic language of the Hamito-Semitic family of West Asia and North Africa, originating among the Arabs of the Arabian peninsula. It is spoken today by about 120 million people in the Middle East and North Africa. Arabic script is written from right to left. The language has spread by way of…
| 790 words
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Full text Article Arabic language and literature

From Encyclopedia of World Religions: Encyclopedia of Islam
Muslims consider Arabic a sacred language because...
Arabic is the fifth or sixth most widely spoken language in the world today, after Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi, and possibly Bengali. It is the official language of 21 modern countries; nearly 160 million Arabic speakers in the Middle East and abroad use it as their mother tongue. More…
| 933 words , 1 image
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Full text Article Suyuti, Al- (848/1445–911/1505)

From Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World
Al-Suyuti was an Egyptian scholar best known for his prolific writings on prophetic tradition (hadith), Islamic jurisprudence ( fiqh) , Qur'anic studies, Arabic language, and related subjects. The son of a minor religious scholar, he was trained in the Sunni religious disciplines and held several…
| 333 words
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Full text Article Shammas, Anton

From Encyclopedia of the Palestinians
(b. 1950–) Palestinian-American writer Anton Shammas pursued his studies in art history and English and Arabic literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1968 to 1972. He was an editor of the Jerusalem literary journal al-Sharq from 1970 to 1975 and later was a producer of Arabic-language…
| 205 words
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Full text Article Arabic languages

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
members of the West Semitic group of the Semitic subdivision of the Afroasiatic family of languages (see Afroasiatic languages ). The Arabic languages comprise North Arabic (or simply Arabic) and South Arabian (or Himyaritic or South Arabic); South Arabian differs sufficiently from North Arabic to…
| 694 words
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Full text Article al-Sakakini, Khalil

From Encyclopedia of the Palestinians
(b. 1878–d. 1953) Palestinian educator Khalil al-Sakakini was born in Jerusalem in 1878. His career began during the late Ottoman period , when he taught school in Jerusalem . In the wake of the Young Turk coup in 1908, he broke new educational ground by establishing the Dusturiyya [Constitutional] …
| 344 words
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Full text Article ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
(born 646/647, Medina, Arabia—died Oct. 705, Damascus) Fifth caliph (685–705) of the Umayyad dynasty . ʿAbd al-Malik was forced to flee his hometown of Medina during an uprising against Umayyad rule in 683. Two years later he succeeded to the caliphate and—with the help of his infamous lieutenant…
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(born 915, Al-Kūfah, Iraq—died Sept. 23, 965, near Dayr al-ʿĀqūl) Poet regarded by many as the greatest in the Arabic language. Al-Mutanabbī received an education, unusual for his time and rank, because of his poetic talent. He lived among the Bedouin and, claiming to be a prophet, led an…
| 162 words
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