My name is Zeba. I am a Loyola student majoring in Biology with a minor in Arabic and Islamic World Studies. I have been learning Arabic at Loyola with ustaadha Sawsan Abbadi for a number of reasons. I think communication is very important and often one of the main hindrances to open communication is language. The Arabic language especially interesting to me because of my background as a Muslim. The Islamic holy book, the Qur’an, is written in formal Arabic. Learning the language is helping me to better read and understand the book.
For example, I was recently looking up verse 19 from Surat al-A’raf. The translation of this verse reads:
And “O Adam, dwell, you and your wife, in Paradise and eat from wherever you will but do not approach this tree, lest you be among the wrongdoers.”
I wanted to see if the original Arabic script actually used the word that I learned for “tree” in class. Turns out that they did! I found that I could recognize a lot of the words from the verse without the help of the translation: askun (live), anta (you), zowjuka (your wife), hadhihi (this), and shajara (tree). I could also see the roots of words that I learned in class within some of the words that I could not identify right away.
I was extremely excited to know just how much only 2 semesters of Arabic with Professor Sawsan have already helped me.