About

Our emerging Arabic program helps Arabic learners at Loyola find connections between classroom learning experience and multiple investments of Arabic as applied to their own worlds. Students celebrate their ability to own their Arabic learning as it fits their needs and enjoy discovering opportunities in which Arabic helps them in diverse personal contexts.

Arabic and Qur’an

Posted on: October 1st, 2012 by sabbadi

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.