Dr. Ali Al-Ghamdi's third essay “Muslims and the Arabic language" is truly thought-provoking. Arabic is the language of the Qur'an because God revealed the Divine book to the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) in Arabic. Every Muslim is to recite (in Arabic) from the Qur'an during prayer. And wherever the Arabs went, they taught Arabic so people could read the Qur'an. However, there are many countries with Muslim populations, such as Indonesia, where children and adults communicate in their own vernacular but learn to recite from memory the Qur'an in Arabic, which they don't understand. This reminds me of the Torah which was in Hebrew. About 200 BC, the Hebrew Torah was translated into Greek for the Jewish diaspora in Alexandria, Egypt, because most of them could not read Hebrew as Greek was the lingua franca. Christians used this Greek scripture, the Septuagint, to spread Christianity throughout the Greco/Roman Empire. About 400 AD, Pope Damasus decided to have the Septuagint translated into Latin so that every learned person in the Roman Empire – with so many different languages – could read the Bible in Latin, the lingua franca of the empire. The Vulgate, the Latin translation, served the Roman Catholic Church for many centuries until Martin Luther and other Protestants decided to have it translated into their own languages to help the common people read it. The King James Bible, printed in England, became the most popular English Bible and was taken to far away places where the British settled and built places of worship. And since 1965, the Second Vatican Council, Roman Catholic churches has stopped insisting on the use of Latin during the Mass and instead encouraged teaching the congregations in their own languages. For them, spreading the Christian message was more important than a language that was no longer in use. Not everyone is proficient in learning foreign languages. Today, if someone learns Arabic, Chinese or Japanese it is to give them an edge in commerce, although English is the lingua franca of the 21st century. Olga Pitcairn, US
