The Qur’an An Abiding Wonder
The Qur’an —The Prophet’s Miracle
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mind – to produce, in defiance of the government of
the day, works of great literary and academic
excellence.
Napoleon’s entry into Cairo (1798) ushered in the
age of the printing press in the Middle East.
Education became the order of the day. The Arabic
language was invested with new life. Yet the
centuries of battering that Arabic had received was
bound to leave its mark: instead of pure Arabic, a
mixture of Arabic and Turkish had been taken as
the official language in Egypt and Syria.
The situation changed again with the British
occupation of Egypt in 1882. They opposed Arabic
with all their strength, prescribing compulsory
English in schools and eliminating other languages
from syllabi. The French did the same in areas over
which they had gained control. With the colonial
powers forcing their subjects to learn their
languages, Arabic lived in the shadow of English
and French for over one hundred years. Yet it still
remained in its original form. Certainly, it
assimilated new words – the word “dabbaba”
meaning tank, for instance, which had previously
