A festival in France is celebrating and highlighting the Arabic language’s contribution to global knowledge, arts and culture, a major language that is being taught less than most of the others, and is wrongly viewed as dangerous by some.
After 15 years of painstaking research, a German academic has amassed compelling evidence on the importance of Arabic as an international language.
From his study of more than 7,000 living languages, Prof Ulrich Ammon, a linguistics specialist at Dusseldorf University, calculated that Arabic was spoken in 60 countries.
He says that more people – 467 million – use Arabic than all others except, in order, Chinese, English and a combination of Hindu and Urdu, which have common roots.
As a week-long festival to celebrate a “great living language” begins today in Paris, the organisers say that these findings are all the more remarkable because Arabic, which the United Nations recognises as one of its six official languages, is taught less than of most of the others.
There is another complication identified by the French-Lebanese former diplomat Nada Yafi, director of the language centre at the Arab World Institute, where the event is being held.
“There are still people who somehow see Arabic as in some ways dangerous,” says Ms Yafi, a former French ambassador to Kuwait.
“They are making what is called in French an amalgam, wrongly confusing different themes – in this case language with politics and an international climate that of course includes terrorism.
“So Arabic is suffering a form of collateral damage. But this really is preposterous because a language is neither dangerous nor, in itself, good or bad. It is a means of communication for human beings.”
Jack Lang, the institute’s president and a veteran of French politics, describes the Fete de la Langue Arabe as “a wonderful opportunity to highlight the key role of this great language in knowledge, culture and art”.
He says: “These days, in France, we speak Arabic without even knowing it.”
How many people studying or referring to algebra, Mr Lang wonders, are aware that the word is a Latin variation of the Arabic Al Jabr, owing its existence to an eighth century Arab mathematician, Mohammed Al Khwarizmi, who was thought to have been born in 780 in what is now Baghdad.
“I think the festival will show how Arabic belongs, with all its cultural richness, to our common heritage rather than being the preserve of just some,” he says.
Mr Lang, whose French government roles included spells as minister of culture and minister of education, rejects attempts to portray Arabic in negative terms, almost as a language of terrorism.
“Never forget that the young people sent to commit these crimes are often completely ignorant of the Arab language and the Quran. Daesh exploits this ignorance to convince people to perpetrate acts of terrorism,” he says.
“It is through culture, science and education that we can build a force to counter the fanatics.”
The institute provides an ideal setting for the festival, which will use films, music and discussions to showcase the social, cultural and professional reach of the Arabic language.
Officially opened in 1987 by Francois Mitterrand, the socialist president of France at the time, the building dominates a square named after Morocco’s late King Mohammed V. It is no more than a 15-minute walk from the Grand Mosque of Paris, also in the fifth arrondissement on the city’s Left Bank.
Jean Nouvel’s award-winning, luminous design reflects French and Arab architectural traditions.
One facade turns north towards the heart of Paris while another, facing south, has 240 mashrabiyas, windows with metal “eyes” that dilate according to outdoor light.
Although Mr Mitterrand championed the institute as part of his legacy – French presidents like to ensure that their time in office is remembered for “grand projects” – it more accurately expanded on the dream of his centre-right predecessor, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, who worked with Arab League countries to plan the centre as a means of improving Franco-Arab relations.
Today, the Arab World Institute has an established, positive place in France’s often discordant cultural and ethnic mix.
The Arabic language festival is one of a number of significant events to be held there. One current exhibition, on the jewels and fineries of the Maghreb, was due to run for seven months until August but was extended until the new year.
Each year, between 1,500 and 2,000 people of all ages and backgrounds attend its language classes. They have included civil servants who were about to be posted to diplomatic missions in Arab-speaking countries, and businessmen and professionals whose work requires some familiarity with Arabic.
The language centre’s mission neatly echoes a saying of the late Nelson Mandela, the leading anti-apartheid campaigner who served as South Africa’s first black president: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.”
It also complements the analysis of the British Council, a British government-funded cultural and educational body, when it produced a report describing Arabic as being more important to Britain’s future than any language except Spanish. It called for much more to be done to ensure that Arabic is taught in schools and universities.
“Our courses provide tuition in a modern, standard Arabic that is understood in all Arab countries. It lies somewhere between colloquial and classical Arabic,” Ms Yafi says.
“In the past, the language has too often been taught in a very traditionalist, even tedious way. We approach it very much as a living language.”
Because France’s secular laws forbid questions about faith when census are conducted, estimates of the number of Muslims in the country vary significantly.
The figure is widely thought to be between 4 million and 7 million, representing Europe’s largest Muslim community. Most have origins in France’s Arabic-speaking former North African and sub-Saharan colonies.
Even in this respect, however, Ms Yafi cautions against making links. The programme for the Fete de la Langue Arabe highlights her comment: “Arabic travels far beyond the borders of a religion or one region.
“We find Arabic spoken in parts of Latin America, many areas of Africa, in the West and beyond. But this has nothing to do with religion. First and foremost, it is a tool of communication.”
The festival will trace Arabic's links to ancient Greek civilisation, and to science and the arts. From a more modern, troubled world, the director Ann Paq will tonight attend a screening of her documentary, Obliterated Families, which tells the stories of residents of Gaza whose lives suffered painful upheavals after the Israeli military offensive in 2014.
The prominent Arab speakers taking part in three seminars will include Marwan Lahoud, the Lebanese-born head of strategy and marketing for the aviation giant Airbus.
Next Saturday, the eve of the festival’s closing day, the French disc jockey and composer Malik Berki presents Kalam Amsiyoum, an intriguing melange of ancient and contemporary Arabic performing arts with an ensemble that includes a Kuwaiti dance team, a French-Algerian rapper, a French-Moroccan lute player and a Palestinian musical duo.
For the institute, the event serves as an extension of – as well as culminating in – the World Arabic Language Day, to be observed by Unesco next Sunday.
“Far away from the polemic, Arabic is a language of the world,” says Ms Yafi.
“The festival will remind us that far from being simply one community’s language, Arabic is the expression of a culture of universal scope at the heart of the transmission of knowledge throughout history and, like all great living languages, a language of the future for young people.”
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