Religion Compass 7/6 (2013): 191–200, 10.1111/rec3.12049 The Global Significance of Arabic Language and Literature 1 Carl W. Ernst * University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Abstract Though often identified with the Arabs and the Islamic religious tradition, Arabic language and literature has enjoyed widespread popularity for over a millennium among numerous different peoples, including not only Muslims but also Christians and Jews. This article explores a number of key examples that demonstrate the global impact of Arabic language and literature. What has been the cultural significance of Arabic language and literature for the world? Obviously, Arabic is central for language and literature in countries where Arabic is the dominant language, and Arabic also has a unique role for Muslims worldwide due to the religious importance of the Qur’an. But in this age of globalization, how can we understand the role of Arabic language and literature as it relates to the rest of the world? This is an important question because, as Sir Hamilton Gibb remarked, “Classical Arabic literature is the enduring monument of a civilization, not of a people.” 2 In other words, the Arabic language is not the exclusive property of the people known today as the Arabs, nor, indeed, is it the exclusive property of the Muslims; it is, instead, a civilization’s legacy for the world. In this discussion, I offer a brief commentary on aspects of Arabic language and literature that go beyond the standard curriculum of Islamic culture to embrace a global and even a cosmopolitan perspective. According to some estimates, in the year 2000, there were roughly 220 million native speakers of Arabic, but as many as 450 million could be counted as Arabic speakers, when one includes non-Arabs who have learned the language. In addition, Arabic is the language of religious practice for a billion and a half Muslims around the world. Arabic literature is the repository of a vast number of literary compositions covering all fields of culture, religion, history, and science. Arabic is considered a West Semitic language, and it belongs to the family of languages with alphabetic scripts (such as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Ethiopic) that all ultimately descend from ancient Phoenician. Old written forms of the Arabic language are found in rock inscriptions throughout the Arabian Peninsula, which employ several different scripts ultimately derived from South Arabia. Arabic speakers also used the Nabatean script from the second century BCE, notably in the city of Petra (in modern Jordan), and that became the basis for the distinctive Arabic script that emerged in Syria and northwest Arabia in the sixth century CE, sometimes in multilingual inscriptions that included Greek or Syriac. 3 The two major monuments of early Arabic literature are undoubtedly pre-Islamic poetry and the Qur’an, which was delivered during the career of the Prophet Muhammad, roughly 610–632 CE. A tremendous shift in ethical and religious consciousness separates these two textual sources. On one hand, the odes (qasidas) of the pre-Islamic poets were formidable creations that summarized and expressed the joys and sorrows of Arab society during the time of paganism. It is the poet who stands at the center of this structure, using the conventions of verse and the story of his life to comment on the limits that frame human existence. On the other hand, the Qur’an, framed as a divine revelation to a human messenger, recounted the tragic history of humanity’s failure to heed the warnings delivered by the prophets, and it © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd