The Magic of the Car
The enchantment of your words and the splendor of your eloquence have captivated both the distant and the near, as if you were a sorceress whose tongue articulates the refined expressions of the system’s masters and rhetoricians. Through the beauty and polish of their speech, they bewitch the daughters of genius, whose soft braids cascade over their shoulders, their eyes kohl-rimmed and dark with slender lashes, and their smiles as sweet as the fragrance of a jasmine blossom, adorned with necklaces that rise to meet the necks. The full moon, unveiled from its veil, shines brightly with its sun and morning light—this is Arabic, and part of its magic.
Its strings play a mournful melody that echoes the longing of lovers, the sorrow of days, and their joy, with words composed by the system through grief and yearning. The imagery emerges, and the meanings reveal their clarity and beauty. The language of the ancients, the authors of the Mu’allaqat, though its vocabulary may seem obscure to some, was elegant and fluid to the masters of that era. As a highly refined and masterful language, rhetoric in their speeches and letters enabled them to excel in the arts of oratory and writing, both in speech and prose.
Those who came later mingled with other peoples and their languages, causing many foreign words to enter Arabic forcibly. Although many were absorbed and widely used, numerous terms remained alien; Arabic rejected them and did not accommodate their introduction, leaving them to be repeated without justification—sometimes labeled as “foreign” (‘ajamiyya), and at other times as “intrusive” (dakheel).
The enchantment of Arabic is clearly evident in its authentic derivation of words, and in its eloquence, which other languages rarely match in similar usage. This represents a remarkable superiority of Arabic over other tongues, a fact observable by any careful reader in both poetry and prose alike. Expression in Arabic draws you into its powerful beauty and charm, evident in its composition and structure. Its musicality becomes apparent through the resonance of its words, their tonal quality, and the rhetorical devices that accompany it—such as metaphor, metonymy, simile, antithesis, paronomasia, synonymy, and others. The miraculous nature of the language then serves as proof of its capacity to convey intended meanings with brevity and extreme precision.
Arabic is also fundamentally grounded in grammar and syntactic rules that align with its expressive styles and phonetic resonance, achieving a balance that readers notice in its texts and vocabulary. The diacritical marks—fatha, kasra, jarr, damma, sukun, and others—further enhance clarity.
The enchantment of its eloquence is one of the reasons Arabs recognized Arabic as a unique language, particularly in relation to the Quran, God’s miraculous Book. Its vocabulary and styles surpassed their own speech of old. When they could not adequately describe it, they termed it “magic” because of its miraculous nature, transcending their accustomed usage in word, meaning, moral depth, and eloquent beauty, despite their own fluency and rhetorical skill in prose and poetry.
The enchantment is fully evident in Arabic’s ability to absorb new words, coin new terms, and derive expressions that illuminate meaning for the reader, writer, and connoisseur of its language. This demonstrates its richness and establishes it as a global language that keeps pace with every era and context.
Arabic, through its enchantment, surpasses its Semitic sister languages in splendor, derivation, and eloquence. Thus, it is no wonder that it has captivated the hearts of lovers and the wise.
Dr. Saud Muhammad Al-Asfour
