Reflections on Arabic Language Learning

My Father and My Brother—or Abūy and Akhūy
by Dr. Muḥammad Akram al-Nadwī
Oxford
3 / 6 / 2026

When I was nine years old I enrolled at the Ḍiyāʾ al-ʿUlūm school in Māni Kalān, Jaunpur—the very school in which our revered teacher, the ḥadīth scholar Shaykh Muḥammad Yūnus al-Jawnfūrī (may Allah have mercy on him), had studied. I spent two years there learning Persian. A boy at that age knows of the world no more than a sparrow knows of the vast sky: he flies only within the limits allowed him and alights where he is told.

We then began Arabic, and it had been arranged that we would approach it through Persian manuals of morphology and grammar. In that lay one of time’s little ironies: Arabic, in those days, was to us like a distant princess living beyond the mountains; we did not see her face to face—we heard only the reports carried by envoys and couriers.

The first grammar we studied was Nahw-e Mīr, by ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī (d. 816 AH). There we read: “The six exalted nouns, when annexed to anything other than the first-person yāʾ, are: abun, akhun, ḥamun, hanun, famun and dhū māl. They take wāw for the nominative, alif for the accusative and yāʾ for the genitive: jāʾa abūka, raʾaytu abāka, marartu bi-abīka. But when they are annexed to my yāʾ, the inflection is implicit on the consonant before the yāʾ: jāʾanī abī, raʾaytu abī, marartu bi-abī.”

We learned that rule as a believer recites his creed, as people remember the names of their fathers and mothers; none of us ever imagined the rule might come to another end, or that time would overturn it on some tongues.

I memorised Nahw-e Mīr by heart at the age of eleven. I then moved to the Maulana Azad Educational Centre and came upon Asbāq-e Nahw by Ḥamīd al-Dīn al-Farāhī, which confirmed everything we had read, till I fancied the grammarians had sealed an unshakeable consensus.

Later, in that same school, I studied Kitāb Qawāʿid al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya and al-Kāfiyya: the rule remained the rule, “abī” was still “abī,” “akhī” was still “akhī,” fixed stars in grammar’s sky, neither shifting nor fading.

I entered Nadwat al-ʿUlamāʾ; years passed, and I never once doubted that the iʿrāb of abī and akhī is latent. I never saw a student err, nor a teacher slip, so clear did the matter seem.

I taught Sharḥ Qaṭr al-Nadā, Sharḥ Shudhūr al-Dhahab and Sharḥ Ibn ʿAqīl at Nadwat al-ʿUlamāʾ; all non-Arab scholars are unanimous in upholding what these works state, as unanimous as travellers fixing the qiblah on a cloudless night.

Then I moved to Oxford and taught the same texts—adding al-Mufaṣṣal and al-Muqtaṣid—yet never did I find two people disagreeing over the pronunciation or inflection of abī and akhī. I thought the matter had been closed centuries ago, the grammarians finished with it as a judge finishes a case from which there is no appeal.

Then I mixed with Arabs, common folk and elite alike, and was stunned to hear them say: abūy and akhūy.

My astonishment was no trifle. I felt like a man who has spent his life reading that the sun rises in the east, then steps outside one morning to find people insisting it rises elsewhere. I reviewed all I had memorised, all I had studied, all I had taught, leafing through books that had accompanied me for decades, searching in them for “abūy” and “akhūy” as a treasure-hunter searches for a lost hoard—yet found not a trace.

That solecism was more than I could bear, and my exasperation reached its height—not because the affair concerned one or two words, but because I saw in it a curious paradox: the very people of the language abandoning what non-Arabs at the far ends of the earth preserve with painstaking care.

My Arab brothers—have mercy on us!

We learned your language in foreign villages and cities, amid India’s fields and alleyways, in schools where Arabic was heard only inside the classroom. We memorised nothing but the classical tongue, treating ḍamma, fatḥa and kasra as a goldsmith treats precious gems—counting each one, fearing any might be lost.

Then we met you, hoping to grow more eloquent, to pass from the science of Arabic to its taste, from its rules to its secrets. We came to you as a thirsty man comes to a clear spring, only to find the water tinged with sediment.

Yet you say the entire West conspires against you, and that Orientalists corrupt your religion.

Very well.

But tell me—answer with the calm of one who verifies, not with the fury of one provoked—what European, Indian, Persian or American forced you to say abūy and akhūy?

Which Orientalist sat in your gatherings and placed this expression upon your tongues?

Which linguistic congress met in Paris, London, Berlin or Washington and passed a historic resolution deposing “abī” and installing “abūy” in its place?

Which great power laid siege to the Six Nouns until they were compelled to surrender?

Concerns Over Language and Cultural Identity

By God, I have never seen a European, an Indian, a Persian, or an American wielding a stick, chasing Arabs through their markets and homes to stop them from saying “abī” and “akhī.” Nor have I ever seen an Orientalist standing at school gates distributing flyers that advocate “abūy” and “akhūy.”

What I have witnessed is something else entirely: people who lament grand conspiracies yet surrender their language to the depredations of petty linguistic habits; people who scour the farthest reaches of the earth for an enemy while solecism sits unmolested upon their tongues, fearing neither pursuit nor accountability.

By God, this distortion of yours rends the heart—not merely because it violates a rule of grammar, but because each time I hear it I recall the long journey Arabic made until it reached a distant village in India, where someone stood guard over it, only for the language to return to some of its own folk and find the sentinel dozing.