Reflections on Arabic Language Learning
Abī and Akhī—or Abūy and Akhūy
by Dr Muḥammad Akram al-Nadwī
Oxford, 3 June 2026
When I was nine, I joined the Ḍiyāʾ al-ʿUlūm school in Mani Kalan, Jaunpur—the very school where our revered teacher, the ḥadīth-scholar Shaykh Muḥammad Yūnus al-Jaunpūrī, may Allah have mercy on him, had once studied. For two years I learned Persian there. A child at that age knows of the world only what a sparrow knows of the vast sky: he is allowed to flutter within a set expanse and must perch where he is told.
Next we began Arabic, but through grammars written in Persian. There was, perhaps, a touch of irony in this: Arabic then was to us like a distant princess hidden beyond the mountains; we never saw her face to face, only heard news of her from envoys and messengers.
The first grammatical text we read was Nahu Mīr by ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī (d. 816 AH). There we encountered the “six exalted nouns declined with the long vowels when annexed to anything but the 1st-person yāʾ”: abun (father), akhun (brother), ḥamun (father-in-law), hanun, famun (mouth), and dhū mālin (one possessing wealth). Their nominative is with wāw, accusative with alif, genitive with yāʾ: jāʾa abūka, raʾaytu abāka, marartu bi-abīka. When attached to my yāʾ, the case endings are merely estimated: jāʾanī abī, raʾaytu abī, marartu bi-abī.
We received this rule as a believer receives his creed, as people know the names of their fathers and mothers. None of us dreamed it might one day fare differently in certain tongues, or that time would undermine it.
I memorised Nahu Mīr by heart at eleven. Then, in the Maulana Azad Educational Centre, I studied Asbāq al-Nahw by the great Ḥamīd al-Dīn al-Farāhī and found it confirmed the same rule, until I imagined the grammarians had forged an unassailable consensus.
At that school I also read Qawāʿid al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya and al-Kāfiya; the rule was still the rule, “abī” still “abī,” “akhī” still “akhī,” like two fixed stars in grammar’s firmament.
Later I entered Nadwat al-ʿUlamāʾ. Years passed without my harbouring the slightest doubt that abī and akhī carry hidden case-endings. No student erred, no teacher stumbled; the matter seemed self-evident.
I taught Sharḥ Qaṭr al-Nadā, Sharḥ Shudhūr al-Dhahab and Ibn ʿAqīl’s commentary at Nadwa. All non-Arab scholars agreed on what those books state, as travellers agree on the qibla beneath a cloudless sky.
Then I moved to Oxford and taught those same works, adding al-Mufaṣṣal and al-Muqtaṣid. Never did I see two people differ over the pronunciation or inflection of abī and akhī. I thought the question long since closed, as a judge closes a case admitting no appeal.
But when at last I mixed with native Arabs, high and low, I was stunned to hear: abūy, 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 to find people insisting it rises elsewhere. I leafed through the books that had accompanied me for decades, hunting for abūy and akhūy as a treasure-seeker hunts a lost hoard—without finding a trace.
This solecism was more than I could bear, and anger flared—not over a word or two, but over a strange paradox: the very custodians of the language were fleeing what foreigners at the earth’s far ends preserve with meticulous care.
My Arab brothers, have mercy on us!
We learned your tongue in the villages and cities of the non-Arab world, amid India’s fields and alleyways, in schools where no Arabic was heard outside the classroom. We memorised only the pristine forms, handling the ḍamma, fatḥa, and kasra as a jeweller handles precious stones—counting each, fearing their loss.
Then we came to you, hoping our speech would grow more eloquent, that we might pass from knowledge of Arabic to the taste of Arabic, from its rules to its secrets. We approached like the thirsty to a clear spring, only to find the water somewhat clouded.
You complain that the West conspires against you and that Orientalists undermine your religion.
Very well.
But tell me—and answer with the calm of one who checks his facts, not the wrath of one enraged—what European, Indian, Persian, or American forced you to say abūy and akhūy?
Which Orientalist sat in your gatherings and slipped this expression onto your tongues?
At what linguistic congress in Paris, London, Berlin, or Washington was a historic resolution passed to depose abī and install abūy in its stead?
What mighty power besieged the Six Nouns until they were compelled to surrender?
Concerns About Language Preservation
By Allah, I have never seen a European, an Indian, a Persian, or an American brandishing 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 handing out leaflets urging the use of “abūy” and “akhūy.”
What I have witnessed is something altogether different: a people who decry vast conspiracies, yet leave their language to be plundered by petty linguistic habits; men who scour the ends of the earth for an enemy while solecism sits unmolested upon their tongues, fearing neither pursuit nor reckoning.
By Allah, this corruption of your speech rends the heart—not merely because it breaks a rule of grammar, but because each lapse reminds me of the long journey Arabic undertook to reach a distant Indian village where guardians stood watch, only to return to some of its own children and find the sentinel dozing.
Historical Document by Sheikh Al-Islam Qadi Iyad
A historical document from Shaykh al-Islām, Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ:
It is indispensable for anyone concerned with the science of transmission, even if only for critical study. He describes a malpractice that spread once the written compilations had become established more than a millennium ago, and that grew even more blatant in later generations. Yet, in his own time he declared:
“People thereafter became lax in receiving and delivering ḥadīth until they filled it with corruption and left it in utter disarray. You will find the celebrated shaykh—praised everywhere, for whom arduous journeys are undertaken; gatherings revolve around him, and scholar and layman alike take from him in turn—yet his presence is as though absence. He does not preserve his ḥadīth, nor perfect their recital or retention; he keeps no personal master copy from which to recognize errors or flaws. Instead, he clutches a book that belongs to someone else, perhaps to one whose word and sight cannot be trusted. Often, while the shaykh is reading, a companion chats with him, or he grows drowsy and drifts into sleep, or his mind wanders to his private affairs, so that he grasps nothing of what he hears. Frequently the book read to him is one he has never opened before, knowing nothing of its contents until that very session. His only ‘license’ is that, when he was a child, a copy bearing his father’s hand—or another’s—was said to have been read to him; or some easy-going shaykh had handed him bundles of books and travel journals whose contents he knew only by their titles; or he received an ijāzah from a distant land for material he neither recognizes nor remembers—at a time when he was still an infant, or even before he was born, still but a foetus in the womb.
Later the shaykh will borrow someone’s book—one known to have been heard from recognised teachers—or buy it in the market, and it suffices him to find in it a note claiming collations and corrections.
You will likewise see the traveller devoted to this pursuit, who has left behind beloved family and familiar homelands, yet he too sinks into negligence: failing to keep his own notes in order, chatting with neighbours during the recitation, coming without any book at all, busied with copying something else, or stretched out, snoring. Both teacher and student settle for a faint mumble of a reading whose meaning neither understands, unable to discern mistake from accuracy, speaking only from behind its veil. Sometimes a mere child attends—one who has not yet understood most of his mother’s speech nor mastered his own small affairs—and they deem his presence a valid audition, especially once he has completed four years of age. They cite for proof the ḥadīth of Maḥmūd ibn al-Rabīʿ: ‘I remember the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم spitting in my face when I was four years old,’ or, as another version reads, ‘when I was five.’ But the child’s remembering that one spittle cannot stand as proof that he comprehends everything else.
When the reading of the book is finished, they inscribe this child’s audition in the original manuscript, or the shaykh writes it for him in his father’s book or another, so that it may serve him later as proof of a “sound” audition. Most of the auditions of people in our age—and in many ages before ours—have been of this sort.
For this reason our shaykh, the jurist Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn ʿAṭṭāb—may Allah have mercy on him—used to say, as related to us verbatim by himself and by others from the jurist Abū ʿAbdillāh, his father: ‘In ḥadīth audition one can never dispense with a proper ijāzah,’ because of these ailments and the permissiveness that has been wrongly permitted.”
Imām Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ ibn Mūsā al-Yaḥṣubī (d. 544 AH), may Allah’s mercy be upon him, wrote these words at the beginning of his priceless jewel, Mashāriq al-Anwār, which he composed as a practical, scholarly remedy for this uncontrolled phenomenon. There is no way to erase it except by erasing transmission itself at its root—and that is impossible. Thus it has proven to be a trait particular to this Ummah, inseparably bound to it. Many have pondered, or attempted, such eradication—or something akin to it—to cure its harms or the harms they imagined, but they have all failed.
The only viable path is the path of knowledge, forbearance, justice, and wisdom: the path taken by those imams who combined all the sciences of Islam while being deeply versed in ḥadīth and its disciplines, containing this phenomenon and correcting its faults from within. Such, then, is the sanctioned remedy available for every decreed reality over which human beings hold no power to remove.