 أنا محمد عز العليم سلام العليم وحصلنا على السبب هنا لتكون حقاً مستعدة من الحالة ونحن نحن هنا لفعل آخر يوم العديد ونحن هنا لتعاون الأموال ونحن في مرسلتنا الإسلامي السعودية ونحن في المزيد والأجهزة ونحن في العديد الأسلال أنا محمد عز العليم و المؤسسة للمنزل العربية هذا العام لديها مجرد من المساعدة هذا جيد جدا هذا جيد جدا يأتي بسرعة و لكن هذا جيد جدا كما تعلم العربية الآن مجرد من المساعدة يتكلم بسرعة و بسرعة من 400 مليون في العربية و نحن هناك من المساعدة العربية وكثيراً للمسلم المسلم، المسلم الذي يجب أن يقوم بعمل المسلم بشكل كبيراً العربية هي عريمة كبيراً، التي يجب أن تساعد من مليديا سأتحدث عن العربية العربية التي يدعوها في فصحة حقاً, هذه كانت لديها المتحدة التي تشغلت التغاية والغرب الممتلات التي تجدها في الحلقة العربية كانت تجربة العربي في العربية فى سنوات 610 و 632 هذا كانوا تقريراً لإموط العربية لم تكن هناك قرآن ، يمكن أن يكون حدود في مدينة الغزر كما لديه الكثير من الناس الناس بمعاربة السنة العربية ستنقلها بسنة العربية السنة العربية بسنة التنقل وكانت نفسها الناس وراء المدينة مباشرة دون العربية الآن في مدينة الثلاثية ولكن في لانجوج الإسلام يتبعون العالم بين المسلمين هذا هو لانجوز الإسلام والآرام أيضا حصلت على العالم العربية والغرام was developed to help converts from other cultures to read the Qur'an العربية was developed to make people understand articulate the Qur'an well Arabic rhetoric was developed in order to identify and describe the stylistic features that makes the Qur'an inimitable inimitable as the Arabs and the Muslims saw it the language you say because of the connection with the Qur'an because of the connection with the Qur'an it really made Arabic control the language from early on Arab linguists have decided on where a pure language will be taken time and in location middle of Arabia and for a certain time after which it will be as it will be mixed by so many other people in different culture any time that comes after that yes it is on the pattern that has been established in the Qur'an would not be considered a fosha or real pure Arabic so that was controlled by the Qur'an and linguists in modern times in 1930s what we had in Arab world language academies like the one in Cairo which was established to regulate and develop the Arabic language now another important point is the Qur'an asked Muslim to look into the horizons and everywhere around them to reflect on God's creation look around and reflect actually the Qur'an emphasizes it is only the learned people that stand in all of God in that context it really means those who observe reflect and discover that is in the first chapter 30 chapter 35 first with the A so only those who can reflect and discover these are the ones who will be in all of God for this reason we find that Arab scientists and philosophers the Arabs also Muslims who came Arabized in their language you see all the Arab scientists and philosophers started their life their education learning the Qur'an by heart okay the prophet of Islam Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم is reported to have said seek knowledge even unto child this is important and he said wisdom is the lost property of a believer wherever he finds it he has the first right to it he has the first right to it so it was these teachings that directed Muslims to seek knowledge from civilizations other than their own around them like Greek Syrian Persian Indian and Chinese and to translate the work from these languages into Arabic translation became very important during the time of Al Mahmoun K. Al Mahmoun who died in 933 he established something called the house of wisdom and used to pay very well for translators it is reported that he was some translators he would give them the word not weight of their book in gold in those days paper was very heavy and thick so they did very well our days we translators have come very cheap so Islam Islam then is not an isolationist or a rejectionist religion it is not it is not Muslim philosopher speak of Aristotle as the first master the first master and you find very great Christian Syriac families who were brought very close to the king number of apostle king and the great Jewish philosopher and physician the Maimonides of Andalusia served Salahuddin Saladin in Egypt so now we should remember that Arabic was a literary language you see some of the characteristic of literary language is you have emotional you have figures of speech you have synonyms and so on this does not work for science language so first thing first requirement was to develop a set of technical terms for translating these works from other cultures you see precision was required and this became a very important science in Islam and in Arabic we have large numbers of technical terms throughout the Islamic Arabic period okay you see this you must Salahuddin as they called in all subjects and they were after a couple of times okay so Arabic had to face had to face the requirement of developments and discoveries scientific discoveries from the centers of learning in the past and now from the most advanced centers in the world the most advanced centers and discoveries in the world Arabic had to face this absorb it in obedience to the tradition and what the prophet said and remain Arabic at the same time because this is the language of the Quran this was that challenge it was a very tall order but they did it it was it was done in the past and in the present time Arabic was helped helped by the nature of the language itself ingenious morphology self in Arabic great this was very helpful and also the broad mindedness of Arabic and Muslim scholars I would urge you to even leave your job and come and study Arabic morphology and so on you will never regret it okay Arabic developed tools for getting new vocabulary new scientific vocabulary how to develop expand the language it had tools to do this I can mention six of them here the first one is derivation you have a word like which means to write and from this you get vast numbers of words writer something written your letter your desk when you write to write and so is library waterstone bookshop and many many other words derived from the same who this is a great virtue of Arabic morphology which realize mainly on derivation as English and some other European languages rely on affixation at the beginning and at the end of the word so derivation number 2 analogy pias in Arabic building new words and by analogy with others yesterday the last I heard of this yesterday is دعشان to دعشان someone or some people take the noun take the noun turn it to a verb and transitive verb or a pattern which is particular to this part but very clear for the Arabic language especially with words that are unacceptable like دعشان and so on but the analogy increases enriches the language then there is fusion is called نعحت in Arabic you see بسم الله for بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم the wrong statement is بسم الله it's used in modern Arabic now in science so I'm fit here I'm fake I'm phibious it's called بر المائي it helps the language to fuse words together then you have borrowed from other languages a lot of words were borrowed from Persian and Greek so in the past and now you have you borrowed from English I have seen Zoom and I have seen Google and so on in the year what was borrowing I think English is more is more you are flexible than Arabic in this then you have an invention of words so in English you have you can send which because the blog one blog ate a lot of that stuff so they leave them sent which if any of you eat all the food that's coming this evening Arabic will not name him or her after that yes then Arabization is called تعريب so invention you see like sandwich Macintosh and so on تعريب try to tweak the words to make them like Arabic and sound and then food okay the Arab you see after having the Arab having this developing having the translation and developing to take knowledge their terminology began their own rich heritage of Arabic sciences rich heritage of Arabic sciences in all subjects you have medicine you have biology you have chemistry etc there is a long list of them here yes they were a head of anybody at that time they were a head of the west for sure and we find in the west people trying to get information or knowledge from the Arabic the prophet of keton who translated the Quran into Latin in 11 30 43 I think went to Spain to learn Arabic sciences and you will find the chair of Arabic in Cambridge in 1632 was established and the founder gave some I mean objectives for that one of them was to get the land which is still looked up in that learned town about Arabic to get the learned from there still looked up in that town and up by the way another objective was to help the kingdom state by kingdom state by trade and a third one wait for this was to enlarge the border of Christianity and propagate Christianity among those among them who still live in darkness these people lived in hope in those days our professor of Arabic here at search doesn't have anything like this in his job description okay now so among the most I mean among the most this is a statement by Arman writing about the Arabic medicine among the most creative geniuses of the medieval times was Abyssinia Abyssinia you see a spoke school the canal was translated 36 times in the 15th and 16th centuries and what's the book in Europe the Abyssinia or Abyssinianism was the all the medicine in Europe or the medical centers relied on that as this man is saying and you will have in order to be a good physician you have to be a good Abyssinianist okay it has been established that hundreds of times went into Europe and learned from Arabic I have an English here I can tell you one word if I may I will give you alcohol which was introduced to Arabic and the people here learned it simply because they love this stuff some excessively judging by the number of Arabic around the country now on the shoulder of this Arabic scientist the European Renaissance started and naturally built and you have enlightenment and you have just an evolution and technology and learning evolution scientific technological revolution in the west to an unprecedented level before so while the west woke up the rules were reversed the west woke up the Arab went fast asleep and were shocked into reality by the advancing armies colonial armies equipped with science and technologies now they quickly started to build up their education here in Egypt for instance and many other countries so Egypt is an example they started their education incidentally some people then started to cast doubts on the ability of the Arabic to catch up with the world in time there was a British advisor to the ministry of education in Egypt it was Scottish and he said to them if you want to develop you will have to give up Arabic and have your education in English they said to him this is all Haggis we will have none of this because they want to keep the connection with the Quran incidentally Haggis happened to sound like the Egyptian word Haggis which is nonsense yes so rather than take another language the Arabs began to translate again from other languages and they developed language academies like the one in Cairo which is more active I suppose than the other I have listed four of them now and plus a center started by the UNESCO ISISCO ISISCO which is the Arabic UNESCO to coordinate the third innovation among these centers okay I have put many information here I would say that Arabic has as we said lived and remained as Arabic absorbed the language absorbed all the foreign sciences and philosophy and now it has absorbed all the scientific and technical terms of the western languages they are all in Arabic now we have the university language academy in Cairo reduced vast numbers of دكشنري this is one of the latest dictionary of computer terms I looked up spam because I had a lot of it so I found I found it translated as as rubbish trash and I looked up chip little chip and it says رقاق a nice word say after me رقاق رقاق رقاق now you know have learned some Arabic in the Arabic language today but you must always remember that it's so happen that in Egypt رقاق also means في لو باستري so eat your chip with fish if you like the Arabic language it is not the fault see Arabs don't produce much sense now this is not the fault with the Arabic language just as there are many countries that speak English and don't produce anything it is great that the Arabic language the Arabic language is the head of Arab scientists it has encompassed everything in Arabic while remaining Arabic with a glorious past when we put the best for you nothing but the best I now have a great pleasure for introducing my learned friend Dr. Moussel بن مغالي from the Saudi Arrival Council on Center he will speak about Arabic as a language of course I'm taking knowledge of Arabic and you have the tools 15 minutes no more I think I've been in it 10 minutes before I just might support him in it so International Arabic Language Day is celebrated on December 18th the event was established by the United Nation Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization which is UNESCO in 2010 it was established to celebrate multi-languism and cultural diversity as well as to promote equal use of all six of its official working languages throughout the organization December 18 was chosen as the date for the Arabic language as it is the day in 1973 when the General Assembly approved Arabic as an official United Nation language with an estimated 390 million speakers Arabic is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world it is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations as well as the historical language of 1.6 million Muslims today there are three different levels of Arabic classical Arabic modern standard Arabic which is used in publishing education and media across the Arab world Arabic and everyday dialect is also used in different regions and has numerous variations the Arabic group in UNESCO used to celebrate this day under different title or titles every year it was decided by them that Arabic as a language of science and technology to be the title of the celebration of this year I'm not going to talk about this subject simply because I have no time but I will take a small issue with the subject which is Arabic language and localization of knowledge and try to just to shade a light on it for knowledge to be localized well it needs to be understood well and for that to happen that knowledge need to formulate it and then transferred using the national language which is Arabic in this context Arabic would feel and understand and use and be creative with very well studies and research indicated that the absorption of science and technology doesn't occur in depth unless those sciences and technologies are taught in the national language in all states of ministries education all the way through to higher education the advancement in science literature arts and religion that occur in our Arabic Islamic civilization during its prosperity was carried by the Arabic language civilization was wasn't to reach to a state of localizing the knowledge and then reaching the creativity and productivity the states if it wasn't for the stage of understanding and absorption of important knowledge that interacted with the elements of the local and original culture first comes understanding then comes creativity and productivity as a result everyone's understanding of the language that is used for transfer production one example of those important or imported sciences is medicine it went through the states of understanding then through the or through to creativity in the first stage the box of a Greek scientist where transferred where transferred to Arabic and people started studying understanding and explaining them for a while Arabic allowed for the wide separate of those sciences and made it available for those who are interested then came the creativity and productivity stage which introduced to us famous scientists such as Ibn Sina Ibn Rushd Arrazi and Ibn Jazar and made others who words and words became references that were recently included in a university including the European ones using Arabic language in medicine resulted in wide separate of the science among the Arabs and Muslims society's knowledge of Arabic participated in the wide separate of medicine for all members of the Arabic or the Arab nation and everyone who use its language the benefit or the benefits became greater among all local I mean the the social classes and many branch of medicine became a popular knowledge that is circulated between people this is because it was available in their own language that they understood and mastered its vocabulary and terminology the first thing that grows things that distinguish our language from other languages is that it is old and new at the same time it coexisted the Greek Latin and Sanskrit and was able to continue till today helped by its flexibility and very characteristics such as etiomology and analogy and synonym Arabic is suitable language of science and technology because the uniqueness of it is structure and the richness of it is vocabulary its history culture and civilization it is spoken by a large number of the people and one of the six languages of the united nations what is lacking or what is lacking is only the adoption of it is language of science of technology where sciences are using it in all levels of learning and translated to it politician political institutes and decision makers need to adapt it in international relations and science and technology thank you very much the task of chairing very easy thank you very much and now I now have the great pleasure I will have another great pleasure to see I now have the great pleasure to introduce my colleague Dr. Pes Lucas who is a senior lecturer in linguistics Arabic and linguistics what a fine combination the excellent combination of Arabic and linguistics which qualified him which speaks to us this evening about some good in linguistics solution and how they invite us okay thank you very much indeed that's all I need sound so can we stop so it's it's a great honor for me to speak to you this evening in such eminent company so I'm as professor Abdul Helim said I'm a linguist and I work on Arabic I studied the Arabic language here at SOAS for my undergraduate degree and the best place the best place to do it yes and it truly is from my point of view an extraordinarily rich language to study from a linguistic point of view okay so seeing as the theme of this UNESCO Arabic language day this year is Arabic and science and seeing as I don't know all that much about what Arabic has contributed to science I thought what I would do instead was tell you something about how science and other language sciences have contributed to our understanding of Arabic so as we've already heard it's absolutely clear that Arabic language and Arabic culture have historically made enormous contributions to science but what I think many of those who are interested in Arabic don't perhaps appreciate as much as they ought to is that we can make progress in understanding we can improve our understanding of Arabic by applying modern scientific methods to the topic and there's no doubt whatsoever that in the past shall we say 100 years we took in progress in understanding various aspects of Arabic language thanks to research in linguistics now I don't want you to misunderstand me as we've heard Arabic speaking culture was way ahead of Europe in scientific matters in the European dark ages and linguistics is no exception whatsoever I've heard of this great linguist I mean he stands as one of the greatest linguists of all time to this day and he was working in the 8th century and produced analyses of Arabic which are astonishingly sophisticated even today but even though he produced these great insights I think we can still make progress so I want to I want to have a quick look at these two questions today so we've already heard that you can distinguish at least two types of Arabic the classical language or the standard language and the colloquial or dialectal Arabic and a very long standing debate within Arabic is when did this differentiation between two types of Arabic occur did it occur before or after Islam so that's one thing I want to look at and the other is another often discussed question the extent to which different Arabic dialects are mutually intelligible so my point is going to be instead of debating such questions from our armchairs and speculating how we draw on the appropriate evidence so let's hope my technology works I want to give you a very quick sample of classical Arabic and a quick sample of dialectal Arabic both taken from the great Lebanese singer Feroz okay let's give it a go very nice okay that was a very short snatch of standard Arabic or classical Arabic but there are many very significant and very interesting differences between these two types of Arabic and we can't possibly unfortunately go into all of them now but one very salient difference between the two which people often focus on is the fact that classical Arabic has cases nouns and adjectives that align according to three cases and verbs also have mood endings whereas in dialectal Arabic we don't get this at all so this is one feature that we can focus in on to explore this question of when did the difference between these two types of Arabic occur so here's the question was the colloquial Arabic brought to for example Lebanon where Feroz comes from in the early Islamic era was it identical at that time to classical Arabic or not so like I say this is a huge long standing debate so on the one side many scholars have argued that yes when the Arabs left the Arabian peninsula after the coming of Islam what they brought with them what they spoke every day was classical Arabic and the differences we see between the dialects and classical Arabic are because people in say Lebanon whose native language was a type of Aramaic learned Arabic but didn't learn it very well and changed it and thereby lost the case and that's one one way of looking at it the other side of the debate says no even in pre-Islamic times you had this differentiation between dialectal Arabic and high Arabic and the Quran and pre-Islamic poetry was written in the high variety but that doesn't mean that there wasn't also a colloquial variety which just hasn't come down to us and the interesting thing is about this debate as I said it's it's all speculation it's been conducted just from the armchair as it were but we can answer questions like this in a non-speculative way by looking at appropriate evidence like this now it's very often claimed that before Islam Arabic was an unwritten language and this is actually completely false well let's say few Arabic speakers were literate that is true but there were a few and they wrote Arabic predominantly in other scripts whether south Semitic scripts or Greek now there are a lot of pre-Islamic Arabic texts written in the Greek script and this is very useful for the question of case endings because Greek has an ordinary alphabet that obligaterally includes symbols for vowels and the case endings of Arabic are vowels so the evidence is in fact conclusive we know from documents written in Arabic in Greek script that come from before Islam that already before the time of Islam there were varieties that did not have cases and this is mainly due to recent work by an American scholar of Syrian extraction called Ahmed Al-Jallad so the point is there's no doubt that when speakers of other languages in Syria or Berber in North Africa came to learn Arabic they made enormous changes to the language there's no doubt about that but we can see here that even so it's not the case that before Islam the only type of Arabic there was classical Arabic okay do I have time to move on to my other okay thank you very much so what about this question of whether all Arabic dialects are mutually intelligible this is another thing that's hotly debated in my experience Arabs will usually tell you that it's very easy fat to understand different dialects but as you know I'm still learning Arabic you spend your whole life learning Arabic it's not an easy language because you've learned something about one dialect it doesn't mean you're going to find the next one particularly easy and if we really think about it if we put it this way are all Arabic dialects mutually intelligible if we think about that question seriously very few people I hope would disagree the answer is no not all Arabic dialects are mutually intelligible so can you understand this Arabic dialect now it's very often said that the purest Arabic comes from Saudi Arabia where do you think this man is from yes جبل فيفر in Saudi Arabia so it's easy to find some dialects that are very extreme and hard to understand equally it's easy to find pairs of dialects where mutual comprehension is near total for example something like Lebanon and Syria but then we could ask the question are these really different dialects there's a huge gray area in between these two extremes and instead of just subjectively giving our impressions about these issues we can test the question scientifically so for example a Slovak scholar called Slavomir Chepler and his colleagues have made a start on answering this question about the mutual intelligibility of Ben Ghazi Arabic Tunis Arabic and Maltese which you may or may not know is historically a variety of Arabic so they made recordings of native speakers of each and they recorded these native speakers saying how everyday vocabulary items were said in their dialect and also recorded them reading a set of simple sentences and then 24 native speakers of each of the other two dialects were tested on the dialect that wasn't their native one so this shows you some of the kinds of words that were tested colors, basic adjectives eating and drinking and the task here with the vocabulary items was they simply had to say what kind of category does this word fall into is it a type of animal is it to do with time and date etc and with the sentences they had to write what they heard in their own in their own variety so what did they find well perhaps not surprisingly Maltese people are not very good at understanding Tunisian and Libyan less than 40% correctly understood words but look at this with the vocabulary everyday vocabulary Libyans don't even get to 80% comprehension of Tunisian and Tunisians trying to understand Libyan only around about 80% and with sentences it's even less so this gives you some impression it's only a start Tunisian and Libyan but we're looking at something like 2 3rd comprehension and this kind of methodology can be continued with other pairs of dialects so I'm sorry for going too long I'm finishing now what I want to say in summary is that Arabic but there's still more to know and I think the way to find out more about the Arabic language is to use knowledge of linguistics other languages other scripts and innovative empirical techniques absolutely you are in an incredible position being an arabist and a linguist but you should have stopped without telling us more thank you thank you very much I now have again a great pleasure introducing my colleague that professor of Arabic where has he gone that's his professor of Arabic and now the head of department in the Middle East another very great arabist and he will speak to you okay thank you well good evening I'm very pleased to be here to speak about this very remarkable subject which you see illustrated here the Quran manuscript from the 15th century have a look at it quietly for a moment what you see is a script which is generally described as remarkably beautiful there is clearly a certain regularly there but there is also immense fluidity, rhythm agility, appliances the question I'd like to discuss very briefly with you is where does all this come from and I'd like to show you that it has in fact a lot to do with science because today we are talking about Arabic and science well let's go into the past where did it all begin and we can go quite a long way into the past to 1800 BC to this particular little animal this is a things from the Sinai Peninsula and on this Egyptian things an inscription was discovered which looks like this and what you see here is the earliest beginning of the alphabet out of these alphabetic signs which are derived from the hieroglyphs emerged what is today Greek Latin and Arabic and Hebrew and Cyrillic and one of these we can even recognize here you see already our T we recognize here our T this little thing is the ancestor of our O and also the ancestor of the Arabic Aein there's a lot to be said about this but here you have in a nucleus the earliest beginning well let's fast forward very quickly because we don't have much time we fast forward some over 2000 years and we come to this which is one of the earliest inscriptions in the Arabic language from the year 300 commemorating a king called Imrul Qais and it's written in a script which is close to the script of Nabataean some of you have been in Jordan we have seen that and well let's fast forward further and see what did the Arabic script look like at the time of the prophet well there is this particular document here which is a letter supposedly sent by the prophet is this letter genuine what is certain is that it is a medieval document it was dated but whether the genuine this could not be assured but you can see here a script which whether it's genuine or not is highly rudimentary and miles away from that beautiful manuscript which we saw at the beginning but let's look at something more reliable which is this one here this is a remarkable document it's a papyrus from the year 22 of the Hijra or 642 and it's written in Greek and Arabic it was found in Egypt and it's a receipt it's the Arab armies conquering Egypt got hungry in an Egyptian village and they wanted something to eat so the army got 65 sheep from the local village headman and the army commander gave the headman a receipt in two languages for the 65 sheep so that the village headman could deduct it from the taxes you can see from this rather interestingly that the Egyptian armies that the Arab armies were not simply pillaging but already were engaging in some kind of administration you already see here remarkably here the formula which already existed in this very very early document and it's definitely genuine because the Islamic dating and the Byzantine dating coincide so this is a fascinating document the story continues however because from then on the Arabic script faced a major challenge in fact two challenges first of all it became the script of empire it had to represent power and secondly and as an even bigger challenge the Arabic script had to become commensurate with the divine revelation of the Quran and here comes the biggest challenge that Arab scribes faced what script is there that can be commensurate with the divine message that can give visual representation to the words of God well the challenge was there and here is one answer this is a script from the Umayyad governor of Egypt from the year 723 you see here a script which suddenly becomes stately and powerful that wants to convey authority again it's a demand for taxes this time and here is the typical early Quran script the so-called Ma'il script which was developed in Umayyad times to give expression to the Quran and you can see already an attempt of power of consistency and a certain kind of rhythm but it's still very far from what we've seen at the beginning well then came a new phase then came the so-called Kufic script which is this one here which you know well and which was the first really convincing answer that scribes had to the aesthetic challenge of how to give expression to the Quran in a visual medium that was beautiful and coherent the technique here is really quite remarkable what they've done is to take all the individual letters and combinations of letters and spread them all over the page with equal distances in between and construct what has been called an architecture of the page whereby there is a proportional relationship between the height and the width of the page but it has one thing it is very difficult to read if you don't the text is really hard for instance here you have this word here is hugely spread out with all these distances and here you have because it plays together it's all compressed so there is a tremendous difference between compression on the one hand and expansion on the other looks tremendous but really hard to read well then came a revolution and that revolution is called the proportion script in the 4th century we have something that resulted in this and that is the famous which is the earliest Quran in this new script and anyone of you who know Arabic and I think all of you here know we recognize that this is actually the Arabic script we know today so something happened something happened to generate the script and that revolution is what was it it was the rise of the proportion script which took place in the 4th century of the Hijra spearheaded by a man called and based upon what based upon geometry we have here the geometry of letters a system by which every single Arabic letter shape was put into a proportional relationship with every other working out or investigating the rules of the with a great Egyptian calligrapher and painter and artist whom I would like to pay tribute here Ahmed Mustafa and we produced this book to look into these rules and what you see here is an illustration of the rules from a Mamluk manuscript and the basis of everything is the length of the letter Aleph which is composed of 7 dots out of the Aleph and its 7 dots emerges everything else and emerges also many different script styles which also have Alephs that are longer or shorter than 7 dots but this is the fundamental pattern and so we started investigating this and we were wondering what is it based upon why geometry and what we realized is that geometry was seen as a perspective as the language or the laws with which God put the universe together there are laws of society on the one hand and there are laws of nature on the other these are laws of nature were perceived to be geometric by generating a script based upon geometry we generate a script based upon the laws of the cosmos hence we have this conclusion the proportion script can be understood and modeled upon the cosmic order in which geometry represents the concrete manifestation of divine justice and for this reason our book carries the title the cosmic script so we see here that science in actual fact is deeply rooted into a certain vision of the cosmos as an ordered entity an ordered creation of the Lord which must be reflected in the arts of mankind then we proceeded to look into how these rules work and I want to give a very very brief illustration first of all we have the 7 dots in sequence which make up the length and breadth of Alif and out of this everything else comes and if you superimpose the rules of the proportion script upon each other you come to this geometric pattern a pattern made up of a circle a square and a hexagon out of which everything comes and one very simple example the letter B is made up of a vertical stroke one-third of Alif and of a horizontal stroke the length of Alif and out of this comes that when it is drawn with the pen so here is something extremely important there is a difference between two things the geometric skeleton of the letter and what happens when the skeleton is so to say brought to life by the pen and bringing it to life in Arabic there is a term for it تارطيب giving it the moisture of life and the meaning of this can be illustrated with this image here here you have a snow crystal here you have geometry in nature a hexagon like we have it also in the script when that crystal melts and becomes fluid water becomes fluid in the same way when this pattern rigid geometric pattern say melts into fluidity through the action of the scribe it gains this feature and that this is not invented but rooted in the theory at the time you can see from the following quote with which I will end which comes from an 11th century manuscript about the proportion script and it says the following the soul is not content with the form of the letters without the correct execution of its proportions like the members of a living being are proportioned or like the paths of a plant are balanced because the soul is an amount of beauty and that is to be found with the proportionality of the natural world with a seeing or heard so it is both the proportionality and the living beauty of the natural world that is reflected in the aesthetics of Arabic calligraphy at its greatest and this is then the result thank you very much thank you you are great you have got the Arabic language today you have got the Arabic language learning and you enjoyed it today thank you very much indeed now we have again another great pleasure in mind I have a letter of pleasure this evening producing the Saeed who is actually the head of teaching Arabic so you have some point me to read and it it is transfer it for him Sarah do you want to read she will read a translation thank you Professor Halim good evening ladies and gentlemen first of all I am grateful to Sarah to agree to read the translation with me and I have to admit I am going to read 4 short pieces only one of them is translated already by the famous translator Lord Arbery of Cambridge was he? no he wasn't okay okay the other 3 pieces I translated myself but Sarah did help me in what we call in Arabic she kind of added some flavor to the translation thank you Sarah we say in Arabic الشعرو ديوان العرب poetry is the record of the anthology or the register the book the life of the Arabs so we cannot celebrate Arabic language without some poetry starting from the pre-islamic period I have selected a short piece by Antara Antara the legendary poet warrior of the tribe of Aps whose poetry depicted the 2 most important themes in Arabic poetry الحب والبطولة love and bravery here's a few lines he said to his beloved عبلة after returning victorious from the battlefield having single handed he rebelled the attacking tribe Antara addressing عبلة يا دار عبلة بالجواء تكلمي وعيني صباحا دار عبلة واسلمين كيف المزار وقد تربع أهلها بعوني زتيني وأهلنا بالغاية عبلة's dwelling in الجواء هل أسألت القومة يا بنت مهلكن إن كنت جاهلة بما لم تعلمي يخبرك من سهد الوقي عطى أنني أفس الوغى وأعفوا عند المغنمي ولقد ذكرتك وارغماح ونواه الامن وقال وقال وارغماح ونواه وبيض الهند تقتر من دمي فوددت تقبيل السيوفي فوددت تقبيل السيوفي لأنها لما عبلة كبارك ثرق المتبسيم يا بنت مهلكن إن أخيك أن أعرف لك عني لماذا أسأل المغنمي ومتأكد من سؤالك هؤلاء المغنمي will tell you how I fearlessly run into battle and fight and how I refrain from sharing in the spoils I remembered you when the spears were dipping into my body and flashing swords dripping with my blood at that very moment how I desired to kiss the swords because they sparkled like your smiling mouth with the coming of Islam and then poetry began to spread its functions and widen its rules some of the caliphs themselves were connoisseurs of poetry and patrons of poets the second caliph عمر عمر الخطاب who was one of the most strict and fair rulers ever he imprisoned a poet a poor poet called Al-Hotay'a because Al-Hotay'a had a very sharp vicious tongue he attacked, his tongue attacked everybody from his prison cell Al-Hotay'a sent عمر very few lines of poetry very emotional imploring poetry asking forgiveness apparently عمر when he heard those lines apparently it's said that he cried and pardoned and forgiven Al-Hotay'a Al-Hotay'a imploring عمر some seek to notice he actually addresses عمر by the first name عمر he didn't say امير المؤمنين or anything just عمر ماذا تقول لأفراخن بذي مرخن زغب الحواص للماء ولا شجر غادرت كاسبهم في قعر مظلمة فغفر عليك سلام الله يا عمر أنت الإمام الذي من بعد صاحبه القائل إليك مقالد النها البشر لم يؤثروك بها لم يؤثروك بها إذ قدموك لها لكن لأنفسهم كانت بك الأثر فمن على صبية بالرمل مسكنهم فمن على صبية بالرمل مسكنهم بين الأباطح يغشاهم بها القدر نفسي في دائك كم بيني وبينهم من عرض أودية يعملها الخبر الله جميل أنت هو المدينة who was given the key position of power of royal mankind they have not favoured you when they gave you the leadership they have actually favoured themselves please be kind to the young children who have no home but the sandy desert where they are exposed to their miserable fate I am far away from them across a very wide valley no one can see its other side by the 9th and 10th century the great poetry has reached its golden age with the great poets the greatest among them without doubt was El Mutanabi the man who was given the title Mali Udunia Washari Lunas that translates as the one whose fame spread far and wide and made all people think of nobody but him those four words needed two lines in English after his very busy life busy composing great poetry moving from El Kufa to Bardat to Aleppo to Antioch to Damascus to Taborias to Egypt later in his life he found himself travelling far east into Persia passing through a famous beauty spot in the valley of Bouan which really fascinated and bewitched him this resulted in a superb amazing depiction of this natural beauty but suddenly in the middle of this depiction he felt a stranger far from his roots and suddenly remembered Damascus I am now emotional I have remembered Damascus he remembered Damascus with great affection and nostalgia I'll start by reading some selected lines from the description of the natural beauty I'll stop when he remembered Damascus المتنبي in شعب بوان شعب could mean a road between mountains where he was travelling and the natural beauty and the birds and the trees and the flowers and the water etc مغان الشعب بيبا في المغان بمنزلة الربيع من الزمان ولكن الفتا العربية فيها غريب الوجه واليد واللسان ملاعب جنة ملاعب جنة لو صار فيها سليمان لسار بترجمان فصرت وقد حجبنا الشمس عني وجئنا من الضياء بما كفان قشرق منها في فياب دنانيرا تفرر من البناني لها ثمارون دعني أردت أن أردت الشمس لها ثمارون تشير إليك منه بأشربة وقفنا بلا أوان هل أنت قامت بذلك The drink was in no cups لها ثمارون تشير إليك منها وقفنا بلا أوان Let's hear the sound of the water وأمواهم تصلوا بها حصاها صلي للحلي في عيد الغوان The abodes of the valley in respect of delightfulness are in relation to all other abodes as spring among all other times But the Arab lad amidst them is a stranger in face, hand and tongue They are places of jins to play in If Solomon had journeyed to them he would have journeyed with an interpreter And I proceeded the branches veiling the sun from me and yet bringing me sufficient radiance and the orient sun cast from them upon my garments denies that fled from my fingers On the branches were fruits pointing to you sweet vines standing without vessels and there were waters in which the pebbles chinked on the hands of young girls Some great poets in situations like that suddenly they remember Damascus The great Ahmad Shoukri in his Zahla tribute after he said He switched and said ودي مشقو جنات النعيم Damascus is جنات النعيم Help Professor Halim جنات النعيم At that moment he switched and said ولو كان الدي مشقو ولو كان الدي مشقو ثناع ناني لبيق الثرد الصيني الجفان تحل به على قلب شجاع وترحل منه عن قلب جبان منازل منازل لم يزل منها خيال يشيعني الى النوبا ذجاني وقد يتقارب الوصفان وقد يتقارب الوصفان وقد يتقارب الوصفان جدا وموصوفه ما متباعدان يقول بشعب بوان حصان عن هذا يسار إلى الطعان أبوك مؤادم سن المعاصي أبوك مؤادم سن المعاصي وعلمكم مفارقة الجناني وإذا كانوا دماسكس سيكونوا راينز بشكل جنرس أفلونت من انتظر معه ومتباعد منه من خارجه خارجه شكرا لكم أبوك منها ومتباعد منها ومتباعد منك خامدهم أبوك منهم نقاعد النوبا ذجان أبوك مؤادم ومتباعد منهم ومتباعد منهم أبوك أبوك يجب أن يتبع كل العالم only for the sake of the children نحن now need to pray for peace يجب أن يقوم براءة جيدة و يا رب من أجل الطفولة وحدها أفضل بركات السلم شرقا ومغربا و رد الأذاء عن كل شعب و رد الأذاء عن كل شعب وإن يكون كفورا وأحبب هو إن كان مذنبا و صندحكة الأطفال و صندحكة الأطفال يا رب إنها إذا غردت في موحش الرملي أعشبا و يا رب حبب كلطفل و يا رب حبب كلطفل فلا يا را فلا يا را وإن لجه في الإعناتي وجها مقطبا وهيئ له في كل قلب صبابطا وهيئ له في كل قلب صبابطا و في كل لقيا مرحبا ثم مرحبا Oh God for the sake of the children alone may you make the blessing of peace flow east and west and may you prevent harm from all people even those who are ungrateful and love even those who are sinful Oh God for when the barren sand hears their singing it will be full of green grass and make every child be loved oh God and not let him see any frowning face no matter what he does make him find affection in every heart and welcoming faces everywhere he goes when we finish translating these five lines when Sarah said to me it sounded like a real prayer I said yes we want it to be a real prayer let's pray for peace شكرا I'm delighted that Sarah stepped in because we were saying we must have some women amongst all these speakers and some students yes and some students as well now it is really my great pleasure to introduce our player of the festival because of you Kennedy who will speak to us about the language of history and history and history we could not have found anyone to talk about this better than him Thank you very much and it's been a real trip down memory lane this evening for me in a sense that Arthur Arbery whose translations you've just been hearing I was his last pupil I believe and even more so and more relevant it is now almost 50 years since Professor Abdul Halim started to try to teach me Arabic I don't think I was a very good pupil because I'm still learning now and finding out things that I don't know and should have known and so on and so forth but what have I done with this education that I was given by such eminent scholars I've used it really throughout my career as a way of reading the great tradition of Arabic history writing the great tradition of Arabic historiography in the classical period in the pre-modern period which I think is one of the great historical traditions in the whole world and it contains such a wealth of wonderful details such a wealth of wonderful observation and so on in a way all human life is there and it's a source of endless fascination to me it's also an enormous and vast tradition I'm going to talk about two historians very very briefly the first is Abu Jaffa Tabari an old old friend of mine whose work I constantly refer to to return to and find new things in and the second Abu Ali Mosqueway Tabari died in 923 of the common era was an immensely industrious man he wrote a history of the Islamic world which dates from roughly it starts from the beginning of the world and goes through to his own time and this has now been translated into English and it comes out the English version in 38 printed volumes each of these volumes is more than 250 pages long and that was only half of what he wrote before he went on or he did it at the same time or before I can't remember he wrote a Tafsir of the Quran which is almost as long as his tariq what an immensely industrious man he was and you might think that the whole of this history would become sort of rather tedious sort of history that the famous Duke of Wellington called one damn thing after another just a procession of angels boring and melancholy events not so because Tabari uses the immense resources that were at his disposal the resources of literature he must have had access to his Baghdad at the time when it's the thriving heart it's the thriving metropolis of culture and civilization he must have had access to an enormous library of books we know a bit about how he found these books and so on and he takes stories and he chooses stories that illustrate the points he wants to make and people talk a lot about whether this history is reliable or not there's been a trend in western scholarship a part of which actually began here in Zas some years ago to be very critical of this historiography we can't believe it it's all a sort of sorry I'm being told I'm not hearing it's all a sort of it's all made up so to speak to make particular religious points and so on but when you actually read Tabari's history as well as his concern for detail and chronology as all good historians should have there's a wonderful concern for the human experience for people who behave well people who behave badly a section that I like to read with my students every year one or two of them I'm seeing here in fact about just the death of the caliph Alameen now this is a tiny fragment of in the year 813 when he was murdered by the troops supporting his brother it's only a tiny proportion of Tabari's great history a sort of a thousand perhaps of it but the way that when we read this carefully together we can see the way in which he uses it as a whole discussion of the human predicament the way the young caliph Alameen who has been portrayed in the early days as the rather ignorant boastful contrast to his brother Ahmed Moon and his father Haruna Rashid becomes in the story of his death something of a martyr something of a real life human being and I compare this when I'm introducing students to this to the whole discussion in Shakespeare's Player of Richard II about again a profligate arrogant young man who in his death days becomes a hero even a martyr and I'm very interested in the way in which Tabari and Shakespeare both come together and develop these themes of human experience and it's this whole richness this whole humanity of the tradition which I think is so inspiring and interesting my second historian Awali Miskawa is a less well known figure I think he's writing about 150 years after Tabari he chronicles the disintegration of the Abbasid caliphate with meticulous detail relying on eyewitness accounts and people whose works he read the story of human folly the story of how people make one bad decision after another and the violence and unhappiness that results from this but he does this not in the sense I think of condemning the participants not in the sense of making judgments about how foolish and stupid people are and so on but he does it as part of a real philosophical enquiry how should politicians behave well what makes for good government what do good people do when they have to make decisions that affect the future of nations and peoples and so on for the other book that Miskawa is famous for he wrote quite a lot of stuff but apart from his history is a book about أخلاق about morals it's a philosophical treatise about what the good life should be now Miskawa was without doubt a pious and God fearing Muslim but it's not a book about religious ethics it's a book that stresses what we might call humanistic ethics it stresses moderation in all things avoidance of unnecessary cruelty thinking what you're going to do in advance taking into account other people's motives and so on and he uses the rich and really rather terrifying and shocking in many ways the story of the historical events to make these ethical points not often he doesn't stress it he doesn't bang on about it so to speak and bring it up front but his story is the way he chooses the stories of peoples lives illustrate exactly the points about what should good men do in power what is good government what is bad government what leads you to disaster what leads you to success how can you benefit your fellow men so for all these reasons I find reasons that go way beyond actually establishing what dates things happened and who was where and so on I think that both these great historians are in a way great minds who make a profound and very interesting contribution to our investigation of the human condition the investigation of all our human conditions Ladies and gentlemen thank you very much and that we had you right at the end it's all joy and all pleasure thank you very much you know I am very pleased I am fully satisfied with this I was wondering at the beginning how it would work but we had these excellent speakers we have enough of you working here