Arabic: An Essential Grammar by Faruk Abu-Chacra

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Arabic: An Essential Grammar by Faruk Abu-Chacra (2018) is a fair guide for beginners to Arabic grammar, although it is extremely overpriced ($48 USD on Amazon right now) for the value that it offers.

Learners wishing to master Arabic grammar should content themselves with the fact that they should read at least half a dozen Arabic grammar books before they can gain a reasonable handle on the highly intricate and confusing system that is Arabic grammar. This book would be a reasonable choice among others.

The book suffers from many errors in its Arabic orthography. It also suffers from the fact that lines that contain Arabic mixed with English have a much wider line-spacing compared to lines that contain only English, giving the text a very uneven look. Below is an example taken from the book preview on Google Books:

Another issue is that the section hints on the right (the text in the gray box shown above) seem to be entirely misplaced and have no relationship with the actual text.

The book, like many other grammar books, also suffers from using an unsatisfactory transliteration system. I wish all English books dealing with Arabic would start using the Brill system.

Additionally, on page 265 an Arabic phrase is erroneously said to be in the Quran:

The phrase la-ʿaḍīm actually never occurs in the Quran.

Science in the Islamic world grew at the fastest rate in 2018

The Scimago Journal & Country Rank numbers for 2018 are in and they show tremendous growth among some of the the 11 top scientific publishers among the Muslim-majority countries. The increase in the number of scientific papers published in 2018 was 44,616, which is almost twice the highest growth recorded over the past 22 years.

Iran continues to be the top scientific publisher in the Islamic world, followed by Turkey and Indonesia. The numbers do not include the scientific output of India’s 200 million Muslims.

The greatest growth came from Indonesia, which went from 18683 papers in 2017 to 31708 papers in 2018 (an increase of 13025 papers). The second highest growth came from Egypt (+5016 papers), and the third highest from Iraq (+4087).

The Islamic world is now publishing more science than either Germany, France or the United Kingdom. If the rate of growth over the past 10 years is maintained, the Islamic world will surpass the United States by 2036 assuming there is no significant growth among these Western countries (which is a reasonable assumption).

Of course, the quality of the papers published by Muslim countries is not as high as those published in more advanced countries, but that too should be expected to improve over time.

Source for the data: The Scimago Journal & Country Rank

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