BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN

ISLAMIC countries should further integrate the learning of Arabic language into their education systems to produce more scholars who could proficiently comprehend Islamic manuscripts and better relay their findings to others.

Such need arises following the need to wholly understand Islamic teachings through the Quran and Al-Hadith instead of just taking its meaning literally, words by words, said Islamic scholars on the sidelines of a recent regional conference in University Islam Sultan Sharif Ali (UNISSA).

Professor Dato Dr Sayyid Muhammad Aqiel Ali Al-Mahdaly Al-Husainy from Insaniah University College in Malaysia said that learning Arabic would help scholars better understand the thoughts of past Ulamas as most of their works are originally written in Arabic.

He said that although some of these works had been translated, it would still better to comprehend its Arabic version as translations could be inaccurate and may not capture the whole idea of what the writer wanted to relay.

The way people comprehend scholarly works today, he said, is better from those in the past as there has been various manuscripts, especially from the Greek has been translated and are widely available.

“People today have better ability to comprehend deep understanding of scholarly thoughts and ideas; and learning Arabic could help better them (experience) the knowledge first-hand, between them and the writer,” he said.

However, he also said that being able to comprehend these works were not enough as it also needs to be accurately translated and relayed in the language that the people around the scholars could understand.

He said this was because the point in understanding such was to be able to spread the knowledge to others, so more people could understand and “think” of the rationale behind such thought.

“So understanding the language itself would also not necessarily mean that they will be able to relay the thoughts and ideas well,” he said.

The Brunei Times