Most Muslims worldwide do not speak or understand Arabic

Evidence

In Arabic-speaking countries, certainly, the characterization of Arabic as the language of Islam (as of everything else) may be substantially true, but in so far as he speaks constantly of larger things (Asia and Africa, Commonwealth Literature, Rushdie and ‘the Khomeini threat’) it may be worth recalling that the vast majority of Muslims in the world neither speak nor understand Arabic. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 410

Categorization

• SHARE: A sharp corrective fact for anyone (like Said in this chapter) who equates Islam with Arabic — worth forwarding to someone working on religion and language.

Related

• Most of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims are not Arab (similarity 0.83)
• Arab Muslims claim authenticity from Quranic Arabic and dismiss African American religious authority (similarity 0.81)
• Islamic emphasis on literacy made enslaved West African Muslims literate in Arabic (similarity 0.80)
• Ibn Warraq argues Arabic fluency is unnecessary for valid critique of Islam. (similarity 0.80)
• Persian, not Arabic, was the classical literary language of late-medieval Islam (similarity 0.80)
• Arabic-speaking peoples defined themselves by Islamic loyalty rather than ethnicity (similarity 0.80)
• The Quran’s identity is bound to Arabic, making translations non-scriptural (similarity 0.80)
• Untranslatable Arabic aesthetics were read as proof of barbarism (similarity 0.79)
• Medieval Europeans could not distinguish the Qur’an from other Islamic books. (similarity 0.79)
• Arabist and Islamic studies resisted the revision that reformed other area studies (similarity 0.78)
• Classical Arabic is deliberately frozen by religious education while spoken dialects diverge freely. (similarity 0.78)