Modern Arabic: The Arab-European Encounter: An Advanced Course for Foreign Students Review

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Modern Arabic: The Arab-European Encounter: An Advanced Course for Foreign Students ReviewI recommend this Arabic text for students at the upper intermediate level or higher not because it is not without flaws but because it retains the reader's interest. The author uses excerpts of renowned authors to good effect. However, the title of Modern Arabic is a bit misleading as the excerpts, from the first half of the book at least, are from medieval texts (Ibn Munqidh, Ibn Jubayr, Idrissi) which are very interesting but hardly constitute Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). In fact, among the tasks students are asked to accomplish is to rewrite the excerpts using simple MSA. Dr. Attar provides parenthetical glosses curiously, however, inasmuch as phrases or terms easy to translate are often provided but arcane or obsolete phrases or terms are sometimes omitted. It would have been even better to provide, with respect to the Medieval texts, a gloss that provides the Modern Standard Arabic equivalent of archaic terms and phrases.
I found strictly grammatical exercises and the modern dialogues to be a less useful component of the book. However, what I found more objectionable were the Western texts that appeared in English. I would have found it more beneficial from the standpoint of Arabic language learning to have had these texts translated in Arabic. If you are using the text for Arabic language learning, you'll just skip over these Western texts. The author includes material in English on Marco Polo's travels to the East; why not have had in place or in addition excerpts from the travel of Ibn Batuta in Arabic?
The lessons are contained in a monumental 500 pages. A further 139 English-Arabic, Arabic-English dictionary follows. Unfortunately, although a lot of effort obviously went into its preparation, I didn't find this resource particularly useful having access to Hans Wehr Arabic-English and the Oxford English-Arabic Dictionary. I think the author would have been better served to have glosses at the end of each of the chapters covering more unusual/difficult words rather than re-inventing the dictionary. More space would have been available for further excerpts in Arabic and the author might have considered having model answers to at least some of the exercises included in an appendix in the back of the book.
All these critical comments should be considered as quibbles. The book is great. If the author decides to write a second edition, however, I would hope she would take these well meant criticisms into account.
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