Quranic Arabic Is a Form of Cultural & Linguistic Imperialism

I recently had a deep discussion with several of my Muslim friends while road tripping across China. We covered a topic I'd never heard discussed: why is the Quran only recitable in Arabic? My Muslim friends do not speak or understand Arabic, and yet all their prayers and recitations must be done in Arabic. This is doubly confusing to me because the Quran itself claims that Allah revealed himself to each nation in their own language. The vast majority of modern Muslims are not Arabs, and yet they're forced to reduce their native languages to second-class secular status while elevating Arabic to the position of a holy language. It sounds like a clear example of Arab cultural imperialism.

It feels like Arabs believe their language to be superior, and that everyone needs to learn their language in order to be pleasing to God. This is the purest form of cultural chauvinism: "Our language is divinely favored by God." It's hard to imagine anything more ethnocentric than claiming that your language is divinely superior: "You cannot truly approach God unless you speak my language, and you cannot read God's revelation without reading my language."

Even at the height of European imperialism, the colonial powers never claimed that conquered peoples needed to learn English or French to approach God or read the Bible. Arab imperialism, however, was so complete that they eventually convinced the populations they conquered that religious rites were only acceptable to God when done in the Arabic language.

One of my friends told me a story about how he met some Arab Muslims who looked down on him after addressing him in Arabic and realizing he didn't understand what they were saying. They asked him disdainfully how he could call himself a Muslim and not know Arabic. I could hear the hurt in his voice as he recalled their comment.

I told them that, as a Christian, I would never want something as simple as language to stand in the way of people approaching God. My friends told me about how they read the Quran all the time but can't understand it. One of them actually memorized the entire Quran in his childhood madrassa, and yet he didn't understand what he'd memorized. I told them I'd finished the Quran in English, and they all agreed that I certainly knew more about its contents than they did.

Islam is essentially a parochial Arabian religion that expanded after the Arab conquests. The language of the conquerors was then proclaimed to be the religious language required to please God. Contrast this top-down cultural imperialism with the very different stories of Christianity and Buddhism. Jesus likely spoke Aramaic when preaching, but the New Testament was first written in Greek. On the day of Pentecost, the apostles spoke every language via the Holy Spirit so that the gospel was proclaimed in everyone's native tongue. The Catholic church used Vulgate Latin as their holy language for a thousand years. Missionaries have always considered the creation of a new Bible translation to be a crucial step in evangelizing a new culture. Similar things could be said of Buddhism and its missionary activities in Asia.

Why do most Muslims tolerate this kind of cultural subjugation? Why do Muslims living on the subcontinent, for example, tolerate their native Persian or Urdu being treated as inferior to the language of the Arab conquerors who decimated their native cultures and forced a new religion on them? Is it not humiliating to be forced to recite prayers in a language one doesn't even understand? God is the God of all nations and tongues, he does not require those who approach him to use a specific language.

There is nothing superior about the Arabic language, it's a flawed language like all other languages. Arabic is not special, and I find it offensive that Muslims believe that the whole world needs to follow a book that can only be written in a foreign language. Arabic is among the many remaining vestiges of the Arab's now collapsed colonial empire. Muslims should throw off the chain of Arabic and approach God in their native tongues.