“If you read a medieval English or French text, for example, it is difficult to grasp its meaning,” observes Zeina Hashem Bec. But “Old texts written in Classical Arabic such as the Koran or ancient Arabic poetry remain fairly comprehensible to the average reader today because of their closeness to Modern Standard Arabic. Even the oldest Arabic inscription (328 A.D.), an epitaph from a tomb located about 100 kilometers southwest of Damascus called the Namara inscription, is extremely close to Classical Arabic.” As Bec reports in story for Beirut’s Daily Star, “debate is raging” in “the corridors of Arab academia” as a result: ” Why hasn’t Arabic drastically changed? Is there a need to make any changes to it? What are the suggested ways of altering, or as some put it, ‘modernizing’ it? And, is Arabic, like Latin before it, threatened by extinction?” Says one professor, “I don’t think that the Arabic language develops. It grows.” Says Bec, “it is getting quite tense.”