How good was Anthony Eden’s knowledge of the Arabic language?

How good was Anthony Eden’s knowledge of the Arabic language?

Is learning Arabic useless?

I have tried to learn Arabic. I studied it for about 3 years. So it is the result:

I can understand Qur’an around 90%.

I can understand news, newspapers, books around 90%.

I can understand around 70–80% when they speak in MSA on TV, radio, news etc…

But when I hear native speakers speaking it in dialects, I can understand almost nothing.

Although I also studied Egyptian Arabic and Levanten Arabic, I still can understand almost nothing except for a few words.

It is your choice whether learning Arabic is useful or useless.

For me, the only thing that makes me happy about learning Arabic is that I can understand around 90% of Qur’an, now.

Nothing else, sorry.

Robert Anthony Eden, 1st Earl of Avon (1897-1977) | OGL

How good was Anthony Eden’s knowledge of Arabic?

Imagine if you will an erudite Arab potentate, hoping to impress the President of the United States with his deep knowledge of English. The foreigner shakes Donald Trump’s hand and recites randomly from The Canterbury Tales.

That’s the reverse of what transpired in 1955 when Anthony Eden met Gamal Abdel Nasser. Eden spoke a version of classical Arabic so formal and refined that it sounded archaic to ears attuned to the vernacular. The British prime minister astonished the Egyptian strongman by reciting Arab poetry. It was their first and only meeting, and it did not end well.

The First World War had interrupted Eden’s education. In 1915 Eden left Eton and volunteered for service in the British army. He was eighteen when he accepted a lieutenant’s commission in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. Eden received the Military Cross for gallantry at the Battle of the Somme, and ended the war a brigade major at twenty.

In October 1919 Anthony Eden enrolled at Christ Church College, Oxford, and busied himself studying Oriental Languages. He discovered an affinity for Persian. It was a language Eden loved.

“Persian is the Italian of the East and appealed to me most,” he explains in Full Circle: The Memoirs of Anthony Eden. “Oxford Schools then required two languages, so I decided to make Persian my main language and Arabic my secondary one.”