Modern Standard Arabic (MSA; Arabic: اللغة العربية الفصحى‎ al-luġatu l-ʿarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā "the most eloquent Arabic language"), Standard Arabic, or Literary Arabic is the standard and literary variety of Arabic used in writing and in most formal speech.

Most western scholars distinguish two standard (al-)fuṣ-ḥā (الفصحى) varieties of the Arabic language: the Classical Arabic (CA) (اللغة العربية التراثية) of the Qur'an and early Islamic (7th to 9th centuries) literature, and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) (اللغة العربية المعيارية الحديثة), the standard language in use today. The modern standard language is based on the Classical language. Most Arabs consider the two varieties to be two registers of one language, although the two registers can be described in Arabic as فصحى العصر fuṣḥā l-ʿaṣr (MSA) and فصحى التراث fuṣḥā t-turāṯ (CA).

Classical Arabic, also known as Qur'anic Arabic, is the language used in the Qur'an as well as in numerous literary texts from Umayyad and Abbasid times (7th to 9th centuries).

Ahdaf Soueif (Arabic: أهداف سويف‎) (born March 23, 1950) is an Egyptian novelist and political and cultural commentator.

Soueif was born in Cairo and educated in Egypt and England. She studied for a PhD in linguistics at the University of Lancaster. ‎ Her debut novel, In the Eye of the Sun (1993), set in Egypt and England, recounts the maturing of Asya, a beautiful Egyptian who, by her own admission, "feels more comfortable with art than with life." Her second novel The Map of Love (1999) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, has been translated into 21 languages and sold over a million copies.^{[citation needed]} She has also published two works of short stories, Aisha (1983) and Sandpiper(1996) - a selection from which was combined in the collection I Think Of You in 2007, and Stories Of Ourselves in 2010.

Soueif writes primarily in English, but her Arabic-speaking readers say they can hear the Arabic through the English.^{[citation needed]} She translated Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah (with a foreword by Edward Said) from Arabic into English.

Hanan al-Shaykh (b. November 12, 1945, Beirut) is a Lebanese author of contemporary Arab women's literature.

Hanan al-Shaykh's family background is that of a strict Shi'a family. Her father and brother exerted strict social control over her during her childhood and adolescence. She attended the Almillah primary school for Muslim girls where she received a traditional education for Muslim girls, before continuing her education at the Ahliyyah school. She continued her gender-segregated education at the American Girls College in Cairo, Egypt, graduating in 1966.

She returned to Lebanon to work for the Lebanese newspaper Al-Nahar until 1975. She left Beirut again in 1975 at the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War and moved to Saudi Arabia to work and write there. She now lives in London with her family.

Hanan al-Shaykh's literature follows in the footsteps of contemporary Arab women authors like Nawal El Saadawi in that it explicitly challenges the roles of women in the traditional social structures of the Arab Middle East. Her work is heavily influenced by the patriarchal controls that were placed on her by not only her father and brother, but within traditional neighborhood in which she was raised. As a result, her work is a manifestation of a social commentary on the status of women in the Arab-Muslim world. She challenges notions of sexuality, obedience, modesty, and familiar relations in her work.

Nouman Ali Khan is a Muslim speaker and the CEO and founder of Bayyinah, an Islamic educational institution in the United States.

His early education in Arabic started under in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and continued in Pakistan. His serious Arabic training began in 1999 in the United States. He has been teaching Modern Standard and Classical Arabic at various venues for several years with over 10,000 students nationwide. Nouman Ali Khan teaches about the religion of Islam through his video speeches. He also frequently speaks at Islamic Circle of North America Conventions about Islam, family, and other life topics.