From Henry Martyn to Samuel Zwemer, the Christian Church has produced a notable series of missionary Arabists—notable but always too few. The tasks of each generation fall, justly and inevitably, upon the representatives of each. We in ours have great need of the consecrated scholarship which knows that dictionaries and diction, vocabulary and syntax, have much to do with the faith of “the Word made flesh.” Fascinating fields of study and of achievement are open to those who can find their way from the kingdom of God to a grammar and back again to the kingdom.
—Kenneth Cragg, The Call of the Minaret, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oneworld, 2000), 183
