Acts17apologetics feel discriminated against; Quran had to be in Arabic?

In answer to the video "Why the Quran Was Revealed in Arabic (David Wood)"

In the ancient world, populations were most often scattered in clusters of clans and small villages with a main town close by. When warners were sent, they concentrated their efforts in the mother town so as to reach the surrounding populations more effectively 28:59. When time came for the final message to be sent to mankind, Arabia was most suited to be the place from whence the final expression of the truth would emanate from. It enjoyed a central geostrategic position with regard to the known world at that time. It had been surrounded for long by a belt of ancient civilizations; the Egyptian civilization in the west, the Phoenicians and Assyrians in the north, the Babylonians, Persians and the Indus Valley civilizations in the north-east and east. Further in that direction laid the Chinese civilization.

Arabia in ancient times was thus very much in the middle of the then “civilized” world. Only in that obscure and unbothered land of Arabia could a new state-community with a fresh ideology arise and establish itself, before the intervention of the neighboring superpowers. At the time of Islam's advent, they were the Christian Roman empire of Heraclius I and the Zoroastrian Persian empire of Chosroe II.

In 1350, the estimated population of the earth was 370 million. We are now in the 7 billion, meaning the dramatic growth of mankind has essentially occurred 600 plus years after the death of the Prophet. 4 billion+ of that population exists in Asia alone, meaning right by the Middle East. The major influx of the population of humanity has been in contact with the Abrahamic movement since the time of the Prophet and even before, through the Israelites. Through these growing demographics and population movements, Africa and Europe were also exposed, with South America coming fourth when its population started swelling in the 1500s through European influx. So when it comes to being a region to remind men of the final reckoning there can be no better place than the Middle East.

Interestingly, when the first human civilization appeared, God sent in it His first messenger with a global mission. Mesopotamia, the nation from which Abraham came, is really considered one of, if not the first civilization of mankind and the Hammurabi codes, which is considered the first real legal document, arose from this nation.

The point is, when civilization reached a stage where it was set to become a global culture, the prophetic mission turned global. This is why Abraham became the spiritual imam for all of humanity 2:124. The prophetic mission then took on a collective capacity with the Israelites first and, after their divine destruction and removal from the covenant, the Ishmaelites took on this mission. This is precisely why, when Abraham fulfilled the vision of sacrifice, God promised to bless his descendants as nations.

The language itself of Arabia was most suited for the transmission of the Quranic message

12:2,41:3,26:191-196"The Faithful Spirit has descended with it, Upon your heart that you may be of the warners. In plain Arabic language. And most surely the same is in the scriptures of the ancients".

Past Revelations sent to different locations and cultures always conformed to the language of the primary addressees

41:44,43:3,14:4"And We did not send any messenger but with the language of his people, so that he might explain to them clearly"  

Ezek3:4-5"And He said to me; "Son of man, go, come to the house of Israel and speak to them with My words. For it is not to a people of an unfathomable language and a heavy tongue that you are sent, [but] to the house of Israel".

Every messenger only spoke to his people with their own language, not a foreign one otherwise they might misunderstand

"so that he might explain to them clearly".

This doesnt exclude that the messenger might speak the language of another people or that he might be sent to a foreign nation. This was Yunus/Jonah's case, an Israelite who went to the neighboring Assyrian kingdom as very briefly related in Jonah1-4 but also prophecied among his own people 2Kings14:25. The Quran doesnt say the knowledge of Arabic is a prerequisite to understand it. It says it had to be sent in Arabic because its primary addressees spoke Arabic 26:198-9,42:7,41:44. A non-Arab approaching the Quran in another language than Arabic is perfectly able to understand it, depending on the quality of the translation. The one approaching the Arabic text obviously needs to master Arabic to understand it and translate it. He must be careful in his choice of words so as to try and catch a succinctly as possible the semantic nuances of a word without upsetting any theological concept.

This is no different for a Biblical scholar mastering the intricacies of Greek to aid a study of the Septuagint or learning Latin to grasp later Latin vulgates.

Revelation is not the prerogative of any race, culture or language. All languages are a blessing from God and He has dispersed His creation throughout the planet by equipping them with the use of varying tongues 30:22. The Quran appeals in most of its themes to human emotions because it is the most universal of languages. One of the main reasons the Quran has such an appeal across linguistic, cultural, and temporal divides precisely is because it conveys its message in a way that people can relate to on a basic, universal level. Its message resonates in the emotions and inner genetic spiritual fabric of mankind and that is why it keeps making sense to people from so many different cultures, across time. Translation captures the WHAT but not the HOW of a statement. It may give a sense of what is being said but not how the Speaker conveyed the speech. And it is precisely the eloquence of the Quran that mostly impacted the Arabs. This aspect will forever remain lost in translation, locked in the original language.

Besides the language, there are other things people need to become acquainted with when approaching any ancient writing, so as to avoid any misunderstandings and be able to appreciate the intent behind the words and references. The Quran for instance uses references relevent to the people of the location in which it was revealed. These references might not be necessarily known or experienced by all people of the world but their implicit meanings can still be appreciated if one studies how the primary addressees experienced these references.

For example sometimes in the context of provoking gratefulness, it turns the attention to the availability of all kinds of fruits. The ones it names were typically appreciated by the Arabs of the Hijaz, like olives, dates and grapes 16:11. A foreign reader, as he gets acquainted with the culture of those first addressed by the Quran, can still appreciate the verse's portents by transposing his own taste of fruits with their tastes. There are several other examples, as in 16:81 saying how garments may be used to protect from the heat, and this is because the verse's primary addressees were desert dwellers.

The description again, is not absolute; it doesnt mean garments cannot be used for warmth, since the Arabs also experienced the harsh cold of the night and used these garments for warmth.

As regards the Arabic language, it had several advantages as opposed to the dominant languages of commerce and intellectual discourse of the time; Latin, Greek, Persian, Hebrew. These were so interwoven as media for the communication of various thought systems that they became unsuitable for the transmission of Islamic concepts. The Abrahamic legacy prior to Islam was polluted by the integration of such languages in the course of its transmission.

Only a language free from false theological notions could bring back the Abrahamic legacy to its original intent. It is known and argued by the masters of the language since al Farabi that the Qurayshi dialect, due to its centralizing position in Arabia, had reached the peak of eloquence by acquiring the best of other tribes' speech patterns and poems. The Quraysh used to deny the inclusion into their dialect, of expressions found among tribes bordering non-Arabic lands. Arabic in the time of the prophet counted many dialects, with the most dominant being his own language, that of the Quraysh. The Quran states about itself, over and over that it is in a clear Arabic language, devoid of any crookedness. It does not specify which Arabic. A study clearly reveals that it possesses mainly the features of the Qurayshi dialect, in addition to several others spoken in the Hijaz and Najd. It is this characteristic, the fact that it was expressed in the centralizing dialect of the most influencing tribe, but allowed enough flexibility so as to integrate other dialects, that made the Quran understandable to all tribes; clear Arabic. 

The Arabic of the Quraysh in particular had developed to such a level that it could transmit any verbalized message, no matter how abstract the idea. The Quran therefore was in no need to borrow any word or concept to convey any of its themes.  That notion is in fact rejected, when it points in derogatory manner to the foreign tongue of one man who was at some point suspected of being the prophet's teacher 16:103. Not only was the accusation faulty from a linguistic perspective, his foreign tongue could never have inspired the matchless Arabic of the Quran, which the Arab masters of the language themselves recognized could not equal in eloquence, but was also faulty from a deeper cultural and theological viewpoint.

None of the words and concepts conveyed in the Quran can be said to have been influenced by the ideological currents of the region. Even the foreign theologies and philosphies to the Arabs, those now deemed closest to Islam and that penetrated deep inside the peninsula, from Judaism's monolatry to Christianity's dying god incarnate, have no effect from near or far, to any of the tenets of the Quran. Also, the accusation as quoted in the Quran is that this foreign person was actively interracting with the prophet, communicating and teaching him yet he was a non Arabic speaker so how could the two have such elaborate exchanges, in addition without ever being noticed? The Quran answers that accusation in a very appropriate way; given that the person they were pointing to spoke unintelligibly (aajami is used buy the Arabs for a language they could not understand) how could the prophet learn any of the stories found in the Quran from him, then reproduce that information accurately in a language they can understand? It is the same as saying that Einstein heard a toddler explaining the theory of relativity, then reproduced that information correctly in a language any physicist would recognize. This calumny was not grounded in any reality, like many other contradictory claims the prophet's opponents used in order to tarnish his well established integrity, in the same manner as prophets before him were unjustly targeted.