On Feb. 8, the External Relations Staff at NYU Abu Dhabi announced that Senior Lecturer of Arabic Nasser Isleem has recently launched MAWARIDARABIYYA, a one-stop website for Arabic learning.

“Mawarid” means source or resources in Arabic, and the platform aims to serve learners and teachers of the language by providing authentic learning materials in the Modern Standard variation, other dialects and Arab cultural knowledge, etc. Unlike other websites, the online platform also lists information on scholarships and study abroad programs where students can further increase their language proficiency.

“I have been exposed to many students and a lot of students come always with the questions either about ‘where should we study Arabic abroad’ or ‘we need a good program’... MAWARIDARABIYYA is in part [created] because we thought that we can put a lot of good tips and resources for our students and even teachers to look at,” explained Professor Isleem.

Isleem created the platform in collaboration with two other experienced Arabic teachers: Associate Professor and Director of Asian Studies at the College of Charleston Ghazi Abuhakema, with whom Isleem has previously collaborated in writing books for learning Arabic, and professor of Arabic language Mohamed Ansary, who was more involved in the technical side of website development.

The trio of educators discovered a need for a comprehensive platform of resources when they noticed that currently existing language learning websites mostly addressed singular aspects such as teaching a specific dialect. They knew that many open-source resources were readily available, so they took upon themselves to collate everything into MAWARIDARABIYYA.

It took them around a year to prepare and launch the website, yet Isleem emphasized that it is not a finished product. In fact, the time constantly invites other learners and professors of Arabic to contribute resources that they find helpful.

“It’s not going to stop [at] this limit, we will be adding information as it comes to us and as we see [it is] important and suitable for the public,” Isleem shared.

Moving forward, Isleem hopes that more people will get to know and use MAWARIDARABIYYA. Along with several other professors of Arabicputting a link to the site on their course syllabi so that students can surf the site and benefit from it.

“We’d love to reach out to as many learners and professors as we can,” Isleem said. “We hope that these users will find it easy, comfortable and beneficial for all.”