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Notes -
How does this work as a practical matter? How are modern people able to read a 1400-year-old version of Arabic?
Think of the Quran as the bedrock anchor to Arabic. All Muslims are expected to pray five times a day which involves reciting memorized surahs (basically short "chapters"). The more surahs you knew the better, and the most venerated achievement was memorizing the entire Quran (earning the title of Hafiz meaning "Protector"). So literacy was directly encouraged and maintained through this daily repetition and crucially this practice was never relegated to just a clergy caste (which doesn't really exist in Islam).
There's still going to be some linguistic drift over the years but it's necessarily going to stay banded to the Quran's version of Arabic. Think about how different English would sound today if all English speakers maintained a 1400 year old tradition of reciting original passages from Beowulf every day.
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