Let’s be honest; yes, understanding Arabic is extremely important in the Deen; it gives you access to classicl scholarly works that have not been translated. and, to an extent, it gives you better access to the meanings of the Qur’an. But what it really gives you regarding the Qur’an, is appreciation of Allah’s Words, the unparalleled Divine eloquence of the Qur’an…in terms of understanding, though, what you get is more the linguistic meanings of the words.
Knowing Arabic does not mean you understand the Qur’an. The Sahabah, whose Arabic was at a level much higher than most Arabic speakers today, used to question Rasulullah ï·º all the time about what words and ayaat meant. And, indeed, much of the disagreements in Fiqh are due to different interpretations of the meanings of certain words.
What gives you understanding of the Qur’an is Tafsir, study of the the life of the Prophetï·º and the circumstances in which an ayah was revealed, studying the Sunnah and the Shari’ah.
Contrary to what most Arabic speakers believe, translations of the meaning of the Qur’an can, in fact, give someone a very good grasp of what Allah has Said. Indeed, if an Arabic speaker is reading the Qur’an, relying exclusively upon his own language to understand it (with no background in tafsir), I would suggest that he will probably fall short of someone reading a translation. Frankly, this is what has led many people to arrive at erroneous interpretations and sometimes fall into extremism and deviation…not because they do not understand Arabic, but because they do, but they do not understand the Qur’an. Because, obviously, the linguistic meanings of the words is not always the same as the Shar’i meaning.
Translations of the meaning of the Qur’an are not linguistic literal translations, they are derived from Tafsir, and, if you have not read a translation, you may not be aware, that they are full of parenthetical clarifications, footnotes, and commentaries. In other words, you are really studying the meanings
This is not at all meant to underestimate the importance of learning and understanding Arabic. Al-Hamdulillah, I can read the Qur’an in Arabic, and being able to do so, has benefited me more than I can say. But this is within the context of studying tafsir and the other areas of knowledge, without which, merely knowing Arabic would never enable someone to understand what the Qur’an says.