Some people argue that you don’t need to learn grammar when learning a language, that it’s possible—even better—to pick up grammar passively. While this might be true for some languages, it’s decidedly not the case for Arabic. In Arabic, a lot of things won’t make sense unless you actively learn the grammar.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

There’s a sentence structure in Arabic that starts with لا بد. This structure is used to say that something must happen. For example, a very famous poem has this verse: إذا الشعب يومًا أراد الحياة / فلا بد أن يستجيب القدر (If the people one day desired to live / then fate must answer their call).

I was doing some research into the grammar of this sentence structure, and I found comments made by many people that were in conflict with each other. This is because in this sentence structure, you can also add a preposition: لا بد من أن يستجيب القدر.

Why is there a preposition? It seems unnecessary. And is there a time you need to add it, and a time you can’t?

If you don’t try to understand the structure of this sentence—why this happens—you might throw your hands in the air and proclaim that Arabic is difficult and doesn’t make sense. But Arabic is a very structural language.

And this brings me to my next point:

Arabic has a concept of the “origin of a sentence”.

What does this mean?

Imagine you have a formula: XY = Z; Y = A + B; therefore, X(A+B) = Z. You can see that Y is the same as A + B, so A + B take the place of Y in the formula. However, the original structure is XY = Z.

In Arabic, it’s important to know the structural origin of a sentence, what its base formula is. This is central to understanding Arabic grammar.

This is the structural origin of our sentence: لا بد من استجابة القدر. In fact, it even makes more sense when translated literally. لا بد means “[there’s] no escape”. Here, it is clear what the sentence is saying: “[There’s] no escape from fate answering.” This is the literal translation.

So how does this morph into لا بد أن يستجيب القدر (literally, “[There’s] no escape that fate answers”)?

The word استجابة is a مصدر. A مصدر is a verbal noun, but literally the word مصدر translates to “source”. The مصدر often exists in the original structure but changes to something else in the actual sentence. It’s often replaced by أنْ + a verb. This أنْ is called أنْ المصدرية. So استجابة changes to أن يستجيب.

Now we have لا بد من أن يستجيب القدر. This sentence is correct, because it follows the grammar rules of the original structure. However, the preposition is unnecessary. It’s just a remnant of the original structure, and here it has no function. It has no noun following it. Therefore, you can remove it. And this is a rule: a preposition can be removed when it’s followed by أنْ. This is just another way of saying that if you have a preposition + verbal noun and you change the verbal noun into أنْ + verb, the preposition loses its function and can be omitted.

So now you know why you don’t need a preposition in this sentence structure, and also why sometimes the preposition shows its head even though it wasn’t invited to the party.

PS: If you’re interested in this kind of in-depth grammatical analysis, you can check out my blog: arabic-in-depth.com/blog