A Brief Description of the Question: 

Why is the language of the Quran Arabic? How can we answer those who regard this as nationalism? Does the fact that our Prophet (pbuh) originated from the Arab culture overshadow the universality of Islam? Do they all express a culture? Is it not better if we read the translation of the Quran?

The Answer: 

To write about the issue in detail is beyond our “question and answer” style; it is necessary to write a book or a very long article to give a detailed answer. Therefore, we find it sufficient to point out some aspects of the issue as far as  weknow. 

a. The language of the Prophet (PBUH) to whom the Quran was sent down as revelation was Arabic. If the Quran had been sent down to Hazrat Muhammad (PBUH) in another language, he would not have understood it. Could it have been possible for a prophet who was appointed to convey and explain a book that he could not understand to convey and explain it to others?  

The following verses attract attention to the issue: “We sent not a messenger except (to teach) in the language of his (own) people, in order to make (things) clear to them”(Ibrahim, 14/4), “Had We sent this as a Qur'an (in a language) other than Arabic, they would have said: "Why are not its verses explained in detail? What! (a Book) not in Arabic and (a Messenger) an Arab?"?” (Fussilat, 41/44) 
b. The Quran had to be sent down to a certain place and environment like the other books and pages of Allah. That is, it is contrary to the laws of Allah to send down books like rain in all of the languages at the same time to address all human beings. The Torah had to be sent down in Hebrew because the first people it was sent to spoke Hebrew; similarly, the Quran had to be sent in Arabic to Arabs, the first people to be addressed. 

c. One of the differences of the Quran from the other heavenly books is that it is a miracle in terms of its style and words. The divine wisdom gave Arabic a special characteristic and vastness – different from the other languages – in the course of history so that the extraordinary rhetoric, unique fluency and unmatched beauty would be understood by Arabs, the first people to be addressed. To this end, Arabs were brought up as an illiterate nation; they had to memorize their historical achievements because they were unable to write them. They had use aphorisms and figures of speech like parables, metonymies, metaphors and similes in order to record history in their heads. 

That system took poetry and rhetoric to an unmatched peak in Arabs among the human communities. That property made Arabs understand that the Quran is a word beyond the power of humans. Therefore, hundreds of thousands of people had to bow down to the rhetoric of the Quran. The majority of them could not resist against the unmatched style of the Quran any more and adopted Islam. Even those who did not accept Islam due to some social, cultural and economic reasons had to confess the beauty of the unmatched style of the expression of the Quran. They tried to get away with it by calling that miracle “magic” because they did not want to abandon the religion of their fathers.   

It is understood from those explanations that one of the reasons why the Quran was sent down in Arabic is the special position of the language of Arabic – which had the ability to reflect the wonder of the Quran, which is a mental, spiritual and lingual miracle.

d. Another reason in terms of wisdom can be this: The position of the language used by the Quran, which is a universal revelation, which addresses the whole mankind and which will be valid until the Day of Judgment, is very important. Arabic, which has a wide comprehension that makes it possible for words to have different meanings, which has a laconic style to express many meanings with few words, which has an aesthetic art that contain subtleties to reflect figurative and lexical meanings, logic and concepts, open and hidden meanings, has deserved to be the language of the Quran – which is a universal revelation.

e. It should not be forgotten that the same questions would be valid no matter in which language the Quran was sent down. In fact, the revelation had to be sent in one of the languages used by human beings.