Before that he taught Arabic at Bayreuth University in Germany, The American University in Cairo, and Brown University. He published seven translations from English into Arabic of introductions to linguistics and its subfields. His main field of research is the history and development of the Arabic language. He published five articles and encyclopedia lemmas on the subject. He has two books on the history of Arabic. In 2007, he published The Arabicization of the Middle East: An introduction in Arabic. A second edition of this book is now in press. In 2010, he published with Brill academic publishers The Ecology of Arabic. In addition, he published in 2014 and 2016 histories of Modern Standard Arabic and pre-Islamic Arabic in monographs, which came along several articles in peer reviewed journals.