Ignoring English seems a little silly. Doesn't modern standard Arabic function as a lingua franca between people who natively speak something else (even if mutually unintelligible local Arabics)? That would explain it's popularity, but on those grounds English would be even more popular.
In completely unrelated news, Arabic is now the second most spoken language in Sweden. <https://digitaledition.chicagotribune.com/tribune/article_po...>