Re: Allah - the Moon God
- From: rick murphy <RichardTRMurphy@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2008 09:06:45 -0700 (PDT)
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-alameddine6apr06,0,4186700.story
'Allah' vs. 'God'
Using English to separate the two has become a dangerous practice.
By Rabih Alameddine
April 6, 2008
All living languages are promiscuous. We promiscuous speakers
shamelessly shoplift words, plucking bons mots and phrases from any
tempting language. We wear these words when we wish to be more formal,
more elegant, more mysterious, worldly, precise, vague. They flash on
our fingers like gaudy rings, adorn our hair, warm our necks like rich
foreign scarves. They become our favorite trousers, the shoes we
cannot live without, our way of describing illness to our doctors,
declaring love to our lovers, formulating policies, doing business. We
believe we own them and are frequently astonished to discover their
original roots in another language.
English, a mongrel (of mixed breed, nature, or origin) from the start,
greedily helps itself to foreign words more than any other. The Oxford
English Dictionary lists more than 500,000 of them, whereas German has
about 185,000 and French fewer than 100,000, according to "The Story
of English" by Robert McCrum, William Cran and Robert MacNeil. Give us
your tired, your poor, your fabulous words yearning to be free. We'll
take them.
English has always had a special fondness for other European
languages, a neighborly soft spot -- perhaps because Britain has been
invaded by speakers of those languages from the onset of its recorded
history.
But not so much fondness for the languages of non-neighbors. Despite
huge increases in immigration from Africa and Asia in the last 50
years, English has resisted adopting words from these continents,
except for the names of certain foods. Think of Mandarin words that
have come into the language. How about from Tagalog? ("Kowtow,"
"shanghai" and "typhoon" from Mandarin; "boondocks" and "yo-yo" from
Tagalog.)
So whenever I come across an Arabic word mired in English text, I am
momentarily shocked out of the narrative. Of course, English has
pilfered numerous bits of Arabic -- "artichoke," "zero," "genie,"
"henna," "saffron," "harem," "tariff" -- but the appropriation was so
long ago that few English speakers know the words' origin. These
dictionary entries were probably introduced by the Moors into Spanish
first, and then by the Spaniards into English.
What has Arabic done for us lately?
If we take away the familiar food pilferages ("hummus," "falafel"),
words recently adopted from Arabic are all troublesome: "hijab,"
"intifada," "fatwa" and "jihad." For an English speaker, the first
suggest humiliation, the last three violence.
In Arabic, the word "hijab" means any type of veil or cover. The
American Heritage Dictionary defines it as "the head scarf worn by
Muslim women, sometimes including a veil that covers the face except
for the eyes." In Arabic, "intifada" denotes rebellion, a throwing off
of shackles. Merriam-Webster's definition is an armed uprising of
Palestinians against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza
Strip. "Fatwa" isn't simply a religious decree; it's an Islamic
religious decree. Even though a fatwa could be an exhortation by, say,
a Moroccan cleric to raise literacy for women, in English, it is used
almost exclusively in reference to the ignominious Salman Rushdie
affair, in which former Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
ordered the death of the novelist because of Rushdie's alleged
blasphemy in his novel, "The Satanic Verses."
And "jihad" comes from the word "excel," juhd or ijtihad in Arabic. It
means a holy war or righteous struggle. Some schools in the Middle
East, religious and secular, will hold jihads -- or special intense
programs to get students to accomplish something -- to improve math
scores and raise reading levels. Although most English usage I've come
across refers only to an Islamic holy war, I have begun to see "jihad"
as a synonym for crusade (originally a Christian holy war, broadened
now) and a vigorous fight against something. In other words, jihad,
this English word, might one day encompass its full Arabic meaning.
English has yet to incorporate these words fully, and history suggests
it might never do so. The language is filled with words that are
culture specific: "sahib," "coolie," "effendi," "bey." The word "emir"
simply means prince in Arabic, but in English it is a prince or ruler
of an Islamic state. When my sister in Beirut tells her daughter a
bedtime story, the emir kisses the sleeping princess awake. No mother
in the U.S. or Britain would let an emir anywhere near a princess'
lips. No princess will ever sing "Someday My Emir Will Come."
That in some ways is how it should be. Language, after all, is
organic. You can't force words into existence. You can't force new
meanings into words. And some words can't or won't or shouldn't be
laundered or neutered. Language develops naturally.
I bring all this up, however, to get to the word whose connotation I
would love to see changed -- "Allah."
Allah means God.
In Arabic, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians all pray to
Allah. In English, however, Christians and Jews pray to God, and Allah
is the Muslim deity. No one would think of using the word "Allah" to
talk about any other religion. The two words, "God" and "Allah," do
not mean the same thing in English. They should.
This isn't about political correctness; it isn't about language
distortion. Altered or incomplete usage of words is natural, even
amusing. "Confetti" in its original language means little bonbons or
small sweets. And incomplete usage is at times explainable and
logical. The words "beef," "pork" and "mutton" arrived with the Norman
invasion. They refer solely to the meat, never to the animal, whereas
in the original French they refer to both (mouton is both sheep and
mutton). That is primarily because French was integrated into the
language of the upper classes, which ate the meat, and less so that of
the farmers, who raised the animals.
God, however, is a big deal. The word for God matters quite a bit more
than what lands on one's table for dinner at night. We never say the
French pray to Dieu, or Mexicans pray to Dios. Having Allah be
different from God implies that Muslims pray to a special deity. It
classifies Muslims as the Other. Separating Allah from God, we only
see a vengeful, alarming deity, one responsible for those frightful
fatwas and ghastly jihads -- rarely the compassionate God. The opening
line of every chapter in the Koran is "Bi Ism Allah, Al Rahman, Al
Rahim": In the name of God, the Gracious, the Merciful. In the name of
Allah. One and the same.
The separation is happening on all sides. This year, the Malaysian
government issued an edict warning the Herald, a weekly English
newspaper, that no religion except Islam can use the word Allah to
denote God. No such edict, or fatwa for that matter, is needed for the
New York Times: a quick search through the archives shows that Allah
is used only as the Muslim God.
In these troubled times, creating more differences, further parsing so
to speak, is troubling, even dangerous. I suggest we either not use
the word Allah or, better yet, use it in a non-Muslim context.
Otherwise, the terrorists win.
One nation under Allah?
Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novel "The Hakawati," due out
this month.
.
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