Have no fear! Absorption of Islamic terminology into European languages

There is no need to be afraid, as is the case for most university educated academics, of the entry of ‘wudu’ for example into the English language. The textual term ‘ablution’ sounds most bizarre to Muslims on the ground who have probably never heard their companion say to them on hearing the adhan ‘I have to make ablution first’. The ‘call to prayer’ which recurs in orientalist-coloured translations is likewise not used by those Muslims who actually answer and fulfill the call. The word adhan is used.

Islam in specific respects has made a comeback in Europe and so will inevitably increase its colouring of the various european languages just as it once coloured Spanish – over three thousand words derive from the Arabic, tendency increasing – Castillian, Sicilian, and all of the Balkan languages; just as it profoundly altered the Turkic and Tifinagh languages, Urdu, Persian, Hausa, Wolof, Mandinka, Bambara, Zenaga, Somali, Malay, Bahasa Indonesia and Swahili to name just a few; indeed they are, or were – before the onslaught of the missionary academics, written in the Arabic script.

This colouring shall continue to happen and all academic attempts to stop this natural linguistic transformation, as history has demonstrated, are futile. Resistance to this transformation is however ferocious. Muslims who live in a christianised-linguistic milieu are relatively ignorant with regard to Muslims who express their world in Islamic, un-translated terms. The missionaries – as did later their spiritual inheritors, the orientalists – knew that whoever established the form in which Islam was purveyed to the West could determine its course. But it is clear that once the Muslims of newly established Muslim areas become aware of the way they are in the world and how they may freely express themselves they are no longer burdened with the linguistic porte-manteaus of religion, i.e. christianity. They would realize they had deen and that this required its own particular language. This is not a belittling of the importance of European languages but a realization that for certain concepts and actions only the original terms can be used – modified, if necessary or naturally, by the demands, rhythms and intonations of the language in question. A well-meaning but ignorant Muslim of the West subject to the linguistic influence of the christian or orientalist terms ‘poor due’ or worse ‘alms’ believes erroneously that by giving in charity when the mood takes him he is fulfilling the obligation of Zakat; while the person who uses the word zakat understands it existentially as a purification of his self and his wealth, as a recognition of the person in authority responsible for the collection and distribution and an affirmation of bimetal currencies of gold and silver sanctioned by the book and the sunna. The same applies to the world pilgrimage: if one lives in the linguistic realm of pilgrimage there is a danger that the person becomes merely a pilgrim with all that this implies; an aware Muslim however makes the hajj and then becomes a hajji. The same applies to ‘prayer’ which strictly speaking is a dua, a supplication, and which often implies a  spiritual meditative state, often done alone when one ‘feels like it’; the sala on the other hand is a very physical, chronologically determined, event established in the company of others. It is true the word ‘prayer’ is in general use amongst Muslims and although most understand it as this very physical event many non-Muslims continue to think it is a meditative state akin to a christian supplication, performed alone; some Muslims are influenced by the very term however – they automatically go into a ‘pious’ state. This is not the nature of the sala. It is done wide awake with the eyes open and the form of it is very specifically determined and varies according to the time of the day. The faatiha and the qunout are indeed supplications but the main emphasis is on the recitation and understanding of the qur’anic ayas and the physical bowing and prostration to the Lord of the worlds. In fact the one minute standing of the humanists to honour the dead is physically closer to the sala of the Muslims

‘Belief’ which once meant trust in God has now become a mental concept in European languages. By using the word iman one ensures that one does not fall into this mental trap. According to one etymological dictionary the slide from trust which is of the highest existential reality to mere conceptual, fleeting impulses of the brain occurred in the following manner:

late 12c., bileave, replacing Old English geleafa “belief, faith,” from West Germanic *ga-laubon “to hold dear, esteem, trust” (source also of Old Saxon gilobo, Middle Dutch gelove, Old High German giloubo, German Glaube), from *galaub- “dear, esteemed,” from intensive prefix *ga- + *leubh- “to care, desire, like, love”. The prefix was altered on analogy of the verb believe….

And just as belief used to mean “trust in God,”  faith meant “loyalty to a person based on promise or duty” (a sense preserved in keep one’s faith, in good (or bad) faith and in common usage of faithful, faithless, which contain no notion of divinity). But faith, as cognate of Latin fides, took on the religious sense beginning in 14c. translations, and belief had by 16c. become limited to “mental acceptance of something as true,” from the religious use in the sense of “things held to be true as a matter of religious doctrine”.

So when we read in journalistic or touristic explanations that ‘believing moslems make the hajj’ [i.e. ‘normal’ Muslims do not normally do so] we enter the surreal realm of linguistic dysfunction. The word Muslim means, as Goethe understood, to submit, submit to the Lord of the worlds. Belief does not really enter into the matter. It is a matter of submission, of iman – trust, and action, both of which are implicit in the word. Allah defines a Muslim as someone who has iman – trust:

‘The Messenger has iman in what has been sent down to him from his Lord, and so do the Muminun. Each one has iman in Allah and His angels and His Books and His Messengers. We do not differentiate between any of His Messengers. They say, ‘We hear and we obey’ [from the Bewley translation].

Have no fear! Endangered democracy

According to many media commentators the people are endangering democracy nowadays by choosing the wrong candidates. Oxymoronic? An implication that the people cannot be left to vote but rather the politicians must be chosen for them? By whom? By the media? An insult to the intelligence of the people? A refutation of the validity of democracy? Media’s reflection of itself as financial guardians of democracy? i.e. help! if the people are not with us, readership shall fall, influence reduced, banks shall not support us. Damage limitation and media’s implicit confession of failure to influence the course of voting in the usual successful manner? Media can fool most of the people most of the time?

Have no fear! Hadd, hudud, limits

The most extreme limits of the road upon which we are moving towards death are clear: they are the infamous hudud. Islam, as sane people know, is more than this and headscarves. All of lived life is limits, edging, stopping short, transgressing, pushing the boundaries. The descendents of those who massacred the indigenous Navaho, Cherokee and Cree civilisations still have their hudud and insist on the excruciating frying of their victims with electricity or subjecting them to a thirty minute torture through chemical poisoning. Every moment of daily actions are hedged in with limits – or expanding to the infinite, depending on the situation. The hudud implemented by the Khawaarij at the moment are not the hudud of a just and fully established non-ribawi society and there is no danger of their illegal implemention by Muslims as Muslim society no longer exists on the face of the earth. All so called ‘Muslim countries’ or ‘states’ live within the constraints of humanist thought – without exception – and all Muslim communities within fully functioning humanist societies are completely subject to democratic rules with the result that Islam necessarily loses at least 99% of its legal, social, economic, medicinal and moral patterns. Should one day Dar al-Islam be reestablished, then any occasional legal implementation of the hudud – after of course the merciful establishment of the zakat and the gold and silver currency – would be for the humanists a minor irritant or embarrassment on a par with their capitalist, economic starving of millions in Africa, the torture of thousands of Uighurs, the global enslavement of 30 millions in emerging states or the world-wide enrefugeeing of 60 million [both fully accepted humanist statistics of last year], and on a par with their responsibility for aids and sexually-licensed diseases, alcoholism, drug abuse, debt-related illnesses – affecting as a whole a quarter of all society [again humanist statistics], and on a par with the millions killed, tortured and displaced in Sham in the war between the humanist coalition and Russia, i.e. minor blips on the way to the ideal capitalist-totalitarian global state in which renegades no longer have the right to an implanted bank-chip.