Tag: Arabic

Islam Extols Arabic NOT Arabs

There is a perception that Islam is the glorification of Arabs and their culture and customs.

Well, it is not.

It is neither Arabism nor worship of Arabs.

Never once does the Noble Word exhort its reciters to follow the Arabs and their manner of living.

The Noble Quran makes a clear and decisive distinction between the dynamics of language and race. The former cuts through racial, ethnic, tribal, and national differences. However, the latter is fixed and cannot be appropriated.

I can possess native fluency in English, but that does not mean I can also physically become an Anglo-Saxon.

In extolling the Arabic language* and admonishing** the Bedouin conduct, Islam states a fascinating feature embedded within human beings, which is as follows:

Anyone can master any language.

Therefore, one sees a non-Arab of ANY race/ethnicity reciting the Quranic verses as beautifully and effortlessly as an Arab.

It can be said that Islam is the only system that balances the particularity and universality of human existence.

It prevents a particularity from eating its own self. Also, it stops a universality from enveloping and destroying a particularity.

 “Indeed in that is a lesson for those of vision.” [3:13]

*: see Quran 12:2, 13:37, 16:103, 41:3
**: see Quran 9:97, 9:98, 49:14

Heidegger’s Being and Time

My take:

Heidegger was trying to revive the meditative mind in the Western tradition which had become disoriented in the glitter of the calculative mind. The vocabulary he deployed to communicate his thesis was bound to put off his readers because, perhaps, his receivers were and are largely metaphysically ill-prepared to appreciate the context. Now, interestingly, when I read his work in Persian or Arabic I instantly understand what he is up to, which, unfortunately, I can’t describe in English since it would again be a transference from a highly metaphysically alive tradition to a calculative, mechanized and technologically driven one.