Look @the ignorance their supposed learned men exhibit. A supposed scholar of Arabic and this scholar either does Not kno, or is deliberately lying to the unsuspecting. ..No Muslim Believes Allah spoke to Muhammad only. In fact it was Gabriel. The Angel. Allah spoke to Moses. Thats what we believe. infowars/what-does-isis-really-stand-for/ That seventh-century day in the desert is the heart and soul of the Islamic religion: the moment, and the only moment, when God spoke to man. It is the foundation of the Islamic faith; accept this truth and Islam accepts you. Recite the words, la illaha illa Allah wa Muhammad rasul Ullah (“There is no god but God and Muhammad is the Messenger of God”) and abracadraba, you’re a Muslim. In other words, all you need to do to become one of the faithful is to truly believe that — through the Angel Gabriel — God spoke to one man, and one man only out there in the sand dunes when he dictated “The Reading”: al-Qur’an. Since this is the one and only time God spoke to man since the universe began, and since He chose to use the language of the desert dwellers of the day, at that instant that particular desert dialect froze as solid and immutable as the Ka’aba itself in Holy Mecca. The power of one: one God, one man, one moment, one tongue. If the Jews are the chosen people, Arabic is the chosen language. No wonder the Arab world confounds so many Western journalists. If you don’t know the language, it is impossible to understand what is really going on in the listener’s mind when an Arab leader addresses his people, what levels and depths of meaning and feeling are being plumbed. No translation can get close. It’s not like going from German to English, or even from Hindi to English. It’s like going from another galaxy to ours. In every sense of the word, Arabic is a different script that tells a different story. And all because of that moment nearly 1,400 years ago that deified both its spoken and written form. So back to Sham, and all the ponderously heavy cultural baggage this word entails. What in God’s name does it mean? Well, one thing it does NOT mean is the truncated Syria that was created by the French in 1922. Rather, it means the “North,” the “Greater Syria” that encompasses, not only Cyprus and part of southern Turkey, but also the artificial states the British and the French carved out of the Ottoman Empire after World War One: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Palestine – and subsequently Israel. For most of the last three thousand years, all these regions were one, not only under the empires of the Ottomans, the Caliphs, the Byzantines, the Romans, the Greeks and the Persians, but also under the AsSYRIAns, and even more ancient civilizations before that, dating all the way back to 2,500 B.C. Sham’s roots run very deep – and very dangerously – indeed. Roses may smell as sweet by any other name, but Syria does not. David Stansfield is an Arabic scholar trained at the universities of Durham, Cambridge, the Sorbonne and Toronto, who has lived in many parts of the Arab world. He is also the writer-producer of the 14-part TVOntario/Encyclopedia Britannica television series: “The Middle East.”
Posted on: Fri, 08 Aug 2014 04:38:13 +0000
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