Arabic is meaning — Ihsan Arabic
“Indeed Allah is with the patient”. But what does “with” really mean?
As a student at SOAS, I remember reading an Arabic sentence and finding it impossible to translate the word ميكل.
I stressed out about this mysterious word for ages… I went to my Hans Wehr dictionary and couldn’t find the root anywhere…. Google Translate wasn’t any use either.
I was stumped. After half an hour of frustration, I asked a fellow student. He read the word and chuckled:
“It means Michael.”
So consumed by the mechanical grammar of the sentence, I hadn’t thought to step back and consider its actual meaning.
If I had, the translation of the word would have been blindingly obvious from its context. I learnt a valuable lesson that day.
As a teacher, I always try to save my students this frustration by emphasising to them that, more than anything else, Arabic is meaning.
More so than verb tables, gender agreement and case endings, Arabic is rhetoric, culture, communication, and devotion.
One of the ways that I provide this balance is to ask my students to meditate on the meaning of a sentence.
For instance, we’re translating the Quranic verse إنّ الله مع الصابرين
and my student gives a suitable translation: “Indeed, God is with the patient.”
Now that could be the end of it but it should be the beginning.
What does it mean to be with someone? What does it mean to not be with someone? Proximity, protection, love?
We’re not necessarily coming to any conclusions but we’re definitely exercising a different part of our brains than we were before.
It is important to emphasise; this is not Tafsir. We’re not making judgements or discussing the teachings of scholars. We’re simply taking a moment to think deeply about the words that we use.
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