In Islam, Arabic is given more importance than any other language because it's the language of the primary religious sources thereof. In Islam, Arabic is regarded as a uniquely perfect and divine language. However, as a B2 Arabic speaker who grew up in an Arabic-speaking country, and a person who's read the Quran, I'd like to argue the opposite.Arabic is a generally very ambiguous, high-context language, which is not something you'd expect from a God who wants to send a clear message. Quranic Arabic in particular is especially murky. In the Quran, the Arabic lacked the usage of *Harakat* (certain Arabic diacritics that dictate pronunciation), which often completely changes the meaning of certain words. In fact, much of the grammatical features of modern arabic Like Harakat and *I'jam* (consonantal dotting) were standardized progressively through scholars like Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali and Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi, specifically *because* Arabic lead to reading errors in non-Arab speaking countries.The reality is, there are extremely long *Tasfirs* (exegesis of the Quran) from varying schools of thought just clarifying basic definitions and interpretations. Quranic Arabic is in fact so ambiguous, it's common that scholars have completely contradicting interpretations of the same verses with the same meaning.Classical Arabic is built on a triliteral root system, which can spawn dozens of derivative forms. Without context, a word can often be parsed as a noun, an active participle, a passive participle, or a command verb.Classical Arabic also often omits pronouns, subjects, objects, or entire clauses when the speaker/writer assumes the listener understands the context. When there's centuries separating the original text and situational context, understanding the context essentially becomes a complete guess.(Cont)
>>18781438My point being, for a supposedly perfect, divine being, you'd expect them to reveal or bring upon a language that unambiguously sends the message, simple, and is universal or timeless. Instead, what we get seems to be the opposite. We get a highly regional, highly ambiguous, highly contextual, extremely difficult language for the majority of the world which requires dedicated scholarly work to set basic definitions on.The work done by scholars and the nature of the Arabic language proves that Islam is, by nature, very unclear, which directly contradicts much of its claims on the clarity of it. Even within the religion itself.
>>18781438> Quranic Arabic is in fact so ambiguous, it's common that scholars have completely contradicting interpretations of the same verses with the same meaning.Example?
The religion makes sense if it was an ethnoreligion that was tied to the Bedouin Arabs of the region and is the framework in which Arabs revolved themselves around.But it being turned into a universalist religion just false flat when a message that is meant to cut across humanity has to put an extreme emphasis on an Arabic dialect that is far removed from modern arabic.
>>18781438>In Islam, Arabic is regarded as a uniquely perfect and divine languageChapter and verse, caliph james quran.
>>18781438I disagree: there is indeed an ambiguity in written Arabic, even moreso when diacritics weren't used but you have to understand that this was not a problem at the beginning of the Islamic period; the Quran was known orally, much more than today, and the written text served as a basis to learn and to remember it but was not meant to be simply read, as it is today. Your problem only applies to the written form, but the Quran was a primarely oral transmitted text.
>>18781438I never really understood what people meant by high-context languages until I started learning Chinese. And yeah it's crazy, some languages just exist in a completely different paradigm. Take a common Chinese phrase like "来了", This can be interpreted as "I am coming", "I have arrived", "you are coming", "you have arrived", "he is coming", "he has arrived", etc. In many cases Chinese doesn't even express tense, so whether the person is talking about the past, the present or the future has to be inferred by context. Fucking crazy.Makes me appreciate how based English actually is. Our grammar literally forces you to communicate unambiguously.Regarding your thread itself, yeah it's strange that God supposedly picks the ugliest sounding languages (Hebrew, Arabic) as his favourites.
>>18781438Why would God reveal himself first and foremost to the Hebrews or the Arabs? Why not start with the Romans who conquered the entire known world?
>>18781863This is a misconception of the Islamic view: yes, the Hebrews believe that the true God was only theirs, and only revealed itself to the rest of the world throught them. But in Islam prophecy is different: it is revealed to all, through prophets speaking the langage of their own community (see Quran 16:36). The Quran is meant to be the same message as all the other ones, but in Arabic. So God has revealed the Truth to every single people (includint Romans) but Muslims believe that all the other revelations have been corrupted.
>>18781870>but Muslims believe that all the other revelations have been corrupted.Just bizzare when you think about it since Muslims believe that the word(s) of God is cemented in stone and cannot be changed but humanity somehow managed to overcome the divine and corrupt it.
>>18781438The truth is all languages and all texts are flawed so it is silly to think about divine being would communicate through such a medium when they could just do direct revelation to everyone.
>>18781438>Arabic is arguably the least optimal choice to be "the language of God">according to whom?>t-to me!!What an ego.
>>18781439Allah gave us the language of the English.
>>18781957>t. OP'S picrel
>>18781957But enough about muhammed
>>18781853Nothing can compare with the ambiguity of English "can". I think it's a true oddity among languages.
>>18781438No, you have this all wrong. Someone like you. That is the least favorable among God. Someone who hates Arabs. You should be ashamed that you even posted this. You don’t target a whole race of people you racists idiot. I love Arabs. And Indians. And Jews. And gays. And blacks and every race. The only people I hate are specific people who put out hate, ignorance, racism and sexism. People like you. Stop using this website as an outlet for your miserable existence. That’s not what this is here for. Weirdo.
>>18781870Somehow, all the peoples had prophets, but it is intolerable to revere any prophet other than Mohammed? Such as Hercules, Krishna, Thor and so on>>18781957Why does God reveal himself to the illiterate goat herders? Surely it is more reasonable to reveal himself to the stonemasons or librarians
>>18782106Not sure what you mean by that. "Can" just expresses the ability to do something, that's a common word that exists in most languages. It's true that it has now merged with "may" to also express the concept of having permission to do something, but those are quite similar meanings anyway. "Can" could be reasonably translated to at most 2 different words in most languages.
>>18781439germany is the true language of God
>>18781438You have no clue what you are talking about dont you
>>18781831muslim scholars in the late 700's were already doing field work among the bedouin because they thought that their dialect was more conservative and it might help with some unclear words in the text.
>>18782257Show me another language that mixes skill or personal capacity to do something, with circumstantial possibility.
>>18781438The greater issue I tend to find with Islam is that the Quran doesn't feel the need to give context - it just speaks directly to Muhammad's immediate audience based on a context with which they are assumed to be familiar. You can't understand much of the text without contextual scaffolding from external sources (when was this verse revealed in Muhammad's lifetime, what is it referring to, what other verses does it abrogate, etc.). It therefore isn't enough for you to believe in the sanctity of the Quranic text, you also have to have faith in the sanctity of the contextual scaffolding put to writing in the centuries after Muhammad's death. In that sense, it's vulnerable to the very "corruption" attacks Muslim apologists direct at the other Abrahamic faiths.
>>18781853>GodExcept that every civilization had its own gods and cults but the hebrews spread their cult to europe and the middle east
>>18781853Also thank fuck we ended up dropping gendered nounsImagine wanting to say "bag" but you have to remember whether a bag is male, female or some tranny in-between
>>18781863The gods DID reveal themselves to the Romans. Just not the hebrew desert dick demon
>>18781879Why would God actively reveal a divinely created message to the people's of the world if it could so easily be corrupted by the works of humans? This isn't me trying to straw man the islamic faith, why would any divine being let this happen?>>18783706>chineseromans are overrated by westoids
>>18783806changoids would just eat whatever prophet or son of god was sent their way 2bh
>>18783816roman pagancel: I worship a sun godChinese IQChad: I worship a sun god, but I'm more technologically and philosophically advanced than you in any way imaginable.
>>18783822Shangdi was NOT a Sun God.
>>18783298French. ¨Pouvoir¨ works exactly the same way as can.
>>18781450What about the one that gets translated two ways:1. If you do not believe Allah will help him, then hang yourself and see if that makes you feel better.2. If you do not believe that Allah will help his messenger, tie a rope to the sky ceiling and climb up to Heaven to try to stop allah from revealing the quran and see if that fixes what was bothering you.
>>18781450Quran 22:15>Whoever thinks that Allah will not help His Prophet in this world and the Hereafter, let them stretch out a rope to the ceiling and strangle themselves, then let them see if this plan will do away with ˹the cause of˺ their rage. (International version)>If anyone thinks that Allah will not help His Messenger in this world and in the Hereafter, let him stretch out a rope to the sky if he can and cut a hole to peep through and see for himself whether his device can avert that which irritates him. (Malik Translation)
>>18783339You don't have to have faith in the external sources. Both the Qur'an and the sahih hadith were verified source by source and there exists extensive literature examining said sources. No such source-checking exists in judaism or christianity
>>18784513Hadith "science" is largely horseshit
>>18783980It has "savoir" for skill.
>>18784941¨Pouvoir¨ can also be used for skills.
>>18781863>conquered the known worldBut Persia, Arabia, India, and China
>>18784938"Science" is a straight translation of the Arabic "ilm" as in knowledge. Science used to mean knowledge too. If your dispute is that it's not as certain as physics, history can't be, and hadith knowledge is a type of historiography.As for "horseshit", I rarely ever see anyone who actually knows hadith methodology claim this. It's a reflex response
>>18785043No, it can't. And it isn't just some odd nuance, speakers of other languages just consider it a completely different thing. I believe it could even cause the confusion of Japanese people giving excessive praise, because they translate "jōzu" as "very good at", because it just feels wrong to translate it as general potential, but I think it just means "can", as "posesses the skill to do x"
>>18782106Even if you think "can" is weird, why the hell would you set it against Chinese? That's close to the worst example possible.
Wow, a high-effort thread about religion.If only /his/ were like this every day
>>18784941"Savoir faire" is the exact same thing as "know how".Aside from counter-intuitive pronunciation/spelling of certain words (usually Anglo-Norman relics and casualties of the Great Vowel Shift) English isn't a difficult language at all
>>18786079Grim that you consider this thread high effort
>>18786035Because English is much worse. One Chinese character means less than one English word, but that allows you to say exactly what you want to say. English gives a haphazard heap of extremely specific words, with some obsessive distinctions, and massive gaps that can't be expressed in any easy way. Chinese can't be easily translated into English, but that's English's fault. I'm not a native speaker of either.
If I was god I would make a book in 4 parts:>Vulgar language, to be understood and fast implemented by plebs even if their interpretation is lacking>A turing complete part with a very simple unit set of instructions, it may be 10 000 pages long but is made to be extremely precise with every definition being as specific as possible>An instruction manual, for intellectuals to decode teachings in their own contemporary language.>An immense list of vectors and tensor operation to describe with perfect accuracy the meaning of the words and the context of sentences at the time the book was formulated, such that if in a sentence he writes that you have to beat your wife, you can have the exact vector operations such that you can determine the word beat means beat with your fists, rather than beat with a toothbrush from 1400 years ago
>>18781560It's not even just the language. The Quran is so obsessed with the minutia of Hejaz tribal politics, customs, and laws that it's obvious whoever came up with it had no expectation it would ever spread beyond the Hejaz. The Hajj alone is something very obviously invented by a guy who didn't conceive of there being any meaningful amount of Muslims living outside the Arabian peninsula. It's kinda like how the New Testament makes way more sense as being written for a small persecuted doomsday cult than the world reigning religion of the past 500 years (and a religion of great empires and kingdoms for a millennia before that)
>>18783339I posit it wasn't even really designed to be a "Holy Book" when first made. Besides the fact it was literally solely an oral tradition until at minimum 50 years after Muhammed's death. It was more just the various sermons a vaguely Abrahamic man had been preaching on the streets in Mecca. I'd posit the "Quran" being a single book or narrative that was meant to be taken by itself with no outside Abrahamic context was something that never even crossed Muhammed's mind. Like if someone took a bunch of your church pastors Sunday sermons and printed them as-is in a book with no commentary or explanation and gave them to a random (magically literate) Sentinel Islander, they wouldn't make any sense because those sermons were made to be heard by a congregation with at least some background knowledge of Abrahamic beliefs. Much like the various Semetic/Judeo-Christian stories and beliefs that Muhammad's audience in Mecca would have all been already familiar with that were the unstated “backbone” of the Quran.
>>18785816>As for "horseshit", I rarely ever see anyone who actually knows hadith methodology claim this. It's a reflex responseI'd suggest you've not engaged much with the secular scholarship if this is the case. Joshua Little has a video where he summarises many of the criticisms laid against hadith "science" in the secular scholarship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz4vMUUxhag
>>18781438cultures are high/low context, not languages. im not reading the rest of this drivel
>>18786140The problem I have with your view is that the Quran itself repeatedly identifies its contents as divine revelation and explicitly calls itself "al-Kitab" (the Book). For instance, in Quran 2:2 it describes itself as a book containing guidance, in 10:37 it identifies itself as a revelation from God, in 41:41–42 it describes itself as an authoritative scripture that falsehood cannot approach, and in 85:21-22 it identifies itself as a complete revelation preserved in a divine realm (the preserved tablet metaphor). My reading of the Quran tells me that the Quranic author very much saw it as a divinely revealed codex of sacred verses on a par with other Abrahamic scripture. I think it's overkill to describe it as a collection of street sermons that were elevated into something the author didn't intend long after he died. I don't think that's supported by the text itself. I don't think the early Muslims would have gone to such lengths to memorise it and recite it during their ritual prayers if they saw it that way. I do, however, agree that Muhammad assumed familiarity with local late antique Judeo-Christian traditions and expected the Quran to be read in light of them. The big challenge, of course, is that much of those traditions come from the apocrypha rather than the canon so it's a distant Judeo-Christian context to the one we are familiar with today.
>>18786099Oh, I don't disagree, it's grim, but also reasonable given the average thread's quality.Almost everything on /his/ is straight up bait for internet fights
>>18781438Bump
