ambled down the street arm in arm. I watched them disappear around a corner, and I couldn’t understand it. How could they go from confrontation to friendship so quickly?
I was forgetting that their House of Being, their Palace of Words, was different. In English we frame arguments within the metaphor of a battle. We “defend our positions.” We “shoot down” the ideas of others. It’s a metaphorical fight, and the whole point is that there will be winners and losers. It’s not necessarily like that in Arabic. Different languages work under different metaphors. An argument could, for example, be a performance, or a dance, if you like. There are steps to be learned. It’s a delicate interplay of give and take, a thing to be engaged in and even enjoyed.
All in all, Arabic has received a bad rap in the West. We tend to think of it as a harsh language filled with crackling, angry consonants. The truth is that these consonants float on a bed of honey. They drip with vowels.
Most Arabic words are constructed from three-letter “roots.” For example, k-t-b conveys the idea of writing. The addition of other sounds before, between, and after the roots produces a whole family of related words such as book (kitab) and writer (katib). Kataba forms the past tense, and yaktuba yields the future. And maktub takes everything a step farther. It carries the concept of fate, the hand of Allah, and a whole way of being. Literally, it means “it is written.”
In English we, too, have words that shift meaning, or at least tense, with the change of a vowel: drink, drank, drunk; sing, sang, sung. I once taught English to a student who did well on these irregular verbs. For sit she wrote sat. For swim she wrote swam. For think she paused for a moment, confused, and then pencilled in the word thank.
My favourite triad in Arabic consists of the letters s-l-m. From these you get the word salam or peace. All through the Muslim world you are greeted with salam aleikum — “peace be with you.”
If you listen closely, you’ll hear salam everywhere. Even the very word Islam comes with these fine sounds: I-salam. Quite often Islam is translated in English as “surrender to God,” and a Muslim mu-salam is “one who surrenders to God.” But to me those English translations are loaded with baggage. We’re still working here with negative connotations. Another translation I often hear is “submission.” That’s even worse. It carries the idea that Muslims are forced into something, which isn’t true. All these translations only serve to reveal the West’s own prejudices and ignorance.
Among the alim — the scholars of the Quran — there is much discussion about such subtle distinctions. A proper understanding of the word Muslim must carry the flavour of the word salam, so that in English it should translate as something along the lines of “one who is pacified by God,” or even “one to whom God has brought peace.”
And I like that very much.
Now imagine a voice … deep and resonant, biblical even. “Behold,” it booms, “the whole Earth had one language and one speech … and it came to pass that the people found a plain and they dwelt there.
“Then they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly. Let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens. Let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole Earth.’”
The above passage concerns the Tower of Babel, of course, the story of the formation of languages. It’s found in Genesis 11:1–9.
Babel almost certainly refers to Babylon, though the forgotten scribe who wrote this particular tale had probably never seen that fabled city. He would have lived somewhere in ancient Israel, quite likely in Jerusalem, and anyway, he was already writing about something long ago and far away.
“Let us make a name for ourselves,” the people of Babel said. That was arrogance, obviously, and it didn’t go unnoticed by God. He didn’t like the idea of people coming up to see him. In fact, he didn’t like it at all.
“Behold,” said God, “they are one people and they have one language and this is only the beginning of what they will do.” He considered the tower. “Nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” This worried God greatly, and after deep deliberation, he made his plan: “Come, let us go down and there confuse their language that they may not understand one another’s speech.”
Confuse in the ancient Hebrew texts is the word balal, an archaic root that actually means “to overflow or spill.” And that’s what God let loose. He turned up the heat until the pot spilled over, mixing up the languages of these first people and “scattering them from there over the face of all the Earth.” After that, God thought, the troublesome creatures wouldn’t be a problem.
Boy, was God wrong!
Today there seems to be a sort of reverse Tower of Babel effect. Of the six thousand languages spoken around the world, it is estimated that only five hundred will be left by the year 2100, and even then only about twenty will still be in solid shape. The rest will have simply withered away. And another century after that the world may be down to three or four superpower languages and a handful more that have simply refused to die.
Arabic is one of the Big Twenty. It’s spoken by almost two hundred million people in more than twenty-two countries, though it has separated into a number of dialects that vary greatly from nation to nation. The Arabic spoken in Morocco, for example, is virtually incomprehensible to Saudis.
The written language is the same, however, and that’s what anchors everything. The Quran retains the seventh-century Arabic script of Muhammad, and according to Islamic thought, it simply can’t be translated without losing something. The sacred book of Islam can only be read in the original Arabic. Even in Muslim countries such as Malaysia and Pakistan where Arabic isn’t spoken, the faithful must learn the old Arabic. The Quran can’t be reproduced in Malay or Urdu. Something of the nuance would be lost, it’s claimed, or something of its power — a very interesting idea indeed.
Of course, one can translate even the most complex of ideas from one language into another. That’s a fact. But it’s true that something more subtle might well be lost. Imagine William Shakespeare translated into Chinese. The plot would certainly remain, but the colour of Shakespeare’s words, the very thing that gives them their beauty, their identity, would surely be lost.
The Christian world, however, freely translates the Bible. Some factions even pride themselves on how many languages they’ve translated it into — Swahili and Blackfoot, Finnish and Korean. But for me the colour of the Bible is always in the thees and begats of the King James Version. “Thou shalt be scattered over the face of the Earth” — there’s a certain power in that kind of voice, a terrible magic. It’s so powerful that it’s easy to get confused and imagine that the original texts must have sounded like that. The original Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic must somehow have had that sort of flavour. But did they?
In the Quran there’s no doubt. That book sings only in Arabic.
I’d been staying for a week in a dirty little pension in the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem. I shared a room with Arno and Berhitte, a Dutch couple. Arno fancied
