by Sally Zahav
If you were thinking that Allah refers to the same God that you worship, and you are not a Muslim, forget that.
By now, everyone has heard, either in person or in the
media, Muslims declaring “Allahu Akbar”. It is called reverently during prayer as
well as passionately at times of triumph, war or adversity.
Many have translated the phrase as “God is great”, which is a
marginally reasonable rendering, but falls short of a true translation, and
leaves the reader or listener with a sense that the phrase is innocuous and
essentially non-threatening, if it is not in the context of a terror attack.
As a translator myself, I am very much aware that in many
cases there is no “true” translation of some words or phrases. There are
several reasons for this, including the complex, cultural references that are embedded
in certain words. Another, simpler reason is that though a word may have a
direct equivalent in both the source and destination languages, there are often
nuances in one or each language that may skew the meaning one way or another. You
go for the closest match, sometimes adding or subtracting a word or two to sharpen
the intended meaning.
In the case of “Allahu Akbar”, there are two main problems
with translating the phrase as “God is great”. First is that “Allah” is not the
equivalent of our English word “God”, since Allah refers specifically to the
god worshiped by Muslims. (And if you still believe that Allah is identical to
the God worshiped by other faiths, I recommend doing a comparison between Allah’s
expectations of humanity and, for example, the Judeo-Christian God’s expectations
of humanity.)
Back to the matter at hand: an awkward, but more accurate rendering
of “Allah” is actually “the god named Allah”. So if you were thinking that
Allah refers to the same God that you worship, and you are not a Muslim, forget
that. In fact, the
Malaysian court ruled in 2013 that Malaysian Christians may not use the word
Allah to mean God.
The other problem is that in Arabic, there is but one word
for both “greater” and “greatest”. The word for “great” is “kabir”, the root
being ر ب ك. If the intention was
to say that “God is great”, the phrase would be “Allahu kabir”, but that is not
their call.
In Arabic, in general, for the comparative or superlative (which
would be the equivalent of “more” or “most” in English), one adds an alif - أ (‘a’)
in the beginning of the word, and the vowels within the word change slightly.
For our current purposes, both “greater” and “greatest” would yield “akbar” or أكبر. The context would
provide the understanding of whether comparative or superlative was intended.
From here, it may not be so important to specify whether the
intent is “greater” or “greatest”, because we have already shown that Allah is
not your god, if you are a Christian, Jew, or a member of any other religion
besides Islam, because “Allah is greater”(according to Muslims) than your god,
ipso facto. Therefore, since he is greater than all other gods – he is
greatest.
However, the
intent is definitely to say that “Allah is the greatest”, which can also be
proven by means of the structure of the Arabic language: If I wanted to say, in
Arabic, my house is bigger than your house, it would be:
بيتي هو أكبر من بيتك
(Bayti hua akbar min baytika)
And if I wanted to say my house is
the biggest, it would be
بيتي هو أكبر (Bayti hua akbar)
The word
is akbar in both cases, whether more or most is intended.
Conclusion:
Yes, I know that most Muslims are peace-loving, productive members of whatever society
the live in. But there are millions, yes millions, who clamor for Islamic
supremacy the world over, and are ready to lie, deceive, rape, murder and pillage
in order to promote that goal. Listen to what they say, unfiltered through PC
news media. Get your news from a reliable source, translated directly from
Arabic, such as MEMRI (http://www.memri.org/).
The cry “Allahu
Akbar” is the simple Arabic assertion that their god and their way is supreme,
and for them, there is no room for any valid alternative concept of what God is
or how He wants us humans to live and to treat each other.
Sally Zahav
Source: Middle East and Terrorism
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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