Arabic is meaning

"Indeed Allah is with the patient". But what does "with" really mean?⁣
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As a student at SOAS, I remember reading an Arabic sentence and finding it impossible to translate the word ميكل.⁣
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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.⁣
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I was stumped. After half an hour of frustration, I asked a fellow student. He read the word and chuckled:⁣
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“It means Michael.”⁣
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So consumed by the mechanical grammar of the sentence, I hadn’t thought to step back and consider its actual meaning. ⁣
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If I had, the translation of the word would have been blindingly obvious from its context. I learnt a valuable lesson that day.⁣
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As a teacher, I always try to save my students this frustration by emphasising to them that, more than anything else, Arabic is meaning.⁣
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More so than verb tables, gender agreement and case endings, Arabic is rhetoric, culture, communication, devotion. ⁣
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One of the ways that I provide this balance is to ask my students to meditate on the meaning of a sentence.⁣
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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.”⁣
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Now that could be the end of it but it should be the beginning. ⁣
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What does it mean to be with someone? ⁣What does it mean to not be with someone? Proximity, protection, love? ⁣
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We’re not necessarily coming to any conclusions but we’re definitely exercising a different part of our brains than we were before. ⁣
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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.