Arabic is meaning


"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, 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.