Re: CITR and the Koran

From: L. Manning Vines <lmanningvines@hotmail.com>
Date: Thu Aug 22 2002 - 19:21:18 EDT

Meghan said:

<< No, I'm not saying that at all. I just disagree with you that there'd be
twice as much controversy. I think there'd be little controversy, if any,
over the Christian bible. I don't think you can argue that Christianity
isn't the most accepted religion. As I've said before, it's perfectly ok to
say God. How many God Bless America billboards and such have you seen since
September 11? No one cares if people want to talk about God. But once you
mention Allah, you're practically labeled a terrorist. >>

"Allah" and "eloh" are cognate forms in two closely related languages.
Their sameness is more clear in their own alphabets than in our Roman one:
allah is in Arabic spelled alif-lam-ha ('LH) and eloh in Hebrew is spelled
aleph-lamed-heh ('LH).

 (The apostrophe in my transliteration designates the glottal stop -- Arabic
and Hebrew letters alif and aleph -- which to untrained Western ears usually
disappears into the following vowel. Properly speaking, it is a plosive
consonant like our plosive consonants, but is formed with the glottis, an
organ we know best from our way of stopping the stream of air while lifting
a heavy object. At the start of a word, it has something of the character
of the "h" in "honor," and in the middle of a word is found in some dialects
of English, as in the way many in Brooklyn pronounce "bottle" as "bo'el.")

The Hebrew "eloh" usually occurs only in the plural form as "elohim" except
in poetry: many words in Hebrew for obscure reasons occur only in the plural
while taking singular verbs and adjectives -- another common one is "mayim,"
the word for water(s). "Elohim" is the word translated as "god" or "God"
(frequently with a definite article in the case of the latter) throughout
the Christian Old Testament.

"Elohim" and "allah," with their Semitic character recognized, have about
the sameness of Spanish "dios" and Italian "dio." All of these words mean
"god," which itself can be represented in the Germanic languages as "god" or
"gott" or "gud." And the sameness between the god of Christians, Jews, and
Muslims is more than just linguistic: it is also historical.

Christians, Jews, and Muslims all claim to worship the god of Abraham. Jews
and Arab Muslims traditionally even claim biological descent from Abraham:
the Jews through his heir, Isaac, and the Arabs through his bastard son,
Ishmael. Abraham's name (more like Avrahom, really) even means "exalted
father" or "father of a multitude." Many Jews and Muslims are named after
Abraham, sometimes, especially with Muslims, in a form more like Ibrahim;
but remember that this is identical in the Semitic consonantal alphabets,
and that vowels in the Semitic languages have an existence that is very
different and less substantial than in the Indo-European languages. Things
like "ben Abraham" and "bin Ibrahim" also commonly appear in names in the
Middle East: "ben" and "bin" mean, in Hebrew and Arabic, "son" or "son of."

I understand that most people -- certainly most Americans -- don't know all
this, and Allah to them might as well be a pagan deity or Satan. But I
encourage you to lecture them with this information.

And it might be only because I am from the hippy-liberal San Francisco Bay
Area -- the seat of the Pledge of Allegiance decision -- but when I was in a
public high school, any mention of God or religion was met with unease by
everyone, and certain teachers sometimes gave entirely reasonable and legal
assignments (like research papers on several religions, or on a religion of
the student's choosing) to receive angry phone calls from parents who
believe wrongly that religion is not allowed in public schools.

According to our Constitution and its modern interpretation, endorsement of
any particular religion, explicit or implied, is not allowed. But studying
them without endorsement is acceptable. The generic quality of the word
"god" is widely considered similarly acceptable, and would be contrary to
beliefs or lack of beliefs only for atheists and perhaps polytheists: some
of us might prefer the government to be totally religiously neutral or
nonreligious, and many even think that this is guaranteed, but it isn't.
The Constitution just says that congress can pass no law concerning an
establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The
modern interpretation of this is that no state-funded entity can endorse any
religion. But using the word "god" in official documents is not obviously
against the law, and popular opinion dictates that it is not. For it to be
so would require a change in the interpretation of the first amendment.

An AP English teacher I once had wanted to require all students to read
selected parts of the Hebrew/Christian Bible(s) over the summer before being
in her class. The reason for this was that almost every book to be read in
her class, from Shakespeare to Melville, is brimming with references to the
Bible. Asking the class, for instance, why the narrator of Moby Dick wants
us to call him "Ishmael" is a profoundly empty question to a class of
students ignorant of the Hebrew Bible. I am not religious, but the
assignment seemed reasonable enough to me for a literature class. The Bible
has, after all, very good and very influential literature. It was
compulsory Bible-reading, though, and won many angry calls and was nixed by
the administration fearing a ruckus before the summer even began.

-robbie
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Received on Thu Aug 22 19:22:07 2002

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