Arabic for Dummies

The spirit of learning

Why are people losing faith in the maulvis and the mullahs? Why is the young lot of this country renegading from Islam? Where did we go wrong? Who’s to blame; Islam or the Muslims? We have got a pandemic at our hands but no one is willing to even talk about it simply because it has become a religious taboo to raise the issue. The police of our society is busy constantly blaming the youth for their immorality but never tries to dig deeper in the issue and shove out the root cause; faithlessness. Yes, face it, many young boys and girls in Pakistan are openly defying religion and professing to be adamant atheists. They are fed up of Muslims, fed up of their hypocrisy, and fed up of Islam because those who claim to be the representatives of Islam simply are not giving them the answers. The fact is; they can’t give the answers simply because they don’t have any. Many of our maulvis and mullahs, with due respect to all, are not learned in religion at all. They are ‘Hafiz-e-Qur’an’ (Memorisers of the Qur’an) only. They have crammed the Surahs and Ayahs in Arabic without even understanding their meaning. Most of their fatwas and opinions are not derived from the Qur’an but from that of other scholars whose opinions in turn are derived from that of other scholars. So the cycle continues with the net result that all those claiming to be the masters of the religion really have no real connection with the Qur’an.

And yet there are those holy elite of our society who try to adorn their haram-earned wealth with lots and lots of Sadaqah (charity) and Hajj (pilgrimage) because apparently the positives would neutralise the negatives and render them sin-free. It doesn’t end here; they have the audacity to sound all religious in parties and gatherings and the courage to demean others who don’t give millions of rupees per month in charity. They have portraits of Ayahs and Surahs, the meaning of which they themselves don’t understand, embedded on the walls of their houses. They engage in Tasbih and Dhikhr (Zikar) in Arabic but themselves don’t know what they are reciting. And it is these blatant hypocrites who are causing our younger generation to lose faith in religion altogether; because to them religion is only a tool in the hands of the powerful to control others. Any opposition against religion means opposition against the power structure of the society, and that our youth is already very-well attuned to.

Deciding to apostate is an individual’s personal decision but there is hardly any discussion on why a person decides to be an atheist in a society which has religion embedded in it as the strongest core value. Well, everyone has access to the Internet these days and every religious young man and woman gets a chance to be a mufti online and give his/her on a particular religious issue.

Deciding to apostate is an individual’s personal decision but there is hardly any discussion on why a person decides to be an atheist in a society which has religion embedded in it as the strongest core value. Well, everyone has access to the Internet these days and every religious young man and woman gets a chance to be a mufti online and give his/her on a particular religious issue. And of course there are hardcore debaters on YouTube, Facebook and many other forums who would cross the line but would not let the militant atheists or the Christian evangelists win over them. Their usual arguments about the number 19 miracle in the Qur’an and how the repetition of words alludes to mathematical miracles have become pretty unconvincing. Problem is many of these supposed miracles are floated online in forums and blogs until they are considered facts, but only a few are talking about the real miracles, which usually require deep study.

And yet no one actually tries to read the Qur’an himself. Linguists know that a translation can never do justice to the original text and sometimes translations change the meaning altogether. Similarly, there are many idioms and phrases in the Qur’an which if literally translated into English would mean something completely different. And so when a young man endeavours to come closer to Islam and opens up the Qur’an and reads its translation, he is faced with so many questions and doubts, simply because the translation does not do justice to the original Arabic text by any means.

Failure to understand the Qur’an for its true meaning and relying solely on its archaic English translation has already led many to lose interest. After all, no one uses ‘Thy’ and ‘Thou’ in normal conversation anyway, so such Shakespearean English used in many translations of the Noble Qur’an is no longer relevant to many.

But no one has the time these days to learn Arabic, and some people argue that if the Qur’an is for the entire mankind, everyone should be able to understand it, and not just the Arabs. Well, the Qur’an definitely is for everyone but it’s only in one language isn’t it? And you don’t have to invest more than 10 minutes a day to at least learn the basics. Nouman Ali Khan, the CEO of Bayyinah, has opened up an institute which teaches Classical Arabic as well as modern-standard Arabic to be able to understand the Qur’an better. He has an online library of videos where he teaches his 11-year old daughter Husna, the basics of Arabic Grammar. I’m sure that if she can do it, we all can. Nouman Ali Khan says that many of the translators of the Qur’an were not Arabs, and so it’s pretty lame to excuse yourself of learning Arabic simply because you are not an Arab. It’s time that Muslims finally read the Qur’an in the language that their God chose for it; Arabic. The trouble with the Urdu-speaking lot of our society is that they think that Urdu and Arabic are more or less the same; if they understand Urdu, they have a command over Arabic too. But the problem is; many of the words in Urdu mean completely the opposite in Arabic. An example is the word ‘Ishan’ which in Urdu means doing somebody a favor; while in Arabic it means excellence. That is exactly what many maulvis do in Pakistan; translating Arabic words using their Urdu meanings and thus causing complete confusion as a result especially amongst the youth who are already turning skeptical about their religion.

Failure to understand the Qur’an for its true meaning and relying solely on its archaic English translation has already led many to lose interest. After all, no one uses ‘Thy’ and ‘Thou’ in normal conversation anyway, so such Shakespearean English used in many translations of the Noble Qur’an is no longer relevant to many. Because the old translations are seemingly more reliable, the society does not encourage the youth to pick up new ones as they could be written by Islam-haters. So where does the solution lie? If one has to know the truth, one has to do a little effort too. Just like there is a huge difference between an eight-grade Physics book and a Masters-level physics book, a person who reads just the translation has only learned the basics and is at worlds apart from he who has endeavoured to study the book in its original language; Arabic. So make your choice today; do you want your understanding of the Qur’an to be shallow or deep?