From: hubey@pilot.njin.net (Hubey)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.arabic,soc.culture.pakistan,soc.culture.iranian,soc.culture.turkish
Subject: Re: The vanquished always want to imitate the victor (Ibn Khaldun)
Date: 25 Dec 92 07:30:02 GMT
Followup-To: soc.culture.arabic
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.

In article <Bzsw2x.M65@ucunix.san.uc.edu> minhaszt@ucunix.san.uc.edu (Zafar T Minhas) writes:


> allahuma salli ala muhammadin wa ala ali muhammad kama sallait ala ibrahima
> wa ala ale ibrahima innaka hamidun majid.

> now what i would like for you to do is to get an arabic dictionary and find
> out where your sentence will fit in what we pray above. (make a stupid 
> statement, expect a stupid response).

I already posted a response to this. Here goes again. I assume
'ala ali' or 'aala aali' means 'exalted family' or
'exalted people' or 'exalted xxx'.

Once again. Who are these people, Mohammed his wife and children
and Abraham (Ibrahim), his wife Sarah and his other wife
Hajjar and his children Isaac (Ishak) and Ishmail (Ismail) ?

Or are we to assume that something else is implied ?
What is implied? Who is implied ? What happened to
Jesus ? What happened to the other prophets ? What 
happened to Moses ? Why Abraham (Ibrahim) ?


> let me put it to you succinctly. you don't know arabic, you are biased, you
> are twisting islam to what it isn't but what you would like for it to be,
> and .... etc.

You're right I don't know Arabic, that's why I asked for this to
be posted, translated AND INTERPRETED? The prayer in Arabic
got posted, a loose translation got posted. I'm still waiting
for a consistent INTERPRETATION.

Would you please explain why, if deference is made to the 
ahl-i kitab, Jesus and Moses are not there.


> did the ottomans really almost completely forget turkish? gee all of the
> historical writings that i have seen from turkey ranging from the seljuks
> to the present time are in turkish! 

Really ? I thought it was mostly Arabic and Farsi. The language
was Ottoman (Osmanli) not Turkish.


>i can read the old stuff because it
> is written in arabic style, i can even understand some of it cause of my
> knowledge of urdu. arabic and farsi were the lingua franca of asia at the
> time, so you would expect many official documents to be written in arabic
> and farsi.

And why would you expect TURKISH documents to be written in Arabic
and Farsi ? Why is this so natural? Do the Pakistanis write
their official documents in Turkish ? Do the Persians write theirs
in Turkish? Do the ARabs write their documents in Turkish ?

> well if the quran is revealed completely in arabic, then it would make sense
> for one to understand arabic to understand what the hell one is
reading.

Yeah it certainly makes sense for people to learn ARabic to understand
the Quran if no translations exist.


> i wrote something in arabi. if you knew arabic, you would have no trouble
> understanding what i said.

Where did I claim to know Arabic?


> man turkish is a language that is filled with arabic words, if i said
> hi to you in turkish, i would say salam alaikum. my name "zafar" is
> very classic arabic name, but when i introduce myself to a turkish
> friend he was delighted to find out my name was so "turkish".

Hey guy, where did I say there  were no borrowings from Arabic
or Farsi ?

Did you read my post ?


> the use of an arabic based alphabet was the natural result of the difficulty
> of using a cuneiform/greek/aramaic type alphabet that did not have the 
> versatility that the arabic based alphabet did,

Arabic has three vowels. Turkish has either eight or sixteen
depending on how you look at it. The longer versions are dipthongized
by the use of the semi-vowels y and soft-g (yumusak g). So a word
like igne is actually more like iine. Similarly agir, or aga is
more like aair or aaa. This means Turkish  requires eight
or sixteen strokes instead of the three that exists in Arabic.

Try to produce eight distinct strokes that can be put on Arabic
consonants. If you are successful, then maybe you can try for
sixteen.


> are you upset that islam is the only religion that was/is able to cross
> the bounds of nationality and nationalism and embrace almost all people
> even some american indians without the cultural imperialism that YOUR
> race tried to give to us?

I think you're barking up the wrong tree. 
-- 

	mark	

   hubey@amiga.montclair.edu         hubey@apollo.montclair.edu
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