From: minhaszt@ucunix.san.uc.edu (Zafar T Minhas)
Subject: Re: The vanquished always want to imitate the victor (Ibn Khaldun)
Organization: University of Cincinnati
Date: Sun, 27 Dec 1992 20:36:40 GMT

In article <Dec.25.02.30.02.1992.27719@pilot.njin.net> hubey@pilot.njin.net (Hubey) writes:
>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'.

no. in the sentence that said ala ali or ala ale (however one choses to 
pronounce it) it means on the family of XXX. so on the family of ibrahim
and on the family of muhammad. however i see what you are getting at.
i assume that ale ibrahima is the immediate family of ibrahim, where he had
two sons who were prophets, as well as the line of prophets that came from
ibrahim, moses, jesus and muhammad were in that line. mose and jesus were
from ishaq, and muhammad was from ismail. the line of ala ale muhammad,
came as a result of a prayer muhammad asked to god which he wanted his family
to be blessed by god the same way god blessed ibrahim and his family
(i believe the blessing is that no one has forgotten the name of abraham
and the line of prophets that would come after him). it is said that
muhammad, in heaven hears people who recite this prayer and when he hears
the prayer being recited he asks god to bless those who recite it.
only god knows the truth.

>
>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) ?

abraham is considered the father of most of the prophets mentioned
in the scripture, so he is like a spiritual father.
>
>
>> 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.

deference to ahl-i-kitab, people with a divinely revealed book, has nothing to
do with the prayer itself.
>
>
>> 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. 

osmanli sounds close enough to turkish to me. i could be wrong though.
>
>
>>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 ?

modern turkish documents are not written in arabic or farsi, they are written
in either turkihs or english, and that makes sense because turkish is the
language of the people and english is an international language.
that is why it would make sense for old documents to be written in arabic
and farsi and turkish. because turkish was the language and because arabic
and farsi were international languages.

 Why is this so natural? Do the Pakistanis write
>their official documents in Turkish ? 
almost all of the official documents in pakistan are written in english.
very little is written in urdu. it is  the convention to do that. like
i said, english is international. the way arabic and farsi were international
it was only over a hundred years ago that official documents in india were
written in farsi.

Do the Persians write theirs
>in Turkish? Do the ARabs write their documents in Turkish ?

no. same reason.
>
>> 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.

well we muslims view it much differently than you do. what to you is
cultural imperialism, we see it as an effective way of keeping our book 
unchanged. the injil was revealed in ancient hebrew and aramaic, one of
the reasons why it is different now is because of its translation into
greek, then latin, then back into hebrew, the bible that you have now is a
mixture of things that doesn;t even deserve to be considered to be injil.
so you have to look at it the way we do. one of the reasons our book has not
changed at all is because of our insistance on maintaining it in the revealed 
arabic.
 
>
>
>> 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 ?

you might want to know that modern arabic has borrowed a lot from other 
languages, like turkish, for example, the word al-khwajah came from turkish, it means
sir, in pure arabic one would not say khwajah, one would sidi or sid.
>
>
>> 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. 

but in combination with other letters the vowel sounds increase.

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.

i did not say that they used an arabic alphabet, i said an arabic BASED
alphabet. one letter that is considered a consonant in arabic
is pronounced like a vowel in other languages ('ayn), actually, the alif,
hamza, and ayn are all pronounced almost the same.... in turkish, that would give
twelve vowels, with a zabar in front of a vow, you would have an ow sound,
with a pesh in front you would have an oo sound, with a zabar in front of a yah
you would have an ay sound and with a zeir in front of the yah you would have
an ee sound, hanmzah is used as a glottal stop on many occasions and alif, vow
and yah can be used to elongate sounds as well. hope i haven't lost you?
>
>
>> 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. 
>-- 

i certainly hope so.
>
>	mark	
>
zafar

p.s. i might add that some of us are quite happy the way our languages are.
though i can't speak turkish, i am happy that my strength in urdu and arabic
can help me (with great strugle of course) in comprehending what i can read
in turkish, and that is the point, arabic based languages, like urdu, turkish,
farsi, etc. helped in shedding the shackles of race and nationalism, i am
happy that i can go to indonesia and be able to read the things that are written.
i am happy that i was able to go to afghanistan and be able to communicate at
least in writing what i had in mind. when i went to the muslim areas of china
though i couldn't understand what the hell was being said, i could at least
read it and recognize some of the words. this was not cultural imperialism.
it was pleasure.
Newsgroups: soc.culture.arabic