El-jaahil 'adoww nafsoh: Arabic
Read the article this discussion is about
- pseudoerasmus
- pseudoerasmus
- rkhen
- pseudoerasmus
This archived discussion is "read only".
» pseudoerasmus - sundry remarks
Robert Henderson said:Muslims believe that the Qu’ran must be read in the original Arabic to be understood properly. This linguistically-sound policy has helped Islam avoid the schismatic politics that plague other world religions...
So what exactly do you think are Sunnis, Shiites, Ismailis, Zikris and Ahmadis?
Arabic’s sacred status in Islam makes it an effective auxiliary in the many remarkably diverse cultures that practice various forms of that religion.
You define an "auxilliary language" in your link as a langauge "native to none" in which "all parties become fluent...which then becomes the language of business". Could you please tell me where in the non-Arabic Muslim world has Arabic become an auxilliary? Certainly not anywhere in Asia.
Such accomplishments are doubly impressive considering the challenges Arabic surfers face. Most obvious is their non-Roman alphabet and right-to-left writing system.
I'm not sure that the Arabic alphabet presents such a problem for Web surfing. After all, it is just an alphabet, a pretty simple one at that. Just take a look at the huge presence of Japanese on the Web, which has an infinitely more complicated writing system. Let's not get started on Chinese.
I think your speculation about why Arabic language and Arabic script have not succeeded very well on the Web falls apart under close scrutiny. The right-to-left issue is not such a big obstacle at all. Arabic (and Urdu, Persian and Pashto) text editors handle that automatically and without a fuss.
The real obstacle is the lack of uniform standards in characters encoding and viewing fonts among Arabic-speaking countries. And the reason for that is obvious -- there are many Arabic-speaking countries, making it difficult to standardise.
Did you bother to investigate the use of modified Arabic scripts on the internet? In contrast to Arabic on the Web, Farsi websites don't use graphic images of text. Why? Because there is basically one country, Iran, which uses Farsi, it gets to set the standard for character encoding. (OK, Afghans and Tajiks speak a variety of Persian, but they don't really have a Web presence.) Download one font and anyone can view most Farsi pages.
A situation similar to Arabic is Cyrillic -- it's preposterous that for the most part one can't view Serbian Web pages under the same encoding & font as for the Russian. This is, presumably, because the multiplicity of Cyrillic users prevent the adoption of a single standard.
As I said before, if the paucity of Arabic presence on the Web is due to the script, we shouldn't be seeing so many Japanese and Chinese sites. Yet we do.
Spain’s years in the great Muslim Empire....
The use of the term "Muslim Empire" is insulting, connoting that there was some monolithic Islamic empire at some point. Well, there was, but it collapsed after, oh, about 680 CE. Al-Andalus was was not part of a greater Islamic Empire, but a sovereign state of its own which happened to be Muslim.
By the way, if you downloaded and installed free Arabic downloads (widely available over the internet), you'd be able to see Arabic text right here in Suite101. You could do Greek right now, given that you must have Symbol preinstalled on your system.
It's just a matter of typing:
< font face="Symbol" >ei gar oi monoglwttoi kai oi poluglwttoi euquV tou polemon pausainto kai h eirhnh polun cronon diateloih .
OR
ei gar oi monoglwttoi kai oi poluglwttoi euquV tou polemon pausainto kai h eirhnh polun cronon diateloih
-- posted by pseudoerasmus
» rkhen - You seem to have missed a few qualifiers and mistaken some gener
You seem to have missed a few qualifiers and mistaken some generalisations for fact. For example, the line reads "has _helped_ Islam avoid," a reference to the fact that Islam hasn't suffered schism to the same extent as other religions, notably Christianity. "Helped" not only refers to those Islamic schisms that have happened, but also to the fact that reading the Qu'ran in the original is not the only reason the two religions have had different histories.Also note that your post is nearly as long as the article. My task as a Suite 101 Contributing Editor is to give curious laypeople a general picture. I also provide entry points where more interested or experienced readers can begin a satisfying surf or find answers to questions. There literally isn't room for the details you've brought up.
Fortunately, Suite 101 makes discussions available to all members, in part to answer this very limitation. However, I generally find that the Usenet style of quoting text and then challenging it has an argumentative quality ill-suited to dialogue and cooperative enquiry, as are combative words such as "insult."
-- posted by rkhen
» pseudoerasmus - ?
Robert HendersonMy comments on your article were civil and constructive. Yet you seem to be offended. In fact, you seem to hate to be called on errors of fact or interpretation. I suggest you stop being so delicate and get a thicker skin.
-- posted by pseudoerasmus
Please follow the guidelines set forth in the Suite101 Posting Etiquette when adding to the discussion.