Ed Dawkins on Allahu Akhbar

TubbaBlubba said:
Not true for pre-Middle Greek though, is it? χ is an aspirated k there, right? I'm only really somewhat familiar with Koiné, though.
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I think you're right. Am I also doing "cultural erasure" when I keep pronouncing it like [x]? Oh, and why does everyone keep using Scottish or German examples of gutturals? Try to pronounce "Scheveningen" to prove your credentials in this. ;)
Anecdotal evidence exists of the name Scheveningen being used as a shibboleth during World War II to identify German spies: they would pronounce the initial "Sch" differently from Dutch native speakers.


TubbaBlubba said:
Parthenon, eh? Yes, it sure is a good thing the Persians had the time to teach the Greeks a bit of proper architecture before the ungrateful subjects revolted :D And gee, weird how the famous mathematicians seem to flourish after the Persian Empire leads to stable contact with the Near East. You'd almost think the Greeks ended up getting access to an even then milennia-old tradition of mathematics to build off.
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Those rebels were only the Ionian Greeks, the ones in Greece proper were never subjugated by the Achaemenids. Greek contact with the ME was there long before the Persians came on the scene. For one thing - as this thread is about writing - they adopted the Phoenician alphabet abjad and made a major innovation: the Greeks invented vowels.
 
ddt said:
Am I also doing "cultural erasure" when I keep pronouncing it like [x]?
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This isn't a sincere question, because you know very well why the two cases are different. I'm not going to bother with this line of discussion unless you demonstrate some interest in analytical frameworks where cultural erasure is meaningful in this context.


Those rebels were only the Ionian Greeks, the ones in Greece proper were never subjugated by the Achaemenids. Greek contact with the ME was there long before the Persians came on the scene.
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True, Athens appears to have been an Achaemenid client state under Hippias however, prior to the Ionian revolt. At any rate plenty of Eastern knowledge and culture was flowing in.

Contact was not as sustained, straightforward or stable, because nobody had centralized rule that much before the Achaemenids. It's clear that Greek developments were spurred by Babylonian and Egyptian knowledge.

As for vowels, it was more a case of misidentification than invention.
 
So Dawkins doesn't like a Muslim call to prayer, or whatever those words mean. As an atheist, he should like the expression "enemy of the state" that was used to label all kinds of dissidents, including religious people, in the Communist countries for the purpose of sending them to the jail or even executing them.
 
Buddha said:
So Dawkins doesn't like a Muslim call to prayer, or whatever those words mean. As an atheist, he should like the expression "enemy of the state" that was used to label all kinds of dissidents, including religious people, in the Communist countries for the purpose of sending them to the jail or even executing them.
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You must be the only one on the planet who doesn't know that Allahu Akbar means God is greatest. It is not a call to prayer.
 
Buddha said:
So Dawkins doesn't like a Muslim call to prayer, or whatever those words mean.
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Seems like it.

As an atheist, he should like the expression "enemy of the state" that was used to label all kinds of dissidents, including religious people, in the Communist countries for the purpose of sending them to the jail or even executing them.
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Why should he like that expression, particularly? Is he a communist or something?
 
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Thor 2 said:
You must be the only one on the planet who doesn't know that Allahu Akbar means God is greatest. It is not a call to prayer.
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"Akbar" is the elative of "kabīr"; it can mean either "greater" or "greatest" depending on context. It has a flavour that's not quite appreciable in English which gives the phrase its breadth of usage.
 
I think it's important here to parse for context. Jihad can be 'the internal struggle for the elevation of the soul and intellect', or 'killing infidels in whatever way seems fitting'. Allahu akbar can be 'hey, I got accepted to Harvard' or 'I'm about to press the button to activate the bomb belt'. The issue isn't whether 'all Muslims are good' or the opposite, but the fact that England has a much higher percentage of Muslims - in their case, mostly South Asian - than any country in the Americas, and this, combined with social and economic change, can be disconcerting to many. The overt racists such as the BNP in England, the Front National in France, AfD in Germany, etc., get traction in such conditions; and after all, Trump's strategists realized that there is similar anti-immigrant sentiment in the US, though not exclusively directed at Muslims (recall Rep. King of Iowa averring to the 'Mexicans with calves the size of canteloupes' or similar, apparently referring to their being drug mules), or Trump's equating them with rapists and gangbangers. Recall, too, American History X. In conditions of poverty, people, like our not-topo-dissimilar chimp cousins, tend to form into gangs for protection when threats are perceived. Is it right, rational, empirical, etc.? Often not. Most people aren't good at making distinctions and observing nuance, preferring to conflate all members of group X with bad quality Y. Any politician knows that.
 
Buddha said:
So Dawkins doesn't like a Muslim call to prayer, or whatever those words mean.
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I'd say it's closest to crossing oneself in Xianity. It can be used in church, or indeed as part of any prayer, or in various situations of distress (such as being about to crash into a mountain), or before a battle, or really whenever you feel like you need some help from the ol' almighty. Unlike what some people (including apparently even an educated guy like Dawkins) seem to think, it isn't particularly associated with Jihad kind of situations, just like crossing oneself in Xianity doesn't mean you're part of some crusade.

I'll grant though that at least crossing oneself can be done perfectly silently. Then again, I guess since Allah knows everything including one's thoughts, there's notking to keep you from just going "Allahu Akhbar" in your head.
 
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HansMustermann said:
I'd say it's closest to crossing oneself in Xianity. It can be used in church, or indeed as part of any prayer, or in various situations of distress (such as being about to crash into a mountain), or before a battle, or really whenever you feel like you need some help from the ol' almighty. Unlike what some people (including apparently even an educated guy like Dawkins) seem to think, it isn't particularly associated with Jihad kind of situations, just like crossing oneself in Xianity doesn't mean you're part of some crusade.

I'll grant though that at least crossing oneself can be done perfectly silently. Then again, I guess since Allah knows everything including one's thoughts, there's noting to keep you from just going "Allahu Akhbar" in your head.
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Well, it is after all the cry Mohamed is said to have uttered after the Battle of Badr, the one in which Medina locals who did not recognize his authority were defeated, and which led soon after to Islam becoming supreme over the local tribal lands. In marking the definitive take off of Islam as a major faith in the region, it also strongly marks what is, and is not, considered good practice. Jihad, for Mohamed, very much meant the use of force to subdue. Because he is the founder of the faith, fundamentalism in Islam does very much equate to accepting the use of violence to impose the faith on all infidels and apostates.

Absolutism is always in danger of becoming violent by its very nature, and of all major religions, Islam has the absolutism baked in most purposely, as similar to Judaism, it preaches violence against apostates, and uniquely among major faiths advocates for the forced submission of unbelievers, on the spot and upon command, no excuse being possible because "Allah wrote his laws on every man's heart" (paraphrasing).

Recorded history, of course, bears out the strong and repeated tendency of all absolutists, including islamists, to kill in cold blood.
 
Yes, well, that still doesn't change what it actually means. Sure, you can use it in some kind of islamic fundamentalist context, just like you can use the cross when doing a witch burning, or whatever, but it doesn't mean that that's THE only one true meaning and use of it.

Or for example, in Catholicism, giving someone absolution can be done before executing them (in fact, it's one situation where you're allowed to not require a confession before giving absolution), but that doesn't mean that that's THE meaning of giving absolution. When the pope does it from the balcony during some papal visit, it doesn't mean he says the whole crowd should be executed :p
 
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Most interesting how flexible the Catholic Church is on issues like this. Yes absolution could only be given after confession, so the priest was summoned to the deathbed with due haste. If the dude died before he got there, then some mumbled explanation, that all would be ok anyway, was given.

I didn't know the Pope did absolutions from his balcony, I thought it was blessings he was giving.
 
Well, the pope can do whatever the pope wants, I suppose, including wear an anime hoodie. But yeah, the rules for absolution are... flexible, to say the least.

E.g., quite explicitly stated by the pope himself this year, since there's a corona around, you can just give general absolution to everyone. Including, and I kid you not, this was explicitly stated by the pope, you can just stand in front of the hospital and shout absolution. No, literally, if you just say it in a loud enough voice to be heard by enough people, yeah, you can literally just grant mass absolution to everyone in the hospital.

And according to the pope himself, it's not even something new, but just connecting the dots of the existing rules. I mean, the rules for absolution do explicitly allow to just give it not just when the guy is already dead, but when the death is imminent, or other such times of grave need. So you can just give it to some guy being snugly fitted into an electric chair even if he explicitly doesn't want to confess or anything. Also when there's more than one guy wanting absolution, and you don't have the time or it's otherwise impractical to listen to everyone's confession.

So, yeah, Dogma was a documentary. Turns out that even Satan COULD get to just go to the right place and get a general absolution.
 
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HansMustermann said:
So, yeah, Dogma was a documentary. Turns out that even Satan COULD get to just go to the right place and get a general absolution.
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I don't have a lot of knowledge about Catholicism, but my understanding is that Dogma was startlingly accurate about a lot of things.

I have a Buddy Christ, still in its original packaging. You reckon it might be worth anything?
 
I went on holiday to Egypt about 30 years ago, a couple of days in Cairo followed by a cruise down the Nile. In Cairo I was woken ridiculously early each morning by a ghastly amplified wailing, which I soon discovered was the call to prayer. All I can say is I understand why people who have to put up with it every day sometimes strap on a suicide vest and blow themselves up.

So I have to agree with Dawkins here: the Christian call to prayer is much nicer than the Islamic one.
 
Pixel42 said:
I went on holiday to Egypt about 30 years ago, a couple of days in Cairo followed by a cruise down the Nile. In Cairo I was woken ridiculously early each morning by a ghastly amplified wailing, which I soon discovered was the call to prayer. All I can say is I understand why people who have to put up with it every day sometimes strap on a suicide vest and blow themselves up.

So I have to agree with Dawkins here: the Christian call to prayer is much nicer than the Islamic one.
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I live within earshot of 5 mosques, so five times a day I get a wonderful version with 5 slightly different and interfering start and end points, different tones and paces, and different ability to maintain a note. When the chanter doesn’t turn up, instead of playing a recording, they ring a bell like the “get to class bell” at school. Speaking of school, I taught English for a little while to a series of classes of mostly Muslim students. Nearly all of them had a call to prayer app on their phones. That was fun too.

If I had to choose between 5 minutes of a ringing bell once a week on Sunday at 10am and the 35+ calls to prayer, I would definitely prefer the bell. But both being gone would be better.

On the other hand, my brother said he quite liked the call to prayer on the grounds it’s ‘like being in the opening scene of a Bond film’.
 
Pixel42 said:
I went on holiday to Egypt about 30 years ago, a couple of days in Cairo followed by a cruise down the Nile. In Cairo I was woken ridiculously early each morning by a ghastly amplified wailing, which I soon discovered was the call to prayer. All I can say is I understand why people who have to put up with it every day sometimes strap on a suicide vest and blow themselves up.

So I have to agree with Dawkins here: the Christian call to prayer is much nicer than the Islamic one.
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You haven't lived next to a large church and worked night shift, I gather. Having them bang on that bloody thing just when I finally got into bed was not my idea of a fun time.

Mind you, I'm not saying that a mosque would have been any better, but that's kinda the thing: neither is all that great, actually. I'd rather they both just kept it to themselves.
 
gypsyjackson said:
I live within earshot of 5 mosques, so five times a day I get a wonderful version with 5 slightly different and interfering start and end points, different tones and paces, and different ability to maintain a note. When the chanter doesn’t turn up, instead of playing a recording, they ring a bell like the “get to class bell” at school. Speaking of school, I taught English for a little while to a series of classes of mostly Muslim students. Nearly all of them had a c0all to prayer app on their phones. That was fun too.

If I had to choose between 5 minutes of a ringing bell once a week on Sunday at 10am and the 35+ calls to prayer, I would definitely prefer the bell. But both being gone would be better.

On the other hand, my brother said he quite liked the call to prayer on the grounds it’s ‘like being in the opening scene of a Bond film’.
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That is a really good post.
I think I resonated.
 
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