More Logical fallacies (and very poorly written English) from Dhimmi.

Submitted by zzazzeefrazzee (United States), Mar 4, 2008 at 19:20

یا "استاذ ذمي"!
هل تعارف شي من قوائدِ علمِ المنطق؟

Of course, if you could really comprehend English, you would readily observe that I never claimed that Arab Christians live in Indonesia; Oliver clearly did. So, why don't you ask him about it? Or are you just here to berate me? Post more logical fallacies? Straw men? Red Herrings? Do you even know what these are? You should, as you employ them in just about every post!

You would really benefit a great deal is you took a deductive logic course, as well as one in English Composition. Of course, will readily admit that I could use an Arabic refresher course- but your comments are nothing more than ridiculous ad hominens; you never addressed my point like a mature adult. Your use of what you believe to be "sarcasm" is hardly cogent, nor does is constitute mature, logical discourse.

You keep asking why I am making a point about the relationship of the names of God in Semitic languages- I've made my point very clear in my post. Please respond to my points, rather than respond as though I never made one (another form of "Straw man"- you are obviously harvesting a field of straw to post here!).

Or is your VERY POOR knowledge of English preventing you from seeing that?

C. Rabin. in his entry "Arabiyya", in "Encyclopedie de l'Islam", 2nd ed.,I (Leiden et Paris, 1960, pp.579a-622b), suggests that Northern Arabic characters used by the Quran were created by the Chistian Missionaries of Hira, centuries before Islam. A tri-lingual Greek, Syriac, and Arabic inscription in Zebed dated to 512 in Aleppo states "With the help of God (الاله)! Sergius, son of Amat Manaf, and Tobi, son of Imru'l-qais and Sergius, son of Sa‘d, and Sitr, and Shouraih."

See:

M. A. Kugener, "Nouvelle Note Sur L'Inscription Trilingue De Zébed", Rivista Degli Studi Orientali, 1907, pp. 577-586. Pl. I facing p. 586.

A. Grohmann, Arabische Paläographie II: Das Schriftwesen. Die Lapidarschrift, 1971, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften Philosophisch - Historische Klasse: Denkschriften 94/2. Hermann Böhlaus Nachf.: Wein, p. 14 and p. 16.

B. Gruendler, The Development Of The Arabic Scripts: From The Nabatean Era To The First Islamic Century According To The Dated Texts, 1993, Harvard Semitic Series No. 43, Scholars Press: Atlanta (GA), pp. 13-14.

Now, are you seriously going to tell me that الاله is not the same as الّله ? If you do, you would necessarily have to retract your prior arguments.

So what if you tell me that some Arab Christians "no longer" use "Allah". All you ar etelling me is that people now have a personal preference to not use the word- obviously due to their own arrogance of historical precedent. Furthermore, is your anecdotal information somehow verifiable? Could you even begin to fathom that I know a fair number of Arab Christians personally that have no problem with using the word like you seem to have. Why? Because they know that the use of the word is simply an elision of "al-Ilah" which has been proven to have been used by Christians in the period before Islam.

So why do you deserve a "break" when you're obviously unwilling to give me one to begin with!

For a full discussion, here is the entry from the 2nd Encyclopedia of Islam

MacDonald, D.B. "Ilāh." Encyclopaedia of Islam. Edited by: P. Bearman , Th. Bianquis , C.E. Bosworth , E. van Donzel and W.P. Heinrichs. Brill, 2008. Brill Online.

Ilāh

(a.), pl. āliha, "deity", appears in pre-Islamic poetry (see, e.g., F. Bustānī , al-Mad̲j̲ānī al-ḥadīt̲h̲a , i, index) as an impersonal divine name, although preceded by the article; for the Christians and (so far as the poetry ascribed to them is authentic) the monotheists, al- ilāh evidently means God; for the other poets it means merely "the one who is worshipped", so that al-ilāh indicates: "the god already mentioned" (the article being used li 'l-ʿahd) or "the god of whom the poet is thinking", and this use has survived to the present day ( ʿAbd al- Ilāh); but ilāh without the article seems to have been used only in the Islamic period to indicate a specific deity. By frequency of usage, al-ilāh was contracted to Allāh , frequently attested in pre-Islamic poetry (where this name cannot in every case have been substituted for another), and then became a proper name ( ism ʿalam ). But whilst the form al-ilāh is not found in the Ḳurʾān , allāh seems in some cases to have preserved the same meaning: thus (VI, 3) wa-huwa 'l-lāhu fi 'l-samawāti "and he is the deity in the heavens" (cf. Zamak̲h̲s̲h̲arī , Kas̲h̲s̲h̲āf, ed. Lees, 394), and in XXVIII, 70, huwa 'l-lāhu 'l-lad̲h̲ī lā ilāha illā huwa , "he is the deity other than whom there is no deity" (cf. Kas̲h̲s̲h̲āf, 1064), in which the juxtaposition of allāh/ilāh is noteworthy.

Ilāh is certainly identical with and represents an expanded form of an element -l- (il, el) common to the Semitic languages (see Enc. Biblica, iii, col. 3323 ff.; Brown-Driver-Briggs, Hebr. Lex., 42 f.; Genesius-Buhl, Hebr. und aram. Wörterbuch, s.v.; Fleischer, Kleinere Schriften, i, 15 ff.; T. Fahd , Le Panthéon de l'Arabie centrale, Paris 1968, 41, and bibliography there given). The Arab philologists discussed at great length the etymology of the words ilāh and allāh (see al-Rāzī, Mafātīḥ al-g̲h̲ayb , Cairo 1307, i, 83 f.; Sprenger, Das Leben, i, ch. 3, app. c). The Baṣrans established no direct connexion between ilāh and allāh , regarding the latter either as formed spontaneously (murtad̲j̲al) or as lāh (from the root lyh) preceded by the article. Some held that allāh was a loan from Syriac or Hebrew, but most regarded the proper name Allāh as a derivative (mus̲h̲taḳḳ, manḳūl), a contraction of al-ilāh, and endeavoured to attach ilāh to a triliteral root; to explain it (see also al-Bayḍāwī , ed. Fleischer, i, 4), some ten derivations were suggested, from the following "roots": (1) ʾlh "to adore", but as al-Zamak̲h̲s̲h̲arī pointed out (Kas̲h̲s̲h̲āf, 8), the verb alaha is derived from the noun; aliha, "to be perplexed, confounded", for the mind is confounded in the experience of knowing Allāh (waliha has the same meaning); aliha ilā, "to turn to for protection, or to seek peace, or in longing" (waliha has a similar meaning); (2) lyh, whence lāha "to be lofty" and "to be hidden" (opinion of the Baṣrans); (3) lwh, whence lāha, "to create"; (4) ʾwl and ʾyl, roots conveying the idea of "priority"; (5) Abū 'l-Baḳāʾ al-Kaffawī, Kulliyyāt al-ʿulūm, Būlāḳ 1953, 69, regards the word Allāh as formed from¶ hāʾ , the "noun of majority" and pronoun of the 3rd person, and the lām of possession.

On the other hand, lexicographers have pointed out that the termination -īl in some South Arabian proper names indicates the deity; on this question, see G. Ryckmans, Les noms propres sud-sémitiques, Louvain 1934-5, passim; for ʾil in the South Arabian inscriptions , see A. Jamme, Le Panthéon sud-arabe préislamique d'après les sources épigraphiques, in Le Muséon, lx (1947), 57-147.

---

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".