Learning a new religion, learning a new language, losing your identity

Submitted by A very concerned reader (Ukraine), Mar 19, 2021 at 04:49

Dear M Tovey,

I know that I will go a bit off topic, but from all your post, I would like to draw the readers' attention to this fact: teaching Islam by non-Arabic speakers. How could it make any sense that a non-Arabic teaches a religion whose language is not theirs? How is that to follow a religion one has to learn a whole new language which more often than not has nothing in common with theirs? That's when the linguistic slips come out. If for mastering a language and being sufficiently competent at it just to communicate and convey our messages with coherence and cohesion, we need many tough study years how someone can pretend to be able to grasp a whole doctrine and understand it? Moreover, how can they expect to teach it? Of course, because this person learns from what has been told to believe as The Truth.

Dr Pipes, M Tovey, I know it can sound defiant, but I'm confident that Islam was created by Arabs and for Arabs. Arabs who dreamt of a whole world in which the only spoken language was Arabic to unify all territories through their totalitarian thinking. Converting to Islam is not only changing/adopting a new religion: it is to change your whole identity, even your language and relinquish to your roots. It was born as an ambitious project with the pretension of putting an end to diversity, our colourful linguistic map, free-thinking and the choice of religion. In short, to end up with the uniqueness of every human being to develop all their potential for the sake of homogeneity as a whole. That's how total and complete control is possible in all orders and levels of life. How wrong...

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