For Noah and the word Jihad and our dear M&M

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Feb 28, 2007 at 07:05

Hi Noah

We do not even have to go to the Qur'an. The great thing about Semitic grammar (Syriac, Arabic and Hebrew) is that it is very easy to master and very logical. But wannabe Arabs the likes of M&M have no clue about anything but to keep repeating same nonsense that the word jihad means strive to improve oneself and does not mean holy war.

Now the Arabic language has what we call the root system. Let us have a hypothetical example here: let us say in English we have a root system as in Arabic and we have the root SN. Well this can be read as: son or sun. And although both words come from the same root, they now belong to different stems that have nothing in common anymore except a common root.

Now I will make it a little bit more difficult. Sibawayhe, the father of the Arabic grammar, esablished the fact the the root system "stems" from the word F3L (the number 3 stands for the Arabic letter Ayn) or verb. And the stems from the root can take 6 basic forms and some other rare forms. More later.

Now in the case of the infamous jihad the root of the word is JHD. Now from the root JHD we have two stems:

1. In one stem we have the word Ijtihad (or in Sibawayhe's F3L it would be: IFTI3AL and notice that this stem is very different from the following stem). Now from this stem we have the words: Ijtihad or "striving to improve", Mujtahid (mufta3il) or he who strives to improve, and Yajtahid (yafta3il) or he strives to improve himself.

2. In stem two we have the word Jihad (or in Sibawayhe's F3L it would be FI3AL. Now from this stem we have the words: Jihad and it means holy war (see Malik: Kitab al-Jihad), Mujahid (mufa3il) or holy warrior, Yujahid (yufa3il) or he fights in holy war.

So a mujahid or holy warrior has nothing in common with mujtahid or he who srtives to improve himself except for the common root of JHD. But again wannabe Arabs the likes of M&M are clueless and I susepct it is out of pure ignorance of the Arabic language grammar.

I hope that i helped.

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".