For Sara and the word kafir

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Mar 8, 2007 at 18:47

Hi Sara

I loved your analysis and I am sure that you know that indeed Arabic as well as Syro-Aramaic use the same 3 letters root and out of each root we have the stems and once you have a stem the words originating from the stem have nothing more in common.

But before i start my response: I'm sure that you are very aware that although there is indeed a solid strata of Jewish material in the Qur'an (see Geiger) and that there are indeed loan words from Hebrew in the Qur'an (eg: zakat) and one can very much argue that the Qur'an is nothing but a midrash, but it seems that the most important source of non Arabic words/loan words in the Qur'an come from Syro-Aramaic and not from Hebrew (and the Qur'an is indeed full of Syro-Aramaic words and eg: Tur, Ruum) and if you examine the Quranic proper names thay must have passed onto the Qur'an from Syro-Aramiac and not from Hebrew and examples here would be: you will not find the Hebrew name Slomoh or P(F)r'he in the Qur'an as in Quranic Arabic we have instead Sulayman and Fira3oon which are clearly loans from Syro-Aramaic Slymuun and P(F)r'uun

So you see when i see a foreign word in the Qur'an I think Syriac first before Hebrew.

Now understaning the above let us work on KFR and this is the root.

1. Yakfur or YAF3UL (takfur f., yakfuru pl) means he becomes an unbeliever. And this is a stem and then we have kafir or unbeliever, Kufr or unbelief,

2. Kafr (kufur pl.) means village and it is from the same root but it is a different stem

3. And then we have the stem of Kafara or FA3ALA means to cover but this is not a common and much used Arabic word as we have the much used: Yughati or to cover. As for claiming that the word kafir has anything to do with kafara I very much suspect that it has nothing to do with it. They only share the same root KFR and this is not unlike the case of saying that the word Islam must have something to do with salam as both words come from the same root: SLM.

But the most imporatnt thing here is: In the Muslim masora the word kafir only means: non-Muslims and Muslims under certain conditions (those that celebrate Mawlid al-Nabi or Muhammad's birthday) and nothing about covering.

I hope that I helped.

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