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Iran and the "mother tongue"! Persian v Arabic!

Reader comment on item: Dhimmis No More
in response to reader comment: Persian writings in Arabic

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Jan 25, 2018 at 11:27

Gato you wrote:

>Concerning secular literature there was lots of Arab-language secular literature (both original and translated from Middle Persian or from Sanskrit mostly through Middle Persian) written by Persians from about 750 to about 1050. Arabic language was replaced by Persian as the medium of secular writing in the Eastern Iranian lands starting with the Samanid rule(about 860-1000) while in the Western and Central Iran it did not happen before 1050, the Seljuk takeover. Buwayhid rulers of Persian origin (940-1055) in their courts in Hamadan and Isfahan cultivated literature not in Persian but in Arabic.

Oh sure but again take the case of India and the English language Many Indians write in English just as many Persians used to write in Arabic So what? After all it is the linguistic market place that will decide the winners and the losers and in the case of Iran the Persian language won for many reasons but I still believe that on the top of the list is the fact that the Persian language is the mother tongue

>Certainly Egyptians having lost their uprising against Ummayads, the Persian uprising which brought to power Abbassids was largely successful.

Or Egyptians did not play the game right and it is: "if you cannot beat them then join them" The Persians played it right They not only established what Islam is all about They wrote the books of Islam and told what the grammar of Arabic is all about and the Persian al-Tabari told us what the Qur'an is really saying. They also defeated the Umayyads, created the Abbasids dynasty, built their capital Baghdad (not an Arabic word!) a few miles away from the glorious Ctesiphon This is why they were able to continue to speak their language and maintain their "superior" culture and make fun of the "backward" Arabs!

See? It is all about continuity

>This of course is an important fact and makes difference. The existence of secular poetry in Egyptian language would have helped its survival in Muslim milieu since secular literature can be shared and admired by people of different confessions,

Oh sure No doubt about it but this, as I have proven to you so far, is not the only reason

>but definitely Christian literature written by Egyptian monks hardly had any appeal on Muslims.

You got my point and to paraphrase Islamic literature written by Persian Mullahs in Arabic hardly had any appeal to the Persian masses and this is why the smart Persians the likes of Ferdawsi wrote the Shahnemah in Persian and not Arabic! Now you know the answer

>It is certainly not easy to say whether Ferdowsi was good or bad Muslim but he certainly a genuine and sincere Persian nationalist.

Or he was a realist He knew well that if he wrote it in Arabic it would not have the appeal that it has now

> It is not easy to tell about Avicenna(who wrote 90 percent in Arabic) either. For Shias, he is certainly a good Muslim, for Sunnis hardly so.

This is an old Islamic game. Listen just google: مدلس كذاب ابن اسحاق or Ibn Ishaq (the author of Sirat Rasul Allah) liar and unreliable/plagiarist and also google حفص كذاب مدلس or Hafs (he collected the likes of the Cairo Qur'an) liar and unreliable/plagiarist and you will be surprised So it is either all the books of Islam are unreliable and they were written by liars and plagiarists or I'm missing something here

You can also replace the name with let us say al-Waqidi, al-Bukhari etc.. and you will get the same

>Concerning "Allah" it is definitely a loan word from Syriac "alaahaa" and certainly not a contraction from al-ilah.

Here from their books from one of my old posts:

Again this is what al-Halabi says in his exegesis of the word Allah

أنه ليس بعربي بل هو معرب، وهو سرياني الوضع وأصله: "لاها" فعربته العرب فقالوا: الله، واستدلوا على ذلك بقول الشاعر:
29- كحلفة من أبي رياح * يسمعها لاهه الكبار
فجاء به على الأصل قبل التعريب، ونق ذلك أبو زيد البلخي.

Or it (the word Allah) is not Arabic (word) but it is Arabized from Syriac and its origin is (the Syriac word) Laha (Alaha) and the Arabs arabized it as Allah and as evidence is what the poet Kahlafa men Abi al-Ryah he heard it as Laha al-kubar and he came with it before it was Arabized as per Abu Zaid al-Balkhi"

And here is the vocalized Alaha in Syriac

http://www.assyrianlanguages.org/sureth/dosearch.php?searchkey=413&language=id

>Concerning the Egyptian language the mainstream scholarship uses the term "Coptic" for the latest stage of the Egyptian language after the introduction of Christianity,

It is so wrong. You will never find the word Qibt or Copt and Aqbat (plural of Copt) and Bilad al-Qibt (the country of the Copts or Egypt) before the Arab invasion of Egypt is 642CE The Qur'an uses only the Semitic form M-S-R for Egypt so we have the Quranic Masri (Egyptian) and Masr (compare with Syriac ܡܨܪܝܢ and Hebrew Misrayim (Tiberian)

So what did the Egyptian people call their Egyptian language and script between the 2nd and 7th century? Any guesses? Hint: They did not call it Coptic language (sic) for sure

So much for modern scholarship and intellectual laziness

>in order to better distinguish it from earlier stages of Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, Demotic etc. As for script it is not especially "Coptic" bu rather simply the uncial Greek alphabet with some 6-7 additional letters from Demotic. And of course Christian Egyptians has lots of Greek loan words,

So what if the Egyptian language written in the so called Coptic script has many loan words from Greek? And also the Persian language has many loan words from Arabic and Arabic, even Quranic Arabic, has many loan words from Persian (eg: Istabraq it is the green cloth that Muslim men will wear in Allah's heaven) but so what?

I suspect that the spoken Egyptian language would have been more pristine when compared with the written texts and the same applies to the Persian language

> I have seen some texts.

You have some texts of what?

Submitting....

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Title Commenter Date Thread
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Dear Jeff [101 words]Debanjan BanerjeeJan 15, 2018 08:42241657
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1So what do we now about the Qur'an as a text? [788 words]dhimmi no moreFeb 10, 2018 11:29241503
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1Thanks for the article 'Dhimmis No More' [601 words]PrashantDec 8, 2017 11:29241498
There are differences [50 words]bernardDec 18, 2017 19:28241498
2So... [13 words]AlexDec 7, 2017 21:00241490
Let's Win the War of Ideas [212 words]DaveDec 7, 2017 18:12241489

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