Ala Sallam

Understanding the True Meaning of Arabic in the Quran

وسلام على آل إبراهيم إنك حميد مجيد

Allah states in Surah Fussilat:

That verse had me thinking for most of my life. What does it really mean? If you read the translation and some of the commentary on the verse, it tells you that Allah is telling the people of Quraysh, if this Quran came in a different language than the language you Qurayshi speak, you would have said, we are Arabs. How could you reveal something to us in a different language? But then the verse continues and says, say, Ya Muhammad, say, this Quran for those who believe is guidance and cure.

If those who believe means the Qurayshi, the Arabs who understand it, who say that if the Quran was in the non-Arabic, then, that means the people who speak that language, what about those who don't speak the language? Is it not guidance? Then there is a problem here, that we need to understand better what Allah means by the word Arabic, عربي.

The True Meaning of Arabic

And if you go to the root of that language, it does not mean the tongue that Qurayshi spoke. It means the expressing, we even say it today, He expresses himself in a very clear manner, in a very flawless, in a way that has no faults.

And that's what Arabic in the Quran from beginning to end mean. It doesn't mean a language of a group of people. It means that it is clear, flawless, has no faults in it.

How then does people understand that? To understand this, you have to go to what language is. I would refer you to some of the scholars that address this issue from our time, and from the old, the scholars that will know, like Ibn Faris and Imam Sayyuti, and from our current time, Dr. Fadhil Samir Rai, and Dr. Omar At-Tayyeb, who is a professor of language in Ummul Qura University, and many others, that stated now, the language itself, the smallest atomic unit for the language is a word. But not in the Quran.

In the Quran is a letter. And when Allah addresses all the children of Adam, and He says, He's not talking to the Arabs. He's talking to everybody.

Allah, in the Quran, the letter is the smallest atomic container that has a meaning. So, when you look at the Arabs, who were the last people on earth, who understood this language, because it was the original language that was revealed to Adam. And that's why they were called أمة أمية.

Understanding Words in Their True Context

The words that Allah has to use in the Quran, these words have to be an absolute words. In other words, language is defined by how you use the words. So, for example, we today use the word أمي, means the one who is illiterate, does not read or write.

But the true meaning of the word أمي, as per the Quran, is the person who is ignorant of something else. So if you take our definition of the word أمي, and you apply it to the following verse, you will be in deep trouble:

What does it mean? Say, Ya Muhammad, to the people of the book, and I'm going to use the term that we use today, أمي means illiterate. So tell the people of the book and the illiterate, are you believers? Are you Muslims? If they said yes, they are guided. Then what happened to those who know how to read and write? They're completely out of this verse.

But if you use اللسان العربي, which is the Quranic meaning of this word, then here is the translation. Say, Ya Muhammad, to the people of the book and those who do not believe in the book. So the people of the book and the rest of the world, أأسلمتم, you become a Muslim, if they say yes, they are guided.

Here the changing of the meaning makes it very interesting, makes it fit perfectly. Why? Because the language Allah has spoke to the children of Adam is the language he taught their forefather. That language is in every cell of your body, in every single one of you.

That's why Allah says:

A Real Example of Universal Understanding

That's why a lot of people, on my own hand, a man asked me to get him the Quran, long time ago. I brought him the Quran, but out of curiosity I asked him, I said, what made you interested in the Quran? He said, I was turning the TV channel on Sunday and I heard something that made me freeze in my place. This man doesn't even know what السلام عليكم is.

One of the minimum, little thing that a lot of people who don't speak Arabic know. He doesn't know anything about Arabic. Then I said, and what made you freeze? He said, I don't know.

I didn't understand what was being said, but I knew there is an important message in this. That's why I called the Islamic center. I read the Quran and he became a Muslim, completely on his own, just by reading the Quran.

He does not understand a single word of Arabic. You explain that to me.

The Divine Names and Their Universal Nature

When Allah uses, when you want to name something:

When you want to name something, you have to know two things. What is it? And what's the functionality? What is it used for? The only one who knows all his creation, what they are used for is Allah. So the naming of Allah to things like الشمس, القمر, النهار, الليل is a name that would last regardless to culture, regardless to time, regardless to place. It would mean the same thing.

If you use the اللسان العربي, it does not change. So how would Allah describe, for example, the time is past and we have now different means of transportation. We have trains, we have cars, we have planes.

How would Allah express that in the Quran? He expresses it with one word. One word would last to the day of judgment and even beyond. دابة. وما من دابة. دابة means anything that walk, fly, or float, or make any sound on earth.

It's called دابة. One word encompasses everything.

The Precision of Every Letter

You need to understand when you read the Quran, don't read it, how many times I finish the Quran from beginning to end. Ask yourself when you read it. Why Ibrahim in Surah Al-Baqarah is written without ياء but everywhere else in the Quran is written with ياء. There is a difference.

We said in the Quran, the letter that changes, changes the meaning. صيام in the Quran doesn't mean the same as صوم. When Allah says:

He didn't say صيام. He said, فقولي إني نذرت للرحمان صوماً. Because صوم involves eating and drinking, not صيام. One letter change.

Why is صلاة in the Quran written with ل sometimes and sometimes written with و? Why is رحمة written with open ت and closed ت and so on?

If you read the Quran, every letter changes, know that the meaning here is different than the meaning of the other word, even though it's almost spelled the same way.

That's how you would reflect on the Quran. Ask Allah to open your heart and open all our hearts to understand this Quran. Of course, there is a lot of details, behind what I'm telling you now, but for the sake of time, we can't dig into every detail on that.

أقول قولي هذا وأستغفر الله لي ولكم

Second Khutbah

الحمد لله حمداً كثيراً طيباً مباركاً فيه كما يحب ربنا ويرضى وأشهد أن لا إله إلا الله وحده لا شريك له وأشهد أن محمداً عبده ورسوله أما بعد

I mentioned to you that Imam Sayyuti and Ibn Faris well known in the tafsir of Quran and the language They, one of the theories about the letters that the Quran is written with, these are restrictive, exclusive from the day Allah taught Adam these letters till today, till the day of judgment. In other words, you cannot come and reinvent and say I'm going to write Alif in a different way.

That's why it explains to us why there are Arabic words that exist in other languages like أبي, أمي In Chinese, أبا, أما In Korean, same thing.

In English, با, ما That's why there are words The Arabs didn't know it was Arabic words they thought it was أعجمي and that's why some of the scholars said there are 275 أعجمي words and they completely wrong on that because many other scholars said no, there is no أعجمي in the Quran because Allah says لسان عربي like زرابي like the word سورة جهنم

These are all non-Qurashi words but they are Arabic words the language that Allah taught Adam the language that He spoke to all the بشر and ask yourself how the jinn when he heard the Arabic language understood it right away because it was more ancient than what Qurashi spoke

أقول قولي هذا واستغفر الله لي ولكم وأقيموا الصلاة