Harsh language followed by unjust action, the burning of churches, has surrounded the debate regarding whether Malay Christians are able to use the word Allah as a translation for the word God. Some Muslims feel that Allah refers to a different God than the Christian God.
That is interesting because I have decreased some of the prejudice against Muslims among Christians by explaining that Allah is the Arabic word for God, and that with the same roots of Adam, and Abraham, that indeed they are the same God words. Now I see that Muslims unravel that mutual understanding because they confuse a linguistic situation of how to share calling on the name of the one God with specifics of Islamic or Christian doctrine.
One God.
The One God called Allah, The One God called God.
Remember, though, that Christians translate the word God into native languages throughout the world. God is the English language word for God.
Christians don't know they are Christians because they worship the divinity spelled G-O-D.
The tradition language of the Catholic Church, Latin, for example, provides the name of the divinity as Deo.
(example: Deo gratias means Thanks be to God in English. )
Followers of The One God called Allah use the word Allah because the Qur'an was given to them in the Arabic language. Thus Muslims have an official liturgical language, Arabic, just as does the Catholic Church, which is Latin.
Thus to be totally accurate in this argument (if you were having the argument with a Vatican official), you are comparing the use of Arabic Allah with Latin Deo.
Because, despite the translations of the Qur'an into many languages, the translators adhered to the word Allah (Arabic) in each translation (for example my English language Qur'an uses the word Allah), and because the only religious imagery of God that is allowed is the inscription in calligraphy of the word Allah, a linguistic word has become holy to Muslims. That is understandable.
However, being understandable does not mean that Muslims can ignore that a different model was not followed with Christianity. Christians did not make the Latin word Deo the word that must be used in every Bible translation. Further, Christians do not make religious imagery of God using his name Deo. So when a Bible is translated into English, the English language word God is used, not Deo, and likewise in every other language.
Because Christians allow religious imagery, which the Qur'an does not for Muslims, Christians have many sources of religious imagery and thus never sanctified the writing of the name Deo. This is a fundamental difference between the practice of Islam and the practice of Christianity, but it does not mean they are different Gods.
I hope that the religion of peace, Islam, will resolve this problem without disrespect, harming people, threatening, violence and, of course, burning down churches. Where are your scholars, who must surely know as much as I do and have just clearly explained here?
Showing posts with label calligraphy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label calligraphy. Show all posts
Friday, January 8, 2010
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Arabic calligraphy
An interview with an amazing artist (a professor of international relations), illustrated with photographs of his beautiful work.
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20070617x1.html
snip
ARABIC CALLIGRAPHY WITH A SENSE OF NIHON
Japan's master of an ancient Muslim art
For Kouichi Honda, writing a beautiful line is what life is about. Getting every detail right — the subtle curves, the varying thicknesses and the density of the ink — matters to him as much as life itself.
******
Most of you remember the huge controversy about making cartoons or representations of the Muslim Prophet (peace be with him) and many westerners do not understand what the fuss is about. That is not surprising since westerners are often so profane about their own religious symbolism, but that's neither here nor there. I'd like to explain the more positive side of Islamic beliefs and art so as to better understand.
Because Islam does not permit figurative representations of Allah or the Prophet, their written work, their script, has been elevated to the highest art form. This way the actual words of the Quran, including the name of Allah, are a devotional art form and there are practitioners of the highest level of calligraphy. Kouichi Honda, in this article, is an example of an artist who brushes in calligraphy devotional words from the Quran. Also, if you have ever traveled to a country with Islamic decorative art, you will notice that a great care and beauty is placed into the drawing of nature - floral, landscape, animals, harvests... all of these are symbolic of Allah's creation. Kouichi Honda has some beautiful contemporary examples in his work of painting a natural scene and then decorating and embedding script from the Quran throughout the landscapes. Many Muslims do not understand that Christians are not actually praying to the "graven images" of God, Jesus Christ, and the saints. They do not understand that the images are used by Christians as a comfortable mental focus to aid in their prayer discipline, and thus they do not realize that Christians understand that images are not necessary for prayer and are not the recipients of prayer. Likewise, Christians are often not familiar with the artistic way that Muslims do honor Allah and the words of the Quran through arabic calligraphy shaped into natural forms that represent the creations of Allah.
I hope this little post and the wonderful interview with Kouichi Honda help to bridge some of this mystery and misunderstanding.
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20070617x1.html
snip
ARABIC CALLIGRAPHY WITH A SENSE OF NIHON
Japan's master of an ancient Muslim art
For Kouichi Honda, writing a beautiful line is what life is about. Getting every detail right — the subtle curves, the varying thicknesses and the density of the ink — matters to him as much as life itself.
******
Most of you remember the huge controversy about making cartoons or representations of the Muslim Prophet (peace be with him) and many westerners do not understand what the fuss is about. That is not surprising since westerners are often so profane about their own religious symbolism, but that's neither here nor there. I'd like to explain the more positive side of Islamic beliefs and art so as to better understand.
Because Islam does not permit figurative representations of Allah or the Prophet, their written work, their script, has been elevated to the highest art form. This way the actual words of the Quran, including the name of Allah, are a devotional art form and there are practitioners of the highest level of calligraphy. Kouichi Honda, in this article, is an example of an artist who brushes in calligraphy devotional words from the Quran. Also, if you have ever traveled to a country with Islamic decorative art, you will notice that a great care and beauty is placed into the drawing of nature - floral, landscape, animals, harvests... all of these are symbolic of Allah's creation. Kouichi Honda has some beautiful contemporary examples in his work of painting a natural scene and then decorating and embedding script from the Quran throughout the landscapes. Many Muslims do not understand that Christians are not actually praying to the "graven images" of God, Jesus Christ, and the saints. They do not understand that the images are used by Christians as a comfortable mental focus to aid in their prayer discipline, and thus they do not realize that Christians understand that images are not necessary for prayer and are not the recipients of prayer. Likewise, Christians are often not familiar with the artistic way that Muslims do honor Allah and the words of the Quran through arabic calligraphy shaped into natural forms that represent the creations of Allah.
I hope this little post and the wonderful interview with Kouichi Honda help to bridge some of this mystery and misunderstanding.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Birds, dinosaurs, China, Arabic calligraphy musings
Here are snips from the NY Times article about a discovery reported in the journal Nature, of a dinosaur that looks like a huge ostrich. The drawing in the article shows a human would stand approximately up to the "knee caps" of the bird, wow!
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/science/14dino.html?hp
snip
Scientists have uncovered a huge surprise in the Inner Mongolia region of northern China: the fossil skeleton of an unusually robust birdlike dinosaur that lived 70 million years ago. The animal appeared to be a young adult 25 feet long and weighing 3,000 pounds and, if it had lived longer, would probably have grown even larger.
snip
The Chinese scientists who made the discovery, being reported today in the journal Nature, said the skeleton belonged to a dinosaur family that included the beaked, birdlike oviraptor. This family was not closely related to the dromaeosaurid dinosaurs generally thought to be ancestors of modern birds. Still, the scientists concluded that the new skeleton “is an exception to some general patterns” during the evolution of related dinosaurs, including the “trend of size decrease” that is associated with the origin of birds. They said it was significant that the large specimen “shows many birdlike features absent” in smaller relatives.
Impressed by the size and puzzling character of their find, the team led by Xing Xu, a paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, classified the animal as a new genus and species. It was given the name Gigantoraptor erlianensis, the specific name recognizing the Erlian basin of Inner Mongolia, where the skeleton was excavated.
snip
********
This news brings together so many of my interests. When I was a teenager my best friend's grandparents had a camp on a lake. Behind it was woods with a waterfall, where we would find innumerable fossils. Nothing spectacular like dinosaurs, but a lot of horn coral, which was easy to pull out even with bare hands. So I always enjoyed dinosaurs and fossils, and those were before the days of Barney that purple cartoon dinosaur. The Chinese have done some fantastic work in excavating fossils these past years, and I congratulate them. I think they were the ones to find the fossils of the earliest flowering plant, Archaefructus sinensis? Anyway, I always read about their finds with great interest.
I've had a lifelong interest in Chinese culture and people. It started when as a teen I bought calligraphy paint brushes, though in my small village in the 1960's there were not many paint resources. It would be as an adult that I learned to write and paint Chinese characters. I was taught how to read and write Chinese characters by a Chinese American guy who worked for me, who had taught Chinese in schools, and spent some lunch hours getting me started, which was great. He taught me to watch for the originating pictures that underlie the development of the character. For example, the character for water evolved from three lines that wriggled like a stream of water. I can still write characters, even pretty complicated ones, in their proper order, though I never got as far as actually speaking Mandarin, though I learned the tonalities.
I had a bamboo calendar at that time, the early 1980's, which remains my favorite. It show a red parrot and the Chinese characters spoken by the parrot, which translates to: "I'm sitting here looking out of the window and learning a new language." It was a parrot, not a 70 foot tall birdlike dinosaur ha, but what an interesting connection as I think about it today. At that time I was also taking shao lin kung fu and tai chi lessons. I'm not a competitive type of person, so I never got into working for various belts and so forth. But I loved how like dance it was. Some time later, after I had to stop with lessons due to long hours at my work job, I taught myself crane style and that remains my favorite. Like a stork (though one with a pot belly ha) I like to stand on one leg in crane stance to relax, sometimes as long as five minutes per leg. When I lived up north I used to stand on a log by a lake and do it. Down south here if I tried that I'd probably be bitten in the rear by an alligator, ha.
Back to the calligraphy. While I still enjoy reading and writing Chinese characters I've become interested also in learning Arabic script. I have a book called "Arabic Script" by Gabriel Mandel Khan, Abbeville Press Publishers, NY, 2001. While it's not a how-to-do book, I can figure out how to draw the script based on my knowledge of calligraphy in general (I also learned mechanical drawing and lettering in high school, and spent several years earning a living drawing maps.) I use as my book mark a print out of a picture and article of a chicken that layed an egg with the script "Allah" inscribed on its shell, in Kazakhstan last year. The mosque confirmed its authenticity for the farmer whose chicken laid the egg. It's beautiful. Anyway, this book has amazing examples of compositions in many different styles. I love the boat shaped compositions in Diwani style, for example. There are many wonderful compositions in the shape of birds, for example, Basmala in the form of a stork. I get a real smile from one page that shows individual letters in the very non-traditional "peacock" style. Letters are peacocks curved and aligned to form each letter. Page 107 if any of you have the book.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/science/14dino.html?hp
snip
Scientists have uncovered a huge surprise in the Inner Mongolia region of northern China: the fossil skeleton of an unusually robust birdlike dinosaur that lived 70 million years ago. The animal appeared to be a young adult 25 feet long and weighing 3,000 pounds and, if it had lived longer, would probably have grown even larger.
snip
The Chinese scientists who made the discovery, being reported today in the journal Nature, said the skeleton belonged to a dinosaur family that included the beaked, birdlike oviraptor. This family was not closely related to the dromaeosaurid dinosaurs generally thought to be ancestors of modern birds. Still, the scientists concluded that the new skeleton “is an exception to some general patterns” during the evolution of related dinosaurs, including the “trend of size decrease” that is associated with the origin of birds. They said it was significant that the large specimen “shows many birdlike features absent” in smaller relatives.
Impressed by the size and puzzling character of their find, the team led by Xing Xu, a paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, classified the animal as a new genus and species. It was given the name Gigantoraptor erlianensis, the specific name recognizing the Erlian basin of Inner Mongolia, where the skeleton was excavated.
snip
********
This news brings together so many of my interests. When I was a teenager my best friend's grandparents had a camp on a lake. Behind it was woods with a waterfall, where we would find innumerable fossils. Nothing spectacular like dinosaurs, but a lot of horn coral, which was easy to pull out even with bare hands. So I always enjoyed dinosaurs and fossils, and those were before the days of Barney that purple cartoon dinosaur. The Chinese have done some fantastic work in excavating fossils these past years, and I congratulate them. I think they were the ones to find the fossils of the earliest flowering plant, Archaefructus sinensis? Anyway, I always read about their finds with great interest.
I've had a lifelong interest in Chinese culture and people. It started when as a teen I bought calligraphy paint brushes, though in my small village in the 1960's there were not many paint resources. It would be as an adult that I learned to write and paint Chinese characters. I was taught how to read and write Chinese characters by a Chinese American guy who worked for me, who had taught Chinese in schools, and spent some lunch hours getting me started, which was great. He taught me to watch for the originating pictures that underlie the development of the character. For example, the character for water evolved from three lines that wriggled like a stream of water. I can still write characters, even pretty complicated ones, in their proper order, though I never got as far as actually speaking Mandarin, though I learned the tonalities.
I had a bamboo calendar at that time, the early 1980's, which remains my favorite. It show a red parrot and the Chinese characters spoken by the parrot, which translates to: "I'm sitting here looking out of the window and learning a new language." It was a parrot, not a 70 foot tall birdlike dinosaur ha, but what an interesting connection as I think about it today. At that time I was also taking shao lin kung fu and tai chi lessons. I'm not a competitive type of person, so I never got into working for various belts and so forth. But I loved how like dance it was. Some time later, after I had to stop with lessons due to long hours at my work job, I taught myself crane style and that remains my favorite. Like a stork (though one with a pot belly ha) I like to stand on one leg in crane stance to relax, sometimes as long as five minutes per leg. When I lived up north I used to stand on a log by a lake and do it. Down south here if I tried that I'd probably be bitten in the rear by an alligator, ha.
Back to the calligraphy. While I still enjoy reading and writing Chinese characters I've become interested also in learning Arabic script. I have a book called "Arabic Script" by Gabriel Mandel Khan, Abbeville Press Publishers, NY, 2001. While it's not a how-to-do book, I can figure out how to draw the script based on my knowledge of calligraphy in general (I also learned mechanical drawing and lettering in high school, and spent several years earning a living drawing maps.) I use as my book mark a print out of a picture and article of a chicken that layed an egg with the script "Allah" inscribed on its shell, in Kazakhstan last year. The mosque confirmed its authenticity for the farmer whose chicken laid the egg. It's beautiful. Anyway, this book has amazing examples of compositions in many different styles. I love the boat shaped compositions in Diwani style, for example. There are many wonderful compositions in the shape of birds, for example, Basmala in the form of a stork. I get a real smile from one page that shows individual letters in the very non-traditional "peacock" style. Letters are peacocks curved and aligned to form each letter. Page 107 if any of you have the book.
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