‘Tis the season… of worship, of course.
In honour of the blessed month of Rajab, here are two of the beautiful supplications from the treasure trove of the Ahlul Bayt (AS), inadequately rendered into English poetry.
May the Almighty accept all of the good deeds performed for His sake during this holy month.
One cool thing about the Arabic language is that you can take a base “root word” and extract derivative words with related meanings by plugging the letters of the root word into different templates, or “forms”.
I’m not going to get into the details about how this process works here; we can leave that to the linguists. Instead, I’m interested in exploring a specific question: in the Qur’ān, which root verb appears in the most derivative verb forms? In other words: of all the root verbs that appear in the Qur’ān, which one comes in the biggest variety of flavours?
What is the midpoint of the Qur’ān?
(Ok, so this might be somewhat of an artificial question, depending on how much value you give to the way the chapters in the Qur’an are presently ordered. But I think the question still has value regardless! It’s interesting to be able to pin down where we can say, when reading the Qur’ān from start to finish, that we’ve reached the halfway point.)
So, what is the midpoint of the Qur’ān? Well, it turns out, it depends on how we want to define “midpoint”…
Sometimes, the way that Islamic rulings are presented will depend on the language that they are written in. Here’s a fun example:
In the English translation of Sayyid Sistani’s rulings, we find the ruling: “Dogs and pigs are impure” [Source]. This ruling is simple, to the point, and clear.
In the Persian edition of Sayyid Sistani’s rulings, however, from which the English rulings are extracted and translated, the wording of the same ruling states: “Dogs and pigs that live on land are impure” (emphasis mine) [Source].
Wait. Why did it have to specify the ones that live on land? Why did the English translation omit this key point? What kind of dogs and pigs don’t live on land, anyway?
It turns out that, in the Persian language, the phrases that literally translate into English as “sea dog” and “sea pig” are used to refer to the animals that, in English, we know of as “seals” and “walruses” (By the way, we have something similar in English, too: sea horses!).
Now, if the Persian-language ruling said that all animals known as dogs and pigs are impure, then that would mean seals and walruses would be included. So, in order to distinguish between the kind of dogs and pigs that truly are impure and the ones that are not (i.e. the seals and walruses), in Persian, the clarifier “that live on land” (as opposed to the sea) becomes necessary.
Fun, right? Now let’s take a look at another example of a language-specific ruling, one with some interesting consequences. This case is a little more involved, so we will need a little bit of background first…
Let’s start by looking at the very first verse in the Holy Qur’ān.
It’s an interesting verse for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons (and perhaps not the first reason that comes to mind) is that this verse actually contains another complete verse entirely inside of it:
I love computer programming. I do it for work, for personal projects, and even for fun. I love the feeling of being able to harness the power of technology to do amazing things, like making daunting tasks effortless and accomplishing huge results with lightning speed.
People see me code. Some of them are coders themselves. Many are not. I’ve frequently been told variations of: “It’s so cool that you can do this. I wish I could code. I wish I knew how.“
I never thought I would have a way that I could actually help these people. Although I love to teach, I simply don’t have the capacity to tutor everyone. But one day, I thought: maybe there was something I could actually do. It wasn’t long before the idea of PyMentorAI was born.
I wrote this poem almost ten years ago. It never really made it out into the world until now, but I never truly forgot about it. It’s a small tribute to Imam Husayn (‘a) and his sacrifices in Karbala.
Here’s a fun puzzle appropriate for this time of year!
A family has five children. …
Did you ever get the feeling that some of the Islamic rulings in Ahkām are oddly specific to some particularly contrived scenarios? I mean, sure, they might occur in real life, but it seems to me that they might actually work well as major plot points in feature films. Here are some of the rulings I came across that, in my opinion, could make great movie plots. (Now with images generated by ChatGPT!)
The story of Prophet Yūsuf in the Qur’ān includes an episode that presents an interesting exercise in logical reasoning. In the incident where the ‘Azīz of Egypt finds his wife and Prophet Yūsuf making conflicting claims, a witness speaks up and presents a series of statements that make it possible to reach a conclusion about what happened using a combination of observation (of Prophet Yusuf’s shirt) and logic.
Verses 25 to 28 of Surah #12 Yūsuf mention the following: