We are not discussing the concepts of Jojo, the OP is about Islamic concepts and interpretations.
You can question if a rock or whatever you don’t see as “intelligent life” can worship God. I don’t start from your ideas, I talk about Islam.
A rock merely by being there = a visible witness that it is created, is in submission to God (it did not have the force to refuse to be created).
A way a rock can worship his creator:
Being there
by this give testemony of Creation
and its own submission to the will of God
By this contributing to the Glory of God
and making this glory visible to the rest of Creation.
And no, I don’t see in the answers posted by other members that other religions do not incorporate the idea that worshipping God involves at the same time submission. You can not worship if you do not submit.
Compare it with the army: You are as a soldier supposed to follow orders of your commander = you submit yourself to your commander’s choices and his leadership wheneveryou obey one of these orders. Or do you say you can obey these orders without submitting yourself to the will of the one who gives them. If yes, I would like to see a drawing of that situation.
Please understand I’m not coming at this from a religious standpoint, more from a linguistic standpoint. The word “worship” has a particular objective meaning independent of my own personal biases or concepts. There isn’t an islamic defintion of the word “worship” and a christian definition of the word “worship”, there is only one definition of the word “worship” and that’s the linguistic defintion. If we start having different defintions of things then I could say that black is white and up is down.
The word worship is a verb, a doing word. That means something is being done. There are two types of verb - the active verb and the passive verb. Examples of the active and passive forms of the verb “worship” would respectively be:
Jojo worships God
God was worshipped by Jojo
So you can see that the very spelling of the word - “worship” (as opposed to “worshipped”) indicates that it is an active verb rather than a passive one.
I hunted around on the net to find something to illustrate my point and finally I found Active Anna.
Don’t worry - that’s not a porn site, it’s a kids site explaining active verbs. Notice that every time an active verb is used, it is always used by a sentient being. Not something like a rock. An active verb can only refer to something that is capable of performing an action.
The word “worship” must be an active verb (due to it’s spelling) and all active verbs require an actor. Now a rock could be an actor in some ways. A rock may release radiation, for example. Thus you could say the rock released radiation - this would be an example of a rock performing an active verb. And therefore, in the same way, you could say the rock released worship.
However you would be wrong in thinking like this because, to understand a word, as well as looking at the grammatical state of the word (eg - worship - an active verb) you also need to look at it’s meaning. The word worship itself comes from Old English. I have a dictionary that gives the root meaning of words, it says it comes from:
which means “deciding to ascribe worth to something” or maybe “worthy of ascribing worth to”. A rock cannot decide to ascribe worth to something therefore a rock cannot worship. Remember “worship” is an active verb so it HAS to mean “deciding to ascribe worth to something”. Only an intelligent actor can decide to do something.
Yes but a soldier has the intelligence to make a decision to submit himself to his commander. A baby (or a rock) couldn’t decide to submit itself to it’s commander, a baby (or a rock) wouldn’t know what a commander was.
If the native language of Islam were ENGLISH! Translation is always going to be a problem when the native ideas of a particular concept are rooted in a different language than the current discussion of those ideas is being waged in. I don’t know Arabic. The best I can do is transliterate, with great difficulty and a ready-to-hand reference, the Arabic alphabet. But I’m willing to bet that the concepts of “worship” and “submission” are pretty close to synonymous in Arabic, when talking about Allah.
Pulling out an Old English glossary to discuss concepts birthed in the 6th Century CE peninsular Arab milieu are sort of useless.
words aren’t just plucked out of the air. Every word represents a concept, whether it be in English or in Arabic. Words aren’t just jumbles of letters thrown together at random - they represent concepts.
Arabic will have it’s word for worship (in the English sense), if it doesn’t then it needs more words - because there are concepts out there that it doesn’t have the words to describe.
The relevant factor in this case is that we are talking in English. If islam says that submission=worship and that worship is possible without an intelligent actor then islam has to explain this to us in English. Because this is the language that the terms “worship” and “submission” belong to.
It’s an iffy argument to say “well worship means something other that the dictionary sense when used islamically”. If it doesn’t mean the dictionary sense then I don’t know what it means. Same with every word. If you’re speaking to me in English then English is your “code”, you can’t start using a different code every so often because I won’t know what you are talking about.
That almost sounds like you’re saying that the universe “thinks” in English, and all those other languages are just playing around to annoy the English-speakers by pretending not to think in English.
Language shapes thought. There are a lot of subtle English distinctions of meaning that aren’t paralleled in other languages, and other languages have words for concepts that English needs to either use a whole phrase for or borrow that word wholesale (e.g. the introduction into English of untranslated German words like schadenfreude or zeitgeist, both of which require English phrases to translate crudely). The idea that concepts will map one-to-one the same in every language reveals a very shallow knowledge of linguistics.
The Quran was written in Arabic. The concepts of Islam were born in the Arabic tongue. The thinking of Islam is wholly Arabic. Any attempt to translate this into English will fall short (one of the major reasons that the translation of the Quran was forbidden for centuries).
You can’t expect everything in a discussion between a non-native English-speaking Muslim and a native English-speaking Christian (?) about the differences between Christianity and Islam to have a perfect translation/understanding ratio.
I’m not even thinking on beginning a discussion on this.
You know what Jojo?
Learn Arabic.
Classical Arabic, that is.
Then learn Quranic Arabic.
Then learn all the variations of Classical Arabic that occured as the language developped during the centuries.
At some point you shall come where whthe development and definitions about and for Modern Standar Arabic occurs.
Then learn all the dialect of Arabic sopken in the Arabic world.
If you are there we can start talking about individual words. In Arabic. Which is not English. Whichg you shall know by the time you finished your study on the Arabic language, covering as much of it as you can find aout it.
You’re both still misunderstanding me, which is a shame because my point is quite simple really. It’s probably my fault, I’m probably not explaining myself properly.
It’s got nothing to do with Arabic - modern, classical or quranic. I know that there are concepts in Arabic that do not translate easily to English (and vice versa). The point is - worship isn’t an arabic word, it’s an english word. Arabic has got nothing to do with it. Aldebaran says a rock can worship but I’m pointing out that it can’t.
Secondly, you both seem to be saying that the equivalent of the word “worship” in arabic has a different meaning to it’s english meaning. I seriously doubt this. There are arab christians, there have always been arab christians (even before islam). Are you saying that these people do not think of “worship” in a christian sense? That they think of worship in a different way to other christians around the world? That they think “worship” equals “submission”? I don’t think they do think this.
So I don’t think the argument that we all need to learn arabic works because:
worship is an english word not an arabic one
and
the definition of worship that Aldebaran is giving is an islamic one not an arabic one. This is proven by the fact there are arab christians who will have a different concept of “worship”.
On what basis do you doubt this? This is where you are going wrong, IMO. Read jayjay’s post again.
Why do you speak of christianity as a monolithic belief, to be defined by English speakers? Why do assume that “worship” as an English word/concept is definitive of “christian sense”?
What do you know about Arab christians in particular, or how they might think?
Can you “think” in Arabic? Can you “think” in any language other than English? Again, from jayjay:
Jojo, If I explain concepts or teachings of Islam I see no need to incorporate a free class about a language you have no idea about to begin with.
And for your information:
If I translate the English word “worship” into any other language I know, I can come up with different possibilities within each language I know. Languages have each their own words for expressing finesses inherent to a concept or idea.
I don’t know if there are such variations on the English word “worship”. I have no clue about the English language to begin with.
I’m not into a comparitive language study either in this particular thread or context.
I explain Islamic concepts.
Hence if I explain how a rock is considered to WORSHIP God, I use the word WORSHIP because that is in my view the best to translate the concept into your language.
It is not saying that a rock considered to be RELEASING WORSHIP. (I have even no idea what on earth you mean by this.)
It is also not saying that *worship and submissionis the same.
I said: you can not worship, if you do not submit.
If you do not wish to read my explanations, you do not have to.
If you however choose to read them and next come up with declarations that you know it better then I do, just because you can come up with some nitpicking on the English words I use, you make a quite ridiculous impression on me.
Jojo, I do not see any need to incorporate in my posts free classes on and about a language you have no idea about to begin with.
And for your information:
If I translate the English word “worship” into any other language I know, I can come up with different possibilities within each language I know. Languages have each their own words for expressing finesses/variations inherent to a concept or idea.
I don’t know if there are such variations on the English word “worship”. I have no clue about the English language to begin with.
I’m not into a comparitive language study either in this particular thread or context.
I explain Islamic concepts.
Hence if I explain how a rock is considered to WORSHIP God, I use the word WORSHIP because that is in my view the best to translate the idea behind this concept into your language.
It is not saying that in this Islamic concept a rock is considered to be RELEASING WORSHIP. (I have even no idea what on earth you mean by this.)
It is also not saying that *worship and submissionis the same.
I said: you can not worship if you do not submit.
If you do not wish to read my explanations, you do not have to.
If you however choose to read them and next come up with declarations that you know it better then I do, just because you can come up with some nitpicking on the English words I use, you make a quite ridiculous impression on me.
Just to note: in Hebrew, for example, there are a good dozen words to mean prayer or pray… kind of like the Eskimo multiple words for snow.
In English, we have worship, prayer, devotion, adoration, veneration, reverence, homage, supplication, invocation, imploration, entreaty, petition, meditation, litany, breviary, benediction, blessing, oblation… and I haven’t begun to scratch the surface. There are subtle distinctions as well as major differences between each word, and that’s just English, so how do you expect to get exact translations to another language?
ok, look, we are trying to ascertain the nature of the relationship between a rock and God. We have (finally) established that it cannot be one of worship since a rock can’t worship. We know a rock is incapable of worship because of the definition of the word “worship”.
Whatever the rock is doing, it isn’t worshipping. So now we can move onto the next stage which is to try and find out exactly what the rock is doing. But first, it would be impolite not to answer some of the points made by others so:
Annaplurabelle said:
You’re thinking about this in totally the wrong way. You need to approach the whole thing from the opposite direction ie what makes you think that the arabs have a different concept of “worship” to everyone else?
Granted, islam has some unique ideas about worship but that’s just islam, it’s not arabic. Islam happens to come from an arabic background but that’s just a coincidence. Arabic was around before islam and there are arabs who are not muslim. Therefore you need to put out of your mind any associations you may be making between arabic and islam. Worship, as a concept, exists in arabic. Before islam the arabs worshipped the sun and the moon etc, and some of them were christian (or jewish).
So there are arabic concepts of worship that are not rooted in islam. Islamic concepts of worship (that it is closely aligned to submission, for example) differ from christian or hindu concepts of worship. Therefore it stands to reason that arab christians will have different concepts of worship than arab muslims.
This proves that the islamic concept of worship is not the arabic concept of worship. They are not one and the same thing. There is an islamic concept of worship, there is a christian concept of worship, there is an animist concept of worship and arabic is a big enough language to be able to encompass and describe them all. You can’t limit arabic by trying to say that, in arabic, worship means what islam says it means and that’s that. Because this isn’t true - there are christian arabs and they will have a different concept of worship to muslim arabs, and yet they all speak arabic.
It’s not a monolithic belief to be defined by english speakers. I’m talking about concepts and, in particular, the concept of worship. I’m saying that a rock can’t worship because the word “worship” is an active verb that needs to be done by a sentient being. So if the word worship is incorrect for describing what a rock does then we need to find another word that does describe what a rock does.
It’s not definitive of only “christian sense”, it’s also definitive of “muslim sense”, “jewish sense” and every other religion.
Worship is a word, it has a definite meaning. It’s meaning doesn’t change depending on what religion you are talking about. It means the same thing whether you are talking about islam, christianity, judaism or the moonies. Language is not religion-dependent.
If “worship” doesn’t do justice to what you are trying to say then you should use a different word. You can’t just decide to change the meaning of the word “worship” into some vague “other thing” in order to try and make it fit in with your definition. “Worship” has a particular definition, you can’t change it. If “worship” isn’t the word you want then you need to find the word you do want.
Well I know that they speak arabic and are christian. Since they are christian, I know that they are likely to have a concept of “worship” that is fairly closely related to that of other christians (since that’s pretty fundamental to being a christian). I know that whatever concept of worship they have it is almost certainly going to be a different one to arab muslims since the concepts of worship in christianity and islam are slightly different. It’s one of the things that differentiates christianity and islam (the submission issue). I think it’s fair to say that islam places more emphasis on it than christianity does.
Since they speak arabic, I know that arabic is therefore a big enough language to encompass both interpretations of worship. From this I can deduce that the islamic concept of worship is not the arabic concept of worship in toto. The arabic concept of worship is bigger than just the islamic definition. The islamic concept of worship is a subset of the arabic concept.
So I know quite a lot about them really without ever having met one.
Hmm… dunno. You could do a whole thread about that idea alone. Does language shape thought or does thought shape language? The chicken or the egg?
I’m inclined to think that thought shapes language - we come up with concepts and then we have to invent words to describe them. But I can see that there could be counter-arguments.
Aldebaran,
First of all let me say that I appreciate that English isn’t your first language and you’re doing a fine job of expressing yourself (when taking that into consideration). That’s why I’ve been trying to express myself really clearly so that you will understand me.
I understand this. I know that is why you used the word worship. But I’m telling you that worship doesn’t work, it’s the wrong word because a rock can’t worship. You need to come up with another word to describe the relationship between a rock and God.
See, here’s my problem:
You say a rock worships. I kinda know what you’re trying to say - that a rock has some kind of relationship with God. But I also know that a rock can’t worship, it’s a physical impossibility owing to the defintion and the grammatical state of the word “worship”.
Therefore the rock must have some other kind of relationship with God other than worship. So I’m trying to figure out what this relationship is if it’s not worship.
The problem is that I can’t think of any other word that will do. The two most important things about the word “worship” are the fact it’s an active verb and the fact that it’s definition requires some level of conscious thought. So the word we need must also have both these elements but then, more importantly, we have to then be able to apply this word to a rock.
I can’t see how there can be any word or any concept in any language that can marry all these three things together. An active verb requiring conscious thought that can be applied to a rock. You see, it’s not just the word “worship” that I have a problem with, it’s the concept which the word “worship” encapsulates.
But then, maybe I’m just dumb. Maybe there’s a miraculous concept out there somewhere that I’ve never heard of before that can somehow marry these three sub-concepts together. An active verb requiring conscious thought that can be applied to a rock.
No, I don’t know what it means either. It doesn’t make any sense, I just made it up to illustrate my point. You can’t “release” worship because “worship” requires conscious thought. So a rock can’t “release” worship in the same way it may release radiation - it would have to consciously make a decision to worship. It would have to give worship, it’s impossible to just release it.
CK:
Yes but note that all of the words you cite are, like worship, also active verbs requiring conscious thought and that none of them can be applied to a rock. This is my point, we need another word to describe the concept of being an active verb, possessing conscious thought and yet being capable of being applied to a rock.
I doubt such a word exists (in any language) because the concept itself seems to be impossible. The concept seems to be a logical contradiction - you can’t apply any kind of conscious action to a rock.
A rock is fufilling the divine will by acting rocklike…it’s obedient to the natural law. It’s acting according to its nature. Of course, since it’s a rock, it doesn’t have a choice…a rock has to be rocklike…it has no freewill. It has to do what God created it to do…sit there, get worn down by wind, etc.
We were also created by God, and like the rock, we also have a natural purpose to our existance. However, unlike the rock, we have free will…we’re able to make moral choices contrary to the divine will. In other words, we’re capable of moral evil, while the rock is not. Islam says, though, (as do Judaism and Christianity) that we’re able to submit ourselves to the will of God. We’re able to perceive God’s will and choose to act in accordance with our natural purpose. Does that make sense?
Kind of and kind of not. Your idea is a bit like the worship idea but with the consciousness element stripped out of it. You are saying that a rock is naturally tuned in to the celestial frequency. We’re back to the “releasing worship” idea again (which, we’ve established, can’t be done).
The problem is that when a muslim (or other religious person) says that a rock is worshipping God they seem to be implying that there is something intrinsic to the rock which puts it into a state of continual worship. Your idea though is more neutral and I’m not entirely sure it jibes exactly with what a muslim means when he says that a rock is worshipping God.
I don’t know the answers to any of this myself, by the way, I’m just asking questions.
Since the rock is merely fulfilling it’s purpose in sitting there then how can it be said to be “worshipping” in any way?
Well, “worship” was the word Aldebaran used. It might not be the best word. In fact, I don’t know if there is a single word in English that encompasses the concept. But, remember, the meaning of the word “Islam” is closest to “submit”, not “worship”. The idea is submission to the will of God…you need to make your will subordinate to the divine will. When Muslims say “All babies start out as Muslims”, what they generally mean is that babies are innocent, and free from evil…they start out their lives by wanting to obey God. They can get corrupted, but they start out innocent and good.