Yes, yes, there are some people who really are still confused by that.
Isn’t “Allah” a transliteration of Yahweh/Jehovah?
So would this mean that if a school received 15,000,000 appropriate posters every single one must be displayed? What about a hundred million? What about a hundred billion?
Where would they put them all? Wouldn’t they run out of “conspicuous places” after 500 or so? Would it be legal to cover over the posters? Because if you were sent enough of them there wouldn’t be room for whiteboards or other educational displays. Could they paper over the windows?
Who is supposed to put all these posters up? The posters may be donated but what about the time and wages for the poor sucker putting them up?
Because they are obviously so similar? Well, they do both have an “H” in there somewhere.
I don’t want to type in a long list of some of the names of God in Islam, but you can click here:
(no YHWH)
You’re putting more thought into the potential impact of this legislation than the Texas Legislature ever did.
no, but Allah is related to a different Hebrew word for God, El
What if someone donates a million “In God We Trust” signs to one school? Do you really need to wallpaper the school with it?
One wonders who is going to enforce this. Are they going to go to every public school in Texas and ensure that the posters are displayed to their satisfaction? Why not actually teach the kids, so they can read the posters in the first place?
I’m sure that those who send in the posters will be happy to complain when they’re not promptly displayed.
The Taliban seems to be able to enforce rules over there, maybe we need a christian version here.
Hey, you’re in luck!
There’s something that rubs me the wrong way about a non-Arab using the Arabic language to make a political point. It’s not exactly “cultural appropriation” - a term and phenomenon that I’m typically leery of when it’s brought up, unless the appropriation is particularly egregious - but it’s…I don’t know, it somehow feels wrong. The guy is trying to dunk on Texas’s stupid law and the Christian fundamentalists who support it, I get that, but it’s like he’s implying there’s something un-Christian about the Arabic language, which would be news to the tens of millions of Arab Christians who recite Christian prayers in Arabic.
It would be one thing if this was an Arabic speaker, either Christian or Muslim, using this stunt as a teachable moment to try to convey to people that Arabic speakers worship the same God who is called “God” in English, but that isn’t what it is. Are there Muslim students at the schools where these posters will go up? Are those kids going to catch shit for this from Christians, even though the kids had nothing to do with it?
Maybe I’m overthinking all of this, but I could see it putting Arab-Americans in a situation that they didn’t ask for.
ISTR that the guy who had the Arabic posters printed up knew several people who spoke, read, and wrote Arabic, and he asked THEM to help him format it. It’s not like he just used Google Translate and Photoshop.
I wonder what the good people of Texas would think if someone distributed posters that said “In God We Trust” in Cyrillic lettering, and preferably the Russian language (I’m aware that Ukrainian, and at least one language in the former Yugoslavia, also uses it).
He’s doing it because Arabic triggers fundamentalist Christians who think of it as a language only terrorists speak. And yeah, you’re right, it could have negative consequences.
This is not a.common expression in Arabic. The equivalent would.be نؤمن بالله which translates literally as 'In God [‘s existence] We Believe’.
thanks
Right, but that doesn’t quite capture the intent of the US “In God We Trust” motto. AIUI it’s from the final verse of the Star-Spangled Banner:
It’s not so much “We are declaring our belief that God exists” as “We know God’s got our back in this difficult situation and we are relying on Him for success”.
You are exactly right. This is why I said the expression isn’t common in Arabic, although I should have put it more clearly and said it doesn’t exist in Arabic at all, due to cultural and religious reasons. And so the real equivalent to ‘In God We Trust’ in Arabic should be an equally central and generic statement that people would put on a banknote. I think the first part of the Shahada (لا إله إلا الله) fits the purpose pretty nicely.
Yes, or ISTM that بالله التوفیق “success is with God” is often used in that same kind of generic “In God We Trust” sense.