Spoken dialects of Arabic (many of which are also written in vernacular literatures, etc.) definitely have changed a lot since Muhammad’s time and are now in many cases mutually unintelligible.
However, there’s also something called Standard Arabic, divided into Classical Arabic (the language of the Qur’an) and Modern Standard Arabic, which is used for many modern news broadcasts, newspapers, etc. in Arabic. The two forms are very similar: I learned to read medieval Classical Arabic starting with an MSA textbook, and had little trouble switching over to ninth-century manuscripts and all like that there. My Arabic isn’t fluent, but it’s good enough for me to easily see the overwhelming similarities between Classical and MSA.
However, I have no clue about the modern colloquial dialects like Lebanese or Egyptian Arabic, any more than someone who learned medieval Latin and can read Pope Benedict’s modern Latin encyclicals would necessarily have a clue about reading modern French or Spanish.
AIUI, it is mandatory to learn enough Arabic to be able to recite certain prayers in the Qur’an, kind of like when 20th-century Catholics still said the “Ave Maria” in Latin. Beyond that, learning Arabic well enough to be able to read the Qur’an in Arabic is definitely considered a Good Thing, but not absolutely required of devout Muslims.
The standard Arabic word for banana is “mawz”, موز . There is an Arabic word “banaan” meaning “fingertips”, but I don’t know of any link between that and Wolof “banana”.
Because it’s the atheists Bible- you said so yourself. That’s why every atheist mass starts with one of Darwin’s songs. (Any idea how hard it is to find a word that both mocks Christianity and rhymes with Galapagos?
Still others are using their Satanically gifted atheists telikinetic abilities to reshape the copies into pterodactyls that attack small dogs.
I’m an agnostic but I hope both of these demon-spawned abominations get airmailed back to the Hellish pit they crawled out from. Bill Maher especially because he’s a dick who wants children to die because he doesn’t know shit about how the immune system works.
I have just been alerted that they are handing them out at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, as well (in front of the Biology building, no less!) Will attempt to grab one or more this afternoon. Totally non-evolved, god-designed grasping digits crossed!
