The word “infidel” is of course in the news in recent weeks for obvious reasons.
I have seen it asserted that “infidel” as used by Muslims simply means “non-believer.”
Now, the English word “infidel” would seem to imply more than just “non-belief.” There is an additional element of betrayal, is there not? Does not “infidel” when taken back to its Latin roots mean “untrue” or “disloyal”? (And hence, we use the word “infidelity” to describe “disloyal” sexual relations.) So rather than being neutral, the word “infidel” contains a sense of condemnation of the person it is used to describe.
My questions:
What is the Arabic word used in the Koran which gets translated as “infidel?”
Is the Arabic word a neutral word used to describe “non-believers” or is there an additional sense of “betrayal” or “disloyalty” conveyed by the word? Is there a sense of condemnation conferred on one whom the word is used to describe?
In other words, is “infidel” a good translation of the Arabic term?
Hope these don’t seem like niggling questions. In light of recent events, I think it is important to understand exactly what Arabic speakers or Muslims mean when they use the English word “infidel.”
Literally it means ‘one who covers’, i.e. denies the truth even though it’s staring him in the face. The same verb is also used for farmers, because they cover seeds with soil.
Just be careful not to use this word if you go to South Africa.
So rather than simply meaning “non-believer,” it would seem to mean “one who actively refuses to believe” (a subtle, but possibly important distinction).
The Arab traders along the Indian ocean used to call the non-muslim blacks kafirs, meaning unbelievers. Somehow the word got picked up by white south africans to mean blacks. It is considered an extremely offensive word there.
We also use the word “unfaithful”. “Faith” and “loyalty” are too closely related in English to really separate them; some people say that when Jesus said that everyone who has faith in him will be saved, the word should be “loyalty”. It certainly is true that I neither believe in God nor am loyal to God, so both meanings would apply. I think that the real deragoratory sense of the word comes the sense that the person is “unloyal” rather “nonloyal”; the second implies nonloyalty in a particular case, the first implies that that nonloyalty extends to all situations.
MJ has pretty much covered Kaafir, I can add an observation, limited as always on actual usage. It’s a pretty grave insult and I’ll hazard the opinion that it is rarely used in its strict theological sense. As a term of political abuse it has a long and ugly history within the Muslim world. There is currently a group operative in Egypt and Sudan – Egyptian origin – called al-Higra wa at-Takfiir, roughly ‘retreat and denunciation of unbelief/infidelity.’ Bloody minded bastards.
(As an aside, MJ where did you get the farming connection? I’ve never seen that used in modern texts, but maybe it is dialect. And of course lord knows it has classical roots.)
Oh yes, in re the SA connection, the roots go back to Dutch and Portuguese contacts with Arabo-Swahili merchants throughout the Indian ocean from the late 15th century forward. Insofar as SA colony started out as and for centuries was a stopover for the Dutch Indonesian and Indian ocean trade, it is entirely logical that the dialect picked up such terms. Also of note is the non-European roots of Afrikaans, originaly the Dutch dialect of the “coloureds” – at that time (throughthe 19th c.) the Indonesian-African-European-Indian-etc. mixed population of the Cape.
It was my understanding that coffee and kaffir shared the same Arabic root. Kaffir is a reference to the blacks’ skin colour and nothing to do with their religious affiliation. ‡
I’m not sure why someone would say such a thing after reading the thread but in any case, your understanding is 100% wrong. Whoever told you this was an idiot.
Coffee comes from the root Qaf ha waw, the word itself is Qahwa (with dialectal variants).
Kafir comes from Kaf fa ra.
No relation. Different letters, different meanings. Claro?
No association with skin color in Arabic(). See Jomo Mojo in re Kafir’s meaning and root origin.
(: there is an Arabic word for Coffee beans --and rarely for Coffee itself-- which is associated with brown skin color, buni. And sometimes some people use Kohl but that always struck me as word play.)
AFAIK, the Dutch/Afrikaans word “kaffer” literally means “bug” or “cockroach.” This is why it’s so insulting; it has nothing directly to do with skin color. I don’t have a linkable citation for this, but it comes from the old Traveller: 2300 roleplaying game. The first people to encounter the enemy insectoid race in the game’s history were German, and called them “Kafer.”
LC (if you can invert my initials and call me MJ, I can call you LC), it isn’t dialectal AFAIK, it’s old-timey Arabic. I don’t doubt you can find it in Edward William Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon, a treasurehouse of old literary usage. Unable to afford the megabucks for a set of Lane, I make do with the affordable Advanced Learner’s Arabic-English Dictionary by H. A. Salmoné, published by Librairie du Liban. According to this work, another meaning of kâfir is ‘husbandman, sower’. From this sense derives the word for village (home of farmers), kafr.
The meaning of ‘bug’ is secondary to the original meaning of ‘unbeliever’; I think the semantic development came from its use as a generalized term of disparagement. Thus the French word cafard, borrowed from the Arabic, which means ‘cockroach’ as well as ‘low spirits, boredom, melancholy, listlessness’. Since Afrikaans has picked up a bit of French influence, this would explain its use of the word to mean ‘a bug’.
I am unable to explain my initials dyslexia. Classical usage, where one finds that every word also means its opposite! Headaches.
By the way, I believe that this game is confusing Kaafir for the germanic Kaefer (normally written with an umlaut). I have no idea as to the etymology, whether this is related to Kafir or mere happenstance. Cafard comes from Arabic? Huh, never knew that. Are you sure? (nb: for those who may be confused, the pronounciation in French does not hit the final d)
That French cafard is derived from Arabic kâfir is the etymology in Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language (World Publishing Company). They note that -ard is a pejorative suffix in French.
Good call on explaining the Arabic triliteral roots, Collounsbury. Folks, listen to Collounsbury, he knows what he’s talking about here. The roots made of three consonants are the whole key to figuring out Arabic (and Hebrew too; the two share a very similar grammatical structure and common roots).
Huh. Well I will be damned. This is a bit of trivia to tuck away. But just to add to this, I looked this up in my Robert Micro and I find an old meaning (archaic in their estimation) “Someone who affects the appearance of devotion, a hypocrite.” Interesting. No etymologies though.
Well, I didn’t really explain the roots at all. But I should.
As JM has noted, the entire langauge is built up around consonal roots, usually three except for the foreign imports (esp. Farsi which usually got translated to a four consonal root).
You build words off of those roots, adding suffixes, prefixes, infixes --I beleive that is the proper English term for a midword insertion. Each root has a chained set of meanings as the system builds in a lot of grammatical information, passive voice etc.
Really quite fun in a way, except a thousand years of accretion have lead virtually every root and word to have a dizzying number of meanings and shades on meanings.
Anyway, if you’re looking at transliterated Arabic, don’t leap to conclusions about relations between the words because most transliterations leave out key information (not transliterating Arabic items which have no good English equivalent like the ayn or hamza). I’ve seen more bone-headed “pop etymologies” based on that kind of error.
