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constantly during the Middle Ages! The presence of the image, of the
metaphor, is at the base of the forks in the Christian religion.”
I gather from his comments that the Arabic language stands out of
this obscurity. The proof is that Christians abandoned the Spanish
language, the Mozarabs, the Latin, for the sake of Arabic language in
the Islamic territories of the Middle Ages. Since then, they never
stopped speaking Arabic even if they never converted to Islam. Al-
Biruni (XI C) pushed it to say that the Arabic translated into Persian:
“loses all éclat, its meaning is eclipsed, its features are obscured, its
utility effaced.” Like the Kanji ideograms, Arabic words come from a
root word. However, Arabic is a more precise language in a sense
that the image is replaced by letters, but by letters with a great
elasticity that can be drawn like images. I mean that every single
word in Arabic has a very precise meaning, each one evokes an
image much more precise than the images created by the Kanji's
system of writing. Arabs have hundreds of words to describe for
instance how one loves somebody. There is wajd, a strong
unconditional love; ichq, a mad love; razel, a love that expresses itself
through calligraphy, poetry, an act. And many other forms of love
exist in Arabic, each form having a separate word to express it with a
different root depending on the feeling we focus on.
If it is very difficult for Japanese and Chinese to create new words, it
is not the case in Arabic. European languages have affixes like
"-ing" in English, meaning a progression in time, or "in" meaning
something inner, but words are almost independent from each other
and have different concepts. For example, even if 'like' and 'love'
describe the same basic feeling, both words are written down
differently and they do not evoke any ideogrammic image that could
connect them. The roots of the words are not very obvious. Unlike
both Asian and European languages, Arabic has strong root words.
This enables the native speakers to anchor what they say in deep
meaning. For instance, the root K-T-B in relation with the writing
gives successively KITAB-‘book’, KATIB-‘writer’ or MAKTAB-
‘office’. A writer is a person who writes books and an office is a
place where books are eventually stored and utilized. Therefore, all
words in Arabic have an intrinsic relation with a root word or concept.
As it is true for Eastern languages, the Arabic language is a
vehicle to express feelings and emotions. All sorts of seemly idioms
and artistic metaphors have been introduced in the Middle East
language. The words were then used as ideographs, joining in the way
the pictorial symbolic of remote Egypt. Like that, in Arabic, the moon
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referred to the luminosity, a tree branch to the tenderness or either the
sand to the purity.
Image courtesy of
Similes and metaphors in Arabic suggest the virtues of a person.
Natural objects are used to describe the depth feeling of love. So, we
can find the image of the beloved woman compared to a moon resting
on a branch of tree that fell on a sandy beach. This is the image of the
loved one pure and untouched by the filth of the world.
The Middle Eastern poetry includes all the depth and the contrasts
that one can find in the traditional Japanese Zen garden. In the
traditional Eastern garden, a pine tree standing behind an artificial hill
suggests a far away forest. Samely, a winding brook half hidden by
the surrounding vegetation suggests the infinite because of the
reflections of the surrounding plants in it. And the particular attention
the Japanese gardener gives to the alternate reflection of the sun and
the moon into a pond suggests the meeting of two opposite worlds: the
spiritual world and the terrestrial world.
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