Arab Semite

Al-Jallad began pulling up every inscription that mentioned migrating in search of rain, and soon he had a long list of terms that had resisted translation. Comparing them with the Greek, Aramaic, and Babylonian zodiacs, he started making connections.  Dhakar  matched up nicely with  dikra,  the Aramaic word for Aries, and  Amet  was derived from an Arabic verb meaning “to measure or compute quantity”—a good bet for the scales of Libra. Hunting for Capricorn, the goat-fish constellation, Al-Jallad found the word  ya’mur  in Edward Lane’s “ Arabic-English Lexicon ,” whose translation read, “A certain beast of the sea, or . . . a kind of mountain-goat.” He stayed up all night, sifting the database and checking words against dictionaries of ancient Semitic languages. By morning, he had deciphered a complete, previously unknown Arabian zodiac. “We’d thought that they were place names, and, in a way, they were,” he told me. “They were places in the sky.”

Is Saudi Arabia Zion?   08/07/2016 11:48 am ET | Updated 2 hours ago James Dorsey Senior fellow, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies By James M. Dorsey Kamal Salibi, one of the Arab world’s foremost contemporary historians, kicked up a storm when he concluded in a 1985 linguistic exegesis that Judaism’s Zion was not located in Israel but in Saudi Arabia. Israelis, Jews, Saudis, Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians found common ground at the time to denounce Mr. Salibi in stark terms. Israelis, Jews and evangelists charged that Mr. Salibi’s bombshell book, The Bible Came from Arabia, constituted an attempt to delegitimize the Jewish State and undermine its historic claim to modern day Israel. Israeli historians and rabbis denounced the theory as mythology, science fiction and nonsense. Saudis, afraid that Israelis might take Mr. Salibi seriously and attempt to colonise the mountains of Sarawat, which the scholar believed was the Jordan valle

Boston Review — Haroon Moghul: Son of Mary For Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, humanity begins in roughly the same way: God creates Adam and Eve, gives them a garden to call home, and tells them to keep away from a certain tree. But Satan sweet-talks the two into disobeying and God exiles them for their transgression. This original act of disobedience is repeated time and again by Adam and Eve's descendants. When they stray too far, God picks prophets from among them to call them back. The serious divisions among the three great religions begin with Jesus. Jews, of course, do not recognize Jesus as divine or as a godly messenger. For Christians, Jesus is the son of God who died on the cross to save us from sin—the original sin of Adam and Eve. Muslims take a middle view: Jesus is one in a long line of prophets beginning with Adam and culminating in Muhammad. All prophets—including Abraham and the prophets sent to the Children of Israel—ar

From a recent Der Spiegel article. " The commandment "Make yourself no graven image" has long been strictly followed in the Arab world. There are very few statues of the caliphs and ancient kings of the region. The pagan gods in the desert were usually worshipped in an "aniconic" way, that is, as beings without form."

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: Anti-Westernism in the Middle East : I just finished the interesting book by Saqr Abu Fakhr titled The Wise Heretic (in Arabic about Kamal Salibi).  It is quite an interesting ...