this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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Overdeveloped answer but:
spoiler
I wouldn't overly police yourself on what jokes you're allowed and not allowed to make. I'm sure if you asked 100 different Arabs/Muslims, many would say they love it and please continue, many would say they don't care particularly, and a small number would very vocally chastise you for it. At risk of sounding like a conservative Youtube demagogue, certain types of people these days are hypersensitive to things that simply do not matter. You're not using them racistly, so who cares? I for one am happy to see Arab/Muslim culture being used in a way that makes it cool and normalizes it. Culture is meant to be shared. The only thing that matters is if you support or hurt the cultures in question, and I sincerely doubt you support the Western destruction of the Middle East. If you saw one Black influencer on TikTok saying "white people should NEVER listen to hip hop music EVER," would you let them speak for their entire race? Should white people stop eating at Mexican or Indian restaurants? No, this is ridiculous, again, culture is meant to be shared and celebrated, it is humanizing and one of the joys of human cooperation and coexistence, its only when the plastic classes of white people steal and then spit on the people they steal from that it has become an issue. You as an individual are not one of those people.
And I certainly don't speak for all Arabs/Muslims either, nobody does. I'm sure someone somewhere will wrinkle their nose. But, IMO, you're not being malicious, you're not. Who cares? Don't let capitalism twist progressivism and globalism into corporate Wokeism where the natural conclusions of its logic are us asking things like, "is it emotional abuse to tell a Black person I like their haircut," or, "is it cultural appropriation to learn Chinese"--it was designed to take a good thing, the human desire of us to learn about and love the myriad of cultures around us, and twist it into immobilizing hesitance, fear, and division. DON'T LET IT. POST BIG MASHALLAH EMOJI. MASHALLAH 💜💜💜
Not to, like, whitesplain or anything but afaik terms like inshallah and mashallah and alhamdulillah aren't exclusive to Islam either; they're just common phrases that are religious in origin but they are widely used by Arabs who are also Christian or Druze or Baha'i (and probably even atheists too) so it's not as if a muslim person can claim it as being exclusively theirs and prohibit non-muslims from using it, not that any but the most unhinged person would even think to do that in the first place.
I'm gonna take a wild guess here and say that for most Arabic-speakers, any concern over using these phrases (as long as it isn't done derisively) would probably be equivalent to a native Arabic-speaker asking us "Is it cultural appropriation if I say the phrase 'Bless you' after someone sneezes or the phrase 'Thank God' when I have avoided misfortune but I'm not a Christian?"
Spanish has the word "ojalá" from "inshallah". Same meaning. Entered the language during the moorish occupation of Iberia. Used in completely non-religious contexts.
Edit: other users have already pointed this out
It's really kinda cool seeing the fingerprints of Arabic influence on the Spanish language.
I'm pretty food focused and there's a lot of Arabic hiding out in Spanish words for food. It still boggles my mind that the Spanish word for olive traces its roots directly to Arabic.
Sugar --> azucar --> al sukar
I can't speak to Arabs but in Turkey there always is the distinction made between "Allah" The One God of Islam, and "Tanrı" also The One God but not of Islam. There is a bit of a split among christians in Turkey on whether to use Allah for our God or Mashallah, Inshallah, Alhamduillah or even Bismillah etc. because it's strongly associated with Islam. While the literal meaning is not islamic and the phrases are also sometimes the appropriate responses to observe politeness they are strongly associated with Islam and christians don't want to be seen as muslim (with exceptions like when they have to blend in for safety reasons). So by not using "Allah" to refer to ones own God or the phrases of politeness referring to Allah they are making a clear statement that they are not muslim.
Tanrı on the other hand is a purely turkish word for a singular God coming from the pre-muslim religion of Tengri. It's very strictly used when translating western movies to turkish since the people on screen are not muslim.
For muslim turks it also differs, most dont mind christians (and if you're white you're assumed to be christian) using Allah or any of the phrases addressing him. Some do, but that's mostly an assertion of dominance and more associated with them wanting to "other" non-muslims and especially non-muslim turks in my experience.
Again this is for Turkey only I cannot speak to how it is in Arab countries. Notably they don't have the word Tanrı to refer to an all-powerful singular God.
Yesss! I fucken guessed that at the first mention of Tanri. I'm so impressed with myself right now lol. (I don't mean to gloat but I just wanted to have this moment.)
Did you know that the flag of Kazakhstan apparently has Tengriist symbolism?
Anyway, that's super interesting to hear how there's a divergence in terms. I wonder if there's a degree of chauvinism in how Tanri is applied given that it sorta carries the implication that the people who use the term are heathens?
What do you reckon the chances are that the Grey Wolves want to force the Alevis into adopting the term Tanri?
True. I know this is Persian, not Arab, but by the span of the Sassanid empire and the fact that their state religion was Zoroastrianism makes me wonder if the name of their all-powerful singular God, Ahura Mazda, carries any cultural weight these days. It's probably a name that gets viewed a bit dimly, I'm guessing, but who knows?
So this is gonna be a wild tangent but I've always wanted to learn about whether there was any interplay between Tengriism, given its spread, and the indigenous Tibetan animistic/shamanistic pre-Buddhist religion called Bön because at a superficial glance there's some similarities. Unfortunately Bön is mostly a footnote in history because when Buddhism was exported to Tibet, the Bönpos basically got the same treatment from the Buddhists that the pre-Islamic religions got from Muslim rulers in history or like what ISIS is currently doing to pre-Islamic history and culture; if you thought of them as being treated like Mountain Yazidis (Turkish in-joke intended) it wouldn't be too far from the truth. That's not very peace-love-and-understanding of Buddhism, is it? (Although most of the history of what should really be considered the conquest of Tibet is wrapped up in ancient Buddhist allegory and mythologising, so it's all "Padmasambhava subjugated the local spirits and converted them into becoming Dharma-protectors by binding them to oaths" etc. rather than saying that he went around murdering half of the Bönpo shamans and forcibly converting the other half. For a taste of how they form their narratives, here's a fairly credible oldschool high ranking lama talking about what happened when two monks were sent by a Buddha to meet with the Buddhist king Songtsen Gampo, who unified Tibet into his empire, and who was considered an emanation of the Buddha of compassion [Avalokiteshvara]:
I'm ex-Buddhist so I feel entitled to a degree of edgelord anti-Buddist sentiment and with that disclaimer, the absolute degree of cope they're engaging with here is pretty wild; that's not a mirage giving the appearance of slaughtered bodies littering the ground, my dudes.
The only problem is that this is about as credible as the stories get and it has to be viewed with a degree of skepticism; the lama who wrote this was part of an ecumenical Buddhist movement so he sought to preserve Buddhist schools, practices, and texts that were at risk of extinction regardless of whether they were part of his school so there's less chance of politicking clouding this however on the other hand the lama who wrote this is considered an emanation of a... sorta religious order that would "reveal" hidden texts and practices or who would have these things revealed to them by Buddhas or lesser Buddhist "deities" directly through dreams etc. Basically like a Buddhist version of divine inspiration and God/angels bestowing revelation to a prophet through dreams or direct intervention. So from a non-Buddist perspective there is a non-zero chance that his source is that he made it the fuck up.)
Anyway, blah blah blah... I think I'd need to speak to a cultural anthropologist who specialises in the plateaus to get a decent answer.
Apologies for all the rambling, this is the most enthusiastic I've felt about anything for weeks.
I will respond to this once I have the time because Im really excited to be talking about this kind of stuff
One of the big joys of people speaking a turkic language is recognizing their words in other turkic languages, it's a game often played. A lot of turkish people will look at Tajikistan, see Tashkent and be like
. It's especially funny if a word has a taken on a different meaning in another language but its plain to see how it got that.
I had no clue, what do they mean?
Ah, I didn't explain that very well. Tanri can be applied to the god of any religion, but Allah is the name of the islamic god. For example an arabic -> turkish translation of the shahada would read like "There is no Tanri other than Allah". So Allah is Tanri but being the only true God no other Tanri can be Allah. But if you then refer to your God not as Allah (his name) but as Tanri, you might be outing yourself as non-muslim. It reads very confusing I realise, but I think the confusion is mainly that we in the (christian) west refer to our god as "God". It's like calling a person "Person", so sometimes you might be referring to a person, but sometimes you're talking about the Person. If I talked about you as a person that has some valid contexts, but in other context not using your name would raise eyebrows. Similar to that.
There is some chauvinism in putting your Gods name in a special place, but for straight translation it wouldn't make sense to translate a non-muslims call to god with "Allah" since they're not praying to Allah.
I mean they dont want them to exist, regardless of the term used. They call themselves Grey Wolves after Asena and seek out to create a great turkish ethnonation across central asia but with Sunni Islam as its religion.
There are a few tengrist oddballs in the turkish far-right though like an absolute mirror-copy of the nazi's who want to reestablish germanic gods like Odin. They strongly identify with the mongolian roots of Turkey and a lot of their sinophobia comes from "Turks = Mongols good, Chinese = Mongols enemy bad". The split in the turkish far-right between muslims (and within those into different sects) and tengrists is often a friction point and the only reason they are banding together is because they want to RETVRN to the ottoman days. Tengrists are like a weird footnote to that though, very few and only accepted insofar as they help the cause.
That buddhist tangent was a good read thanks for that, I have nothing to add to it unfortunately since I know nothing about buddhism or tengrism.
Exactly, like "bless you" or "goddammit" or "what the hell" or "jesus christ"; religious origins but more regional than religious or even racial
I worked with Turkish Muslims and Gujrati Muslims and both groups thought it was fuckin hilarious when they heard inshallah/mashallah and encouraged it. They also regularly encouraged participating in ramadan/eid to whatever extent was comfortable. It was quite nice.