4/13/09

God's Dangly Bits

This from a discussion group:

Q = Does Allah have gender? Is He male?
A = The Arabic word Allah has no gender.

Well, Duh, it's a word, and words don't have dangly bits. They have noun classes, aka “grammatical gender” sometimes, but when you say that people go looking for god's penis, so I avoid the word gender like it had herpes and I only talk about noun classes.


The Arabic grammar has only two genders noun classes,

First class = words for {garden, table, life ... }
Second class = words for {door, path, book ... }

What's the difference? Easy. Words in the first class all end in the letter ta or alif. All the words that don't are in the second class. Allah ends in the letter ha, so it's second class. God's dick has nothing to do with it.


Not that anyone has ever seen him so they'd know, but all the experts agree that Allah is neither male nor female, and is just too good for all that icky sticky sex stuff. No nooky for god, but OH NOES, Arabic only has two pronouns, 'she' and 'he', so which one do I use for her him god? It'd be easy if god spoke English, because we don't have noun classes, just three pronouns: it, she, and he. Since Allah is supposed to not be a 'she' or a 'he', you use “it”. No problem.


Arabic only has two pronouns, though: hiya 'she', and huwa 'he'. The koran always uses huwa. Why do you suppose that is? I see three possibilities—we can have a poll!

Choices

1. It's an epicene pronoun, where you use one form for a mixed group, like the English gender neutral masculine in :

Man is a Mammal that Suckles His Young.”

If you don't like that monstrosity, you don't get “Praise Allah and His works” either. You gotta change all the his-es to its-es. You'd have to rewrite the koran.

2. “'He' is used only out of respect and dignity - not for gender.”
This is some kind of party line talking point, because I see it repeated word for word on one Islamic site after another. They must call their moms 'he', since saying 'she' would show disrespect and indignity. Male chauvinist pig, aims at sanctimony, shoots self in foot. Which brings us to our third choice:


3. These guys are all a bunch of misogynistic jerks, with sad little dicks that shrivel up at the mere thought of god not being EXACTLY LIKE THEM.

Number three gets my vote. What do you think?

1 comment:

PersonalFailure said...

no. 3 with a little "if god's a she, we're SCREWED in the afterlife" thrown in.