Dum Pendebat Filius

The best thing about working late is getting to listen to the lunatic ravings of Michael Savage on the radio on my way home. Tonight he had some guest, whose name I didn’t catch, who was telling Savage all about the perfidy and evil of Saudi Arabia. The guest made a mistake, though, in his description of the Saudi flag.

The guest said, “Your listeners may not know what those Arabic words on the Saudi flag stand for.” (Obviously, I’m not able to repeat his exact words; I’m recreating what he said as much as I can remember it.) He went on, “What it says is: There is no true God but Allah. Now, can you imagine if the Stars and Stripes said, There is no true God but Jesus?”

Savage’s guest clearly didn’t understand a word of Arabic (he repeatedly pronounced “bin Laden” as “bin Louden” and “Allah” as though it were the German word alle), and thus he was misinformed somewhere about what the words on the Saudi flag “stand for.” What it says on that flag is:

ﻻ إﻠﻪ إﻻ اﻠﻟﻪ ﻤﺣﻣد رﺴﻭﻞ اﻠﻟﻪ

laa ilaaha illaa llah muhammad rasuulu llahi

This is known as the shahaadah — “There is no God but God [and] Muhammad is the messenger of God.”

(Hans Wehr defines rasuul, which is usually translated as “messenger” in this context, as follows: “messenger; emissary; envoy, delegate; apostle (Chr.); [ar-rasuul] or [rasuulu llahi] the Messenger of God (i.e. Mohammed).”)

Rendering this text as “There is no true God but Allah,” as Savage’s guest did, makes it sound like the Saudi flag is meant to be a sort of truculent in-your-face challenge: Screw you guys! Allah is the real God! In reality, what’s on the Saudi flag is the shahaadah, one of the fundamental “Pillars of Islam,” which is not surprising, considering that Islam’s two holiest cities are to be found in that country.

Remember, as I have written before, Allah isn’t the name of some alternate deity like Zeus or Ahura Mazda, it’s simply the Arabic word for “god.”