Juan Cole Informed Comment
Trump and Michigan senatorial candidate Mike Rogers make a big deal out of the name of the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, who goes by Abdul. They are of course attempting to other him, hoping that Michigan voters will be reluctant to vote for a Muslim. El-Sayed was born in Michigan and was raised by his American step-mother, Jacqueline Johnson, so there isn’t actually anything alien about him. A Rhodes scholar, he taught health sciences at Columbia University and ran the Health Department in Wayne County, Michigan. He is campaigning on Medicare for all. So bringing up his name is not pertinent to his record. But his record is stellar and hard to run against, especially for an old Trumpie hack like Mike Rogers, who supported the stupid attack on Iran that has raised prices for all of us.
Trump said at a campaign rally in Georgia, “His name is actually Abdullahalalalala baa ba ba Muhammad El-Sayed.”
But making fun of El-Sayed’s name also could be seen as a form of blasphemy. Abdulrahman means “servant of the All-Merciful.” The Arabic root r-ḥ-m (رحم) and Hebrew r-ḥ-m (רחם), meaning compassion or mercy, are cognates, since Hebrew and Arabic are related languages, not quite as close as Spanish and Portuguese, but still close. And in both languages the root forms a name of . . . GOD.
In fact, there is every reason to believe that in everyday life, Jesus called God “raḥmana,” the Merciful, using the very word that is in El-Sayed’s name.
For Hebrew, let us consider Exodus 34:5-6, when Moses cuts two new tablets and goes up to Mt. Sinai
That word “merciful” or raḥūm is a Hebrew form of the Arabic ar-Raḥmān. Semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic are based on 3-letter consonantal roots which are put into certain patterns. The vowels are less important than the consonants. R-ḥ-m, the three-letter root for compassion or mercy, tells you the basics.
Or consider Moses’ discourse in Exodus 4:31:
Here we see again the r-ḥ-m root, meaning merciful and applied to God, just as it is in Islam.
Abdulrahman goes by the shortened form of Abdul. But the full name means “servant” (`abd) of the (ul) All-Merciful (Rahman ).
The phrase “servant of God” also exists in the Hebrew Bible. In Deuteronomy 34:5, Moses is called the servant (‘eḇeḏ ) of God (YHWH):
This sort of construction is common in Isaiah.
That Hebrew word for servant, ‘eḇeḏ (sometimes you see it written as `eved), is a cognate with the Arabic `abd, also meaning servant.
The Hebrew name Obadiah, a shortened form of Ōḇaḏyāhū, also means “servant of God.”
Since al-Raḥman, like the Hebrew raḥūm, is a divine name never used for a human, if you say Abdulrahman or servant of the All-Merciful, it is the same as saying “servant of God,” which is what Moses was called in the Bible.
The Hebrew rahum or Merciful as a divine attribute was translated into Greek as oiktirmōn (οἰκτίρμων). So we find in Luke 6:36 Jesus instructing us,
Jesus probably spoke Aramaic in everyday life, and the Peshitta or the Syriac New Testament gives Luke 6:36 this way:
Hwaw den raḥmane aykana d-ap abukon raḥmana hu. – “Be merciful (rahmane), just as your Father is merciful (rahmana).”
The form Rahman in Arabic is probably from Aramaic.
Courtesy Abdul for Senate
Maria Gorea wrote,
Aramaic came to be a lingua franca in the first millennium of the common era and some Jewish texts use it.
So in the Babylonian Talmud there is a common phrase, de amar Rahmana, “the All-Merciful said.”
In the late 300s A.D., the pagans of what is now Yemen converted to monotheism under the influence of Judaism, and many became Jews. Some became Christians. In Yemen, all the monotheists, whether indigenous or Jewish-influenced, called God Rahmanan, “the All-Merciful,” probably under Jewish influence. Al-Rahman as a divine name for God, characterizing him as merciful or compassionate, probably came into Arabic from Aramaic.
So when Trump and other politicians make fun of the name Abdulrahman, they are making fun of a phrase that has the name of God in it, a form of which appears in the Bible and the exact form of which appears in the Syriac New Testament and the Jewish Talmud.
May God have mercy on them.
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