Response: In
one of your answers you have said that Allah is a neutral, genderless term.
How can it be when Allat also comes from the word ilah (deity)
and means ‘goddess’? The Qur’an repeatedly refers to God as ‘He’.
Not only that but there are also other patriarchal terms such as ‘king’
instead of ‘queen’.
Comment: This
is not what my reply was intended to mean. But then perhaps I couldn’t
explain my point of view well enough. I’ll try to explain it again:
Firstly, it should be kept in mind
that we have no knowledge whatsoever about the physical being of Allah;
we do not know if He is male, female, genderless or has some other gender
that we are not aware of.
Secondly, in spite of not knowing
what God’s gender is, since humans had to address God, some gender had
to be adopted.
If these two points are clear, then one can go on to
consider another fact: the concept of God was found in the very first human
beings -- Adam and Eve. With their birth, languages were born. We have
no knowledge about what language our progenitors spoke, nor do we know
what languages were spoken by much later generations. Anyway, as time progressed
various languages were born and in them was born the concept of ‘gender’.
Even things were classified as either male or female. For example, in the
English language, the female gender was adopted for the entity ‘country’.
So we now say: ‘Nepal is a poor country; her resources are very little’.
This of course does not make the country a female. Likewise, the expression
‘sister-organizations’ refer to like organizations. Similarly, in the Arabic
language, the nouns Shams (sun) , Sa‘ir (Hell) and Sama
(Sky) are feminine. Why? Simply because Englishmen and Arabs used to speak
this way. Likewise, the male gender was adopted for God. Again not because
God is ‘a male’ but because of the usage of the language. So consistent
was this usage that in most languages, the male gender was reserved for
God.
So you see with this history, one can safely conclude
that genders of things and entities (except for men and women and other
species whose gender is physically known), all genders are fixed by the
usage of a language and have nothing to do with the actual gender of the
thing.
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