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108-768: The name Kufra (comes from Kufuh and Epher) itself is a derivation from kafir , the Arabic term for non-Muslims. Kufra did not fall under the dominion of either the Arabs or the Ottomans and was owned by the Arab Bedouin tribe of the Zuwayya only in the mid-19th century, and eventually by the Italians by the 1930s. In 1931, during the campaign of Cyrenaica, General Rodolfo Graziani easily conquered Kufra, considered

216-513: A dahri . One type of kafir is a mushrik (مشرك), another group of religious wrongdoer mentioned frequently in the Quran and other Islamic works . Several concepts of vice are seen to revolve around the concept of kufr in the Quran. Historically, while Islamic scholars agreed that a mushrik was a kafir , they sometimes disagreed on the propriety of applying the term to Muslims who committed

324-406: A kafir is known as takfir , a practice that has been condemned but also employed in theological and political polemics over the centuries. A dhimmi or mu'ahid is a historical term for non-Muslims living in an Islamic state with legal protection. Dhimmis were exempt from certain duties specifically assigned to Muslims if they paid the jizya poll tax, but otherwise equal under

432-578: A Muslim commits a punishable offense if they say to a Jew or a Christian: "Thou unbeliever". Charles Adams and A. Kevin Reinhart also write that "later thinkers" in Islam distinguished between ahl al-kitab and the polytheists/ mushrikīn . Historically, People of the Book permanently residing under Islamic rule were entitled to a special status known as dhimmī , while those visiting Muslim lands received

540-522: A collection of related dialects that constitute the precursor of Arabic, first emerged during the Iron Age . Previously, the earliest attestation of Old Arabic was thought to be a single 1st century CE inscription in Sabaic script at Qaryat al-Faw , in southern present-day Saudi Arabia. However, this inscription does not participate in several of the key innovations of the Arabic language group, such as

648-435: A corpus of poetic texts, in addition to Qur'an usage and Bedouin informants whom he considered to be reliable speakers of the ʿarabiyya . Arabic spread with the spread of Islam . Following the early Muslim conquests , Arabic gained vocabulary from Middle Persian and Turkish . In the early Abbasid period , many Classical Greek terms entered Arabic through translations carried out at Baghdad's House of Wisdom . By

756-1081: A dialect of Arabic and written in the Latin alphabet . The Balkan languages, including Albanian, Greek , Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian , have also acquired many words of Arabic origin, mainly through direct contact with Ottoman Turkish . Arabic has influenced languages across the globe throughout its history, especially languages where Islam is the predominant religion and in countries that were conquered by Muslims. The most markedly influenced languages are Persian , Turkish , Hindustani ( Hindi and Urdu ), Kashmiri , Kurdish , Bosnian , Kazakh , Bengali , Malay ( Indonesian and Malaysian ), Maldivian , Pashto , Punjabi , Albanian , Armenian , Azerbaijani , Sicilian, Spanish, Greek, Bulgarian, Tagalog , Sindhi , Odia , Hebrew and African languages such as Hausa , Amharic , Tigrinya , Somali , Tamazight , and Swahili . Conversely, Arabic has borrowed some words (mostly nouns) from other languages, including its sister-language Aramaic, Persian, Greek, and Latin and to

864-413: A different status known as musta'min . The mushrikun are those who believe in shirk 'association', which refers to accepting other gods and divinities alongside God . The term is often translated as polytheist . The Quran distinguishes between mushrikun and People of the Book, reserving the former term for idol worshipers, although some classical commentators considered Christian doctrine to be

972-541: A form of shirk. Shirk is held to be the worst form of disbelief and it is identified in the Quran as the only sin that God will not pardon ( 4:48 , 4:116 ). Accusations of shirk have been common in religious polemics within Islam. Thus, in the early Islamic debates on free will and theodicy , Sunni theologians charged their Mutazila adversaries with shirk , accusing them of attributing to man creative powers comparable to those of God in both originating and executing actions. Mu'tazila theologians, in turn, charged

1080-544: A grave sin or the People of the Book . The Quran distinguishes between mushrikūn and People of the Book, reserving the former term for idol worshippers, although some classical commentators considered the Christian doctrine to be a form of shirk . In modern times, kafir is sometimes applied to self-professed Muslims, particularly by members of Islamist movements . The act of declaring another self-professed Muslim

1188-487: A lesser extent and more recently from Turkish, English, French, and Italian. Arabic is spoken by as many as 380 million speakers, both native and non-native, in the Arab world, making it the fifth most spoken language in the world, and the fourth most used language on the internet in terms of users. It also serves as the liturgical language of more than 2 billion Muslims . In 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked Arabic

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1296-587: A millennium before the modern period . Early lexicographers ( لُغَوِيُّون lughawiyyūn ) sought to explain words in the Quran that were unfamiliar or had a particular contextual meaning, and to identify words of non-Arabic origin that appear in the Quran. They gathered shawāhid ( شَوَاهِد 'instances of attested usage') from poetry and the speech of the Arabs—particularly the Bedouin ʾaʿrāb  [ ar ] ( أَعْراب ) who were perceived to speak

1404-543: A paraphrase of the tafsir by Ibn Kathir , there are eight kinds of Al-Kufr al-Akbar (major unbelief), some are the same as those described by Al-Hilali ( Kufr-al-I'rad , Kufr-an-Nifaaq ) and some different. In Islam, jahiliyyah ('ignorance') refers to the time of Arabia before Islam . When the Islamic empire expanded, the word kafir was broadly used as a descriptive term for all pagans and anyone else who disbelieved in Islam. Historically,

1512-692: A part of decentralization in 2012, the country is administratively split into 13 regions from the original 25 municipalities, which were further divided in 1,500 communes. As of 2016, there were 22 administrative divisions in the country in the form of districts. 24°N 23°E  /  24°N 23°E  / 24; 23 Kafir Political Militant [REDACTED] Islam portal Kafir ( Arabic : كَافِر , romanized :  kāfir ; plural: كَافِرُون kāfirūn , كُفَّار kuffār , or كَفَرَة kafara ; feminine: كَافِرَة kāfira ; feminine plural: كَافِرَات kāfirāt or كَوَافِر kawāfir )

1620-478: A receipt of payment, either in the form of a piece of paper or parchment or as a seal humiliatingly placed upon their neck, and was thereafter compelled to carry this receipt wherever they went within the realms of Islam. Failure to produce an up-to-date jizya receipt on the request of a Muslim could result in death or forced conversion to Islam of the dhimmī in question. Various types of unbelief recognized by legal scholars include: Muslim belief/doctrine

1728-594: A result, many European languages have borrowed words from it. Arabic influence, mainly in vocabulary, is seen in European languages (mainly Spanish and to a lesser extent Portuguese , Catalan , and Sicilian ) owing to the proximity of Europe and the long-lasting Arabic cultural and linguistic presence, mainly in Southern Iberia, during the Al-Andalus era. Maltese is a Semitic language developed from

1836-462: A script derived from ASA attest to a language known as Hasaitic . On the northwestern frontier of Arabia, various languages known to scholars as Thamudic B , Thamudic D, Safaitic , and Hismaic are attested. The last two share important isoglosses with later forms of Arabic, leading scholars to theorize that Safaitic and Hismaic are early forms of Arabic and that they should be considered Old Arabic . Linguists generally believe that "Old Arabic",

1944-470: A single language, despite mutual incomprehensibility among differing spoken versions. From a linguistic standpoint, it is often said that the various spoken varieties of Arabic differ among each other collectively about as much as the Romance languages . This is an apt comparison in a number of ways. The period of divergence from a single spoken form is similar—perhaps 1500 years for Arabic, 2000 years for

2052-486: A strategic region, leading about 3,000 infantry and artillery personnel, supported by about twenty bombers. Kufra's location in Libya's southeast places it on the country's border with Egypt , Sudan (unlike any other Libyan district), and Chad . It borders the following regions of these countries, namely, New Valley Governorate, Egypt in the east, Shamaliyah State, Sudan in the southeast, North Darfur State, Sudan in

2160-507: A type of Arabic. Cypriot Arabic is recognized as a minority language in Cyprus. The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon of diglossia , which is the normal use of two separate varieties of the same language, usually in different social situations. Tawleed is the process of giving a new shade of meaning to an old classical word. For example, al-hatif lexicographically means

2268-507: A variety of regional vernacular Arabic dialects , which are not necessarily mutually intelligible. Classical Arabic is the language found in the Quran , used from the period of Pre-Islamic Arabia to that of the Abbasid Caliphate . Classical Arabic is prescriptive, according to the syntactic and grammatical norms laid down by classical grammarians (such as Sibawayh ) and the vocabulary defined in classical dictionaries (such as

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2376-476: A wider audience." In the wake of the industrial revolution and European hegemony and colonialism , pioneering Arabic presses, such as the Amiri Press established by Muhammad Ali (1819), dramatically changed the diffusion and consumption of Arabic literature and publications. Rifa'a al-Tahtawi proposed the establishment of Madrasat al-Alsun in 1836 and led a translation campaign that highlighted

2484-737: Is a Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world . The ISO assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic , including its standard form of Literary Arabic, known as Modern Standard Arabic , which is derived from Classical Arabic . This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as al-ʿarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā ( اَلعَرَبِيَّةُ ٱلْفُصْحَىٰ "the eloquent Arabic") or simply al-fuṣḥā ( اَلْفُصْحَىٰ ). Arabic

2592-590: Is a minimum level of comprehension between all Arabic dialects, this level can increase or decrease based on geographic proximity: for example, Levantine and Gulf speakers understand each other much better than they do speakers from the Maghreb. The issue of diglossia between spoken and written language is a complicating factor: A single written form, differing sharply from any of the spoken varieties learned natively, unites several sometimes divergent spoken forms. For political reasons, Arabs mostly assert that they all speak

2700-559: Is a sister language rather than their direct ancestor. Arabia had a wide variety of Semitic languages in antiquity. The term "Arab" was initially used to describe those living in the Arabian Peninsula , as perceived by geographers from ancient Greece . In the southwest, various Central Semitic languages both belonging to and outside the Ancient South Arabian family (e.g. Southern Thamudic) were spoken. It

2808-568: Is an Arabic term in Islam which refers to a person who disbelieves the God in Islam , denies his authority, rejects the tenets of Islam, or simply is not a Muslim —one who does not believe in the guidance of Muhammad , the Islamic prophet . Kafir is often translated as ' infidel ', ' pagan ', 'rejector', ' denier ', 'disbeliever', 'unbeliever', 'nonbeliever', and 'non-Muslim'. The term

2916-478: Is believed that the ancestors of the Modern South Arabian languages (non-Central Semitic languages) were spoken in southern Arabia at this time. To the north, in the oases of northern Hejaz , Dadanitic and Taymanitic held some prestige as inscriptional languages. In Najd and parts of western Arabia, a language known to scholars as Thamudic C is attested. In eastern Arabia, inscriptions in

3024-408: Is credited with establishing the rules of Arabic prosody . Al-Jahiz (776–868) proposed to Al-Akhfash al-Akbar an overhaul of the grammar of Arabic, but it would not come to pass for two centuries. The standardization of Arabic reached completion around the end of the 8th century. The first comprehensive description of the ʿarabiyya "Arabic", Sībawayhi's al - Kitāb , is based first of all upon

3132-472: Is credited with standardizing Arabic grammar , or an-naḥw ( النَّحو "the way" ), and pioneering a system of diacritics to differentiate consonants ( نقط الإعجام nuqaṭu‿l-i'jām "pointing for non-Arabs") and indicate vocalization ( التشكيل at-tashkīl ). Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi (718–786) compiled the first Arabic dictionary, Kitāb al-'Ayn ( كتاب العين "The Book of the Letter ع "), and

3240-574: Is not present in the spoken varieties, but deletes Classical words that sound obsolete in MSA. In addition, MSA has borrowed or coined many terms for concepts that did not exist in Quranic times, and MSA continues to evolve. Some words have been borrowed from other languages—notice that transliteration mainly indicates spelling and not real pronunciation (e.g., فِلْم film 'film' or ديمقراطية dīmuqrāṭiyyah 'democracy'). The current preference

3348-855: Is official in Mali and recognized as a minority language in Morocco, while the Senegalese government adopted the Latin script to write it. Maltese is official in (predominantly Catholic ) Malta and written with the Latin script . Linguists agree that it is a variety of spoken Arabic, descended from Siculo-Arabic , though it has experienced extensive changes as a result of sustained and intensive contact with Italo-Romance varieties, and more recently also with English. Due to "a mix of social, cultural, historical, political, and indeed linguistic factors", many Maltese people today consider their language Semitic but not

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3456-640: Is often summarized in " the Six Articles of Faith ", (the first five are mentioned together in the 2:285 ). According to the Salafi scholar Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din al-Hilali , " kufr is basically disbelief in any of the articles of faith." He also lists several different types of major disbelief, (disbelief so severe it excludes those who practice it completely from the fold of Islam): Minor disbelief or Kufran-Ni'mah indicates "ungratefulness of God's Blessings or Favours". According to another source,

3564-572: Is the third most widespread official language after English and French, one of six official languages of the United Nations , and the liturgical language of Islam . Arabic is widely taught in schools and universities around the world and is used to varying degrees in workplaces, governments and the media. During the Middle Ages , Arabic was a major vehicle of culture and learning, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy. As

3672-408: Is the active participle of the verb كَفَرَ , kafara , from root ك-ف-ر K-F-R . As a pre-Islamic term it described farmers burying seeds in the ground. One of its applications in the Quran has also the same meaning as farmer. Since farmers cover the seeds with soil while planting, the word kāfir implies a person who hides or covers. Ideologically, it implies a person who hides or covers

3780-542: Is the third of three"), among other verses, has been traditionally understood in Islam as rejection of the Christian doctrine on the Trinity , though modern scholarship has suggested alternative interpretations. Other Quranic verses strongly deny the deity of Jesus Christ , son of Mary and reproach the people who treat Jesus as equal with God as disbelievers who will have strayed from the path of God which would result in

3888-590: Is the variety used in most current, printed Arabic publications, spoken by some of the Arabic media across North Africa and the Middle East, and understood by most educated Arabic speakers. "Literary Arabic" and "Standard Arabic" ( فُصْحَى fuṣḥá ) are less strictly defined terms that may refer to Modern Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic. Some of the differences between Classical Arabic (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) are as follows: MSA uses much Classical vocabulary (e.g., dhahaba 'to go') that

3996-413: Is to avoid direct borrowings, preferring to either use loan translations (e.g., فرع farʻ 'branch', also used for the branch of a company or organization; جناح janāḥ 'wing', is also used for the wing of an airplane, building, air force, etc.), or to coin new words using forms within existing roots ( استماتة istimātah ' apoptosis ', using the root موت m/w/t 'death' put into

4104-438: Is unjust), which makes him a kafir . The most fundamental sense of kufr in the Quran is 'ingratitude', the willful refusal to acknowledge or appreciate the benefits that God bestows on humankind, including clear signs and revealed scriptures. According to the E. J. Brill's First Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1913–1936, Volume 4 , the term first applied in the Quran to unbelieving Meccans, who endeavoured "to refute and revile

4212-416: Is used directly 134 times in Quran, its verbal noun kufr is used 37 times, and the verbal cognates of kafir are used about 250 times. By extension of the basic meaning of the root, 'to cover', the term is used in the Quran in the senses of ignore/fail to acknowledge and to spurn/be ungrateful. The meaning of 'disbelief', which has come to be regarded as primary, retains all of these connotations in

4320-418: Is used in different ways in the Quran , with the most fundamental sense being ungrateful toward God. Kufr means 'disbelief', 'unbelief', 'non-belief', 'to be thankless', 'to be faithless', or 'ingratitude'. The opposite term of kufr ('disbelief') is iman ('faith'), and the opposite of kafir ('disbeliever') is mu'min ('believer'). A person who denies the existence of a creator might be called

4428-524: Is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the industrial and post-industrial era , especially in modern times. Due to its grounding in Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic is removed over a millennium from everyday speech, which is construed as a multitude of dialects of this language. These dialects and Modern Standard Arabic are described by some scholars as not mutually comprehensible. The former are usually acquired in families, while

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4536-503: The Mu'tazila believed that there was a status between believer and unbeliever called "rejected" or fasiq . The Kharijites ' view that the self-proclaimed Muslim who had sinned and "failed to repent had ipso facto excluded himself from the community, and was hence a kafir " (a practice known as takfir ) was considered so extreme by the Sunni majority that they in turn declared

4644-445: The Lisān al-ʻArab ). Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) largely follows the grammatical standards of Classical Arabic and uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no longer have any counterpart in the spoken varieties and has adopted certain new constructions and vocabulary from the spoken varieties. Much of the new vocabulary

4752-608: The Cafars ") by two different but similar names. The word is also used in reference to the coast of Africa as "land of Cafraria". The 16th century explorer Leo Africanus described the Cafri as " negroes ", and he also stated that they constituted one of five principal population groups in Africa. He identified their geographical heartland as being located in a remote region of southern Africa, an area which he designated as Cafraria . By

4860-695: The Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire (before the political decline of Islam). In their memoirs on Muslim invasions, enslavement and plunder of this period, many Muslim historians in South Asia used the term kafir for Hindus , Buddhists , Sikhs and Jains . Raziuddin Aquil states that "non-Muslims were often condemned as kafirs , in medieval Indian Islamic literature, including court chronicles, Sufi texts and literary compositions" and fatwas were issued that justified persecution of

4968-781: The Kharijites to be kuffar , following the hadith that declared, "If a Muslim charges a fellow Muslim with kufr , he is himself a kafir if the accusation should prove untrue". Nevertheless, in Islamic theological polemics kafir was "a frequent term for the Muslim protagonist" holding the opposite view, according to Brill's Islamic Encyclopedia . Present-day Muslims who make interpretations that differ from what others believe are declared kafirs ; fatwas (edicts by Islamic religious leaders) are issued ordering Muslims to kill them, and some such people have been killed also. Another group that are "distinguished from

5076-706: The Mahdist War , the Mahdist State used the term kuffar against Ottoman Turks, and the Turks themselves used the term kuffar towards Persians during the Ottoman-Safavid wars . In modern Muslim popular imagination, the dajjal ( Antichrist -like figure) will have k-f-r written on his forehead. However, there was extensive religious violence in India between Muslims and non-Muslims during

5184-568: The Xth form , or جامعة jāmiʻah 'university', based on جمع jamaʻa 'to gather, unite'; جمهورية jumhūriyyah 'republic', based on جمهور jumhūr 'multitude'). An earlier tendency was to redefine an older word although this has fallen into disuse (e.g., هاتف hātif 'telephone' < 'invisible caller (in Sufism)'; جريدة jarīdah 'newspaper' < 'palm-leaf stalk'). Colloquial or dialectal Arabic refers to

5292-494: The northern Hejaz . These features are evidence of common descent from a hypothetical ancestor , Proto-Arabic . The following features of Proto-Arabic can be reconstructed with confidence: On the other hand, several Arabic varieties are closer to other Semitic languages and maintain features not found in Classical Arabic, indicating that these varieties cannot have developed from Classical Arabic. Thus, Arabic vernaculars do not descend from Classical Arabic: Classical Arabic

5400-419: The "learned" tradition (Classical Arabic). This variety and both its classicizing and "lay" iterations have been termed Middle Arabic in the past, but they are thought to continue an Old Higazi register. It is clear that the orthography of the Quran was not developed for the standardized form of Classical Arabic; rather, it shows the attempt on the part of writers to record an archaic form of Old Higazi. In

5508-454: The 11th and 12th centuries in al-Andalus , the zajal and muwashah poetry forms developed in the dialectical Arabic of Cordoba and the Maghreb. The Nahda was a cultural and especially literary renaissance of the 19th century in which writers sought "to fuse Arabic and European forms of expression." According to James L. Gelvin , " Nahda writers attempted to simplify the Arabic language and script so that it might be accessible to

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5616-432: The 15th century, Muslims in Africa were using the word kaffir in reference to the non-Muslim African natives. Many of those kufari were enslaved and sold to European and Asian merchants by their Muslim captors, most of the merchants were from Portugal , which had established trading outposts along the coast of West Africa by that time. These European traders adopted the Arabic word and its derivatives. Some of

5724-423: The 18th century, followers of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab , known as Wahhabis , believed kufr or shirk was found in the Muslim community itself, especially in "the practice of popular religion": [S]hirk took many forms: the attribution to prophets, saints, astrologers, and soothsayers of knowledge of the unseen world, which only God possesses and can grant; the attribution of power to any being except God, including

5832-571: The 4th to the 6th centuries, the Nabataean script evolved into the Arabic script recognizable from the early Islamic era. There are inscriptions in an undotted, 17-letter Arabic script dating to the 6th century CE, found at four locations in Syria ( Zabad , Jebel Usays , Harran , Umm el-Jimal ). The oldest surviving papyrus in Arabic dates to 643 CE, and it uses dots to produce the modern 28-letter Arabic alphabet. The language of that papyrus and of

5940-779: The 8th century, knowledge of Classical Arabic had become an essential prerequisite for rising into the higher classes throughout the Islamic world, both for Muslims and non-Muslims. For example, Maimonides , the Andalusi Jewish philosopher, authored works in Judeo-Arabic —Arabic written in Hebrew script . Ibn Jinni of Mosul , a pioneer in phonology , wrote prolifically in the 10th century on Arabic morphology and phonology in works such as Kitāb Al-Munṣif , Kitāb Al-Muḥtasab , and Kitāb Al-Khaṣāʾiṣ    [ ar ] . Ibn Mada' of Cordoba (1116–1196) realized

6048-541: The Church. On the other hand, modern scholarship has suggested alternative interpretations of verse Q. 5:73 . Cyril Glasse criticizes the use of kafirun (plural of kafir ) to describe Christians as "loose usage". According to the Encyclopedia of Islam , in traditional Islamic jurisprudence , ahl al-kitab are "usually regarded more leniently than other kuffar [plural of kafir ]" and "in theory"

6156-580: The Last Day and do good, will have their reward with their Lord and they will not fear, nor grieve." 2:62 Charles Adams writes that the Quran reproaches the People of the Book with kufr for rejecting Muhammad's message when they should have been the first to accept it as possessors of earlier revelations, and singles out Christians for disregarding the evidence of God's unity. The Quranic verse 5:73 ("Certainly they disbelieve [ kafara ] who say: God

6264-412: The Middle East and North Africa have become a badge of sophistication and modernity and ... feigning, or asserting, weakness or lack of facility in Arabic is sometimes paraded as a sign of status, class, and perversely, even education through a mélange of code-switching practises." Arabic has been taught worldwide in many elementary and secondary schools, especially Muslim schools. Universities around

6372-615: The Muslims. Ibn Hajar is of opinion that none of the Muhammad's parents who were non-prophets were kafirs (disbelievers) and all the hadiths on this subject (although some hadiths seem to contradict it) mean that. Ibn Hajar says about Muhammad saying his ab is in the Hell, that the ab in the hadith refers to the paternal uncle and that Arabs widely use ab to refer to 'amm (paternal uncle). Most Sunni scholars hold

6480-463: The Prophet". A waiting attitude towards the kafir was recommended at first for Muslims; later, Muslims were ordered to keep apart from unbelievers and defend themselves against their attacks and even take the offensive. Most passages in the Quran referring to unbelievers in general talk about their fate on the day of judgement and destination in hell . According to scholar Marilyn Waldman, as

6588-690: The Qur'an is referred to by linguists as "Quranic Arabic", as distinct from its codification soon thereafter into " Classical Arabic ". In late pre-Islamic times, a transdialectal and transcommunal variety of Arabic emerged in the Hejaz , which continued living its parallel life after literary Arabic had been institutionally standardized in the 2nd and 3rd century of the Hijra , most strongly in Judeo-Christian texts, keeping alive ancient features eliminated from

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6696-417: The Quran "progresses" (as the reader goes from the verses revealed first to later ones), the meaning behind the term kafir does not change but "progresses", i.e. "accumulates meaning over time". As the Islamic prophet Muhammad 's views of his opponents change, his use of kafir "undergoes a development". Kafir moves from being one description of Muhammad's opponents to the primary one. Later in

6804-467: The Quran, kafir becomes more and more connected with shirk . Finally, towards the end of the Quran , kafir begins to also signify the group of people to be fought by the mu'minīn ('believers'). Khaled Abou El Fadl argues that Quran 2:62 supports religious pluralism, implying that some non-Muslims are not kafirs: "Those who believe, Jews, Christians, Sabians --whoever believes in God and

6912-446: The Quranic usage. In the Quranic discourse, the term typifies all things that are unacceptable and offensive to God. Whereby it is not necessary to deny the existence of God, but it suffices to deviate from his will as seen in a dialogue between God and Iblis , the latter called a kafir . According to Al-Damiri (1341–1405) it is neither denying God, nor the act of disobedience alone, but Iblis' attitude (claiming that God's command

7020-576: The Romance languages. Also, while it is comprehensible to people from the Maghreb , a linguistically innovative variety such as Moroccan Arabic is essentially incomprehensible to Arabs from the Mashriq , much as French is incomprehensible to Spanish or Italian speakers but relatively easily learned by them. This suggests that the spoken varieties may linguistically be considered separate languages. With

7128-576: The Sunnis with shirk because under their doctrine a voluntary human act results from an "association" between God, who creates the act, and the individual who appropriates it by carrying it out. In classical jurisprudence, Islamic religious tolerance applied only to the People of the Book, while mushrikun, based on the Sword Verse , faced a choice between conversion to Islam and fight to the death, which may be substituted by enslavement. In practice,

7236-460: The attitude toward unbelievers in Islam was determined more by socio-political conditions than by religious doctrine. A tolerance toward unbelievers "impossible to imagine in contemporary Christendom" prevailed even to the time of the Crusades , particularly with respect to the People of the Book. However, due to animosity towards Franks , the term kafir developed into a term of abuse. During

7344-574: The conversion of Semitic mimation to nunation in the singular. It is best reassessed as a separate language on the Central Semitic dialect continuum. It was also thought that Old Arabic coexisted alongside—and then gradually displaced— epigraphic Ancient North Arabian (ANA), which was theorized to have been the regional tongue for many centuries. ANA, despite its name, was considered a very distinct language, and mutually unintelligible, from "Arabic". Scholars named its variant dialects after

7452-520: The designation of People of the Book and the dhimmī status was extended even to non-monotheistic religions of conquered peoples, such as Hinduism. Following destruction of major Hindu temples during the Muslim conquests in South Asia , Hindus and Muslims on the subcontinent came to share a number of popular religious practices and beliefs, such as veneration of Sufi saints and worship at Sufi dargahs , although Hindus may worship at Hindu shrines also. In

7560-452: The different rulings of the schools of Islamic jurisprudence , might be required to convert to Islam, pay the jizya , exiled, or subject to the death penalty . In 2019, Nahdlatul Ulama , the world's largest independent Islamic organization, issued a proclamation urging Muslims to refrain from using the word kafir to refer to non-Muslims because the term is both offensive and perceived as "theologically violent". The word kāfir

7668-424: The different rulings of the four madhhab , might be required to accept Islam, pay the jizya, be exiled, or be killed under the Islamic death penalty. Some historians believe that forced conversion was rare in Islamic history, and most conversions to Islam were voluntary. Muslim rulers were often more interested in conquest than conversion. Upon payment of the tax ( jizya ), the dhimmī would receive

7776-566: The earliest records of European usage of the word can be found in The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589) by Richard Hakluyt . In volume 4, Hakluyt writes: "calling them Cafars and Gawars , which is, infidels or disbelievers". Volume 9 refers to the slaves (slaves called Cafari ) and inhabitants of Ethiopia ("and they use to go in small shippes, and trade with

7884-587: The emergence of Central Semitic languages, particularly in grammar. Innovations of the Central Semitic languages—all maintained in Arabic—include: There are several features which Classical Arabic, the modern Arabic varieties, as well as the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions share which are unattested in any other Central Semitic language variety, including the Dadanitic and Taymanitic languages of

7992-472: The entrance of hellfire . While the Quran does not recognize the attribute of Jesus as the Son of God or God himself, it respects Jesus as a prophet and messenger of God sent to children of Israel. Some Muslim thinkers such as Mohamed Talbi have viewed the most extreme Quranic presentations of the dogmas of the Trinity and divinity of Jesus ( 5:19 , 5:75 , 5:119 ) as non-Christian formulas that were rejected by

8100-728: The eve of the conquests: Northern and Central (Al-Jallad 2009). The modern dialects emerged from a new contact situation produced following the conquests. Instead of the emergence of a single or multiple koines, the dialects contain several sedimentary layers of borrowed and areal features, which they absorbed at different points in their linguistic histories. According to Veersteegh and Bickerton, colloquial Arabic dialects arose from pidginized Arabic formed from contact between Arabs and conquered peoples. Pidginization and subsequent creolization among Arabs and arabized peoples could explain relative morphological and phonological simplicity of vernacular Arabic compared to Classical and MSA. In around

8208-607: The fact that they participate in the innovations common to all forms of Arabic. The earliest attestation of continuous Arabic text in an ancestor of the modern Arabic script are three lines of poetry by a man named Garm(')allāhe found in En Avdat, Israel , and dated to around 125 CE. This is followed by the Namara inscription , an epitaph of the Lakhmid king Imru' al-Qays bar 'Amro, dating to 328 CE, found at Namaraa, Syria. From

8316-438: The far southeast, and Bourkou-Ennedi-Tibesti Region, Chad in the south. Domestically, it borders the following districts, namely, Murzuq in the west, Jufra in the northwest and Al Wahat in the north. Kufra is a part of Cyrenacian geographical subdivision, the largest region in Libya and which is mostly semi-arid in nature. The region receives average annual rainfall of 5 in (130 mm). There are no perennial rivers in

8424-510: The fourth most useful language for business, after English, Mandarin Chinese , and French. Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet , an abjad script that is written from right to left . Arabic is usually classified as a Central Semitic language . Linguists still differ as to the best classification of Semitic language sub-groups. The Semitic languages changed between Proto-Semitic and

8532-597: The inclusion of new words into their published standard dictionaries. They also publish old and historical Arabic manuscripts. In 1997, a bureau of Arabization standardization was added to the Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization of the Arab League . These academies and organizations have worked toward the Arabization of the sciences, creating terms in Arabic to describe new concepts, toward

8640-613: The language. Software and books with tapes are an important part of Arabic learning, as many of Arabic learners may live in places where there are no academic or Arabic language school classes available. Radio series of Arabic language classes are also provided from some radio stations. A number of websites on the Internet provide online classes for all levels as a means of distance education; most teach Modern Standard Arabic, but some teach regional varieties from numerous countries. The tradition of Arabic lexicography extended for about

8748-408: The largest independent Islamic organization in the world, issued a proclamation urging Muslims to refrain from using the word kafir to refer to non-Muslims, as the term is both offensive and perceived to be "theologically violent". According to Islamic sources, none of forefathers of Muhammad were kafirs . According to Ibn Hajar, the Quran clearly declares that Ahl al-Fatrah were among

8856-632: The late 19th century, the word was in use in English-language newspapers and books. One of the Union-Castle Line ships operating off the South African coast was named SS Kafir . In the early 20th century, in his book The Essential Kafir , Dudley Kidd writes that the word kafir had come to be used for all dark-skinned South African tribes. Thus, in many parts of South Africa, kafir became synonymous with

8964-604: The late 6th century AD, a relatively uniform intertribal "poetic koine" distinct from the spoken vernaculars developed based on the Bedouin dialects of Najd , probably in connection with the court of al-Ḥīra . During the first Islamic century, the majority of Arabic poets and Arabic-writing persons spoke Arabic as their mother tongue. Their texts, although mainly preserved in far later manuscripts, contain traces of non-standardized Classical Arabic elements in morphology and syntax. Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali ( c.  603 –689)

9072-420: The latter is taught in formal education settings. However, there have been studies reporting some degree of comprehension of stories told in the standard variety among preschool-aged children. The relation between Modern Standard Arabic and these dialects is sometimes compared to that of Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin vernaculars (which became Romance languages ) in medieval and early modern Europe. MSA

9180-417: The laws of property, contract, and obligation according to some scholars, whereas others state religious minorities subjected to the status of dhimmis (such as Hindus , Christians , Jews , Samaritans , Gnostics , Mandeans , and Zoroastrians ) were inferior to the status of Muslims in Islamic states. Jews and Christians were required to pay the jizya and kharaj taxes, while others, depending on

9288-883: The many national or regional varieties which constitute the everyday spoken language. Colloquial Arabic has many regional variants; geographically distant varieties usually differ enough to be mutually unintelligible , and some linguists consider them distinct languages. However, research indicates a high degree of mutual intelligibility between closely related Arabic variants for native speakers listening to words, sentences, and texts; and between more distantly related dialects in interactional situations. The varieties are typically unwritten. They are often used in informal spoken media, such as soap operas and talk shows , as well as occasionally in certain forms of written media such as poetry and printed advertising. Hassaniya Arabic , Maltese , and Cypriot Arabic are only varieties of modern Arabic to have acquired official recognition. Hassaniya

9396-408: The mass of kafirun " are the murtad , or apostate ex-Muslims, who are considered renegades and traitors. Their traditional punishment is death, even, according to some scholars, if they recant their abandonment of Islam. Dhimmī are non-Muslims living under the protection of an Islamic state . Dhimmī are exempt from certain duties assigned specifically to Muslims if they paid

9504-782: The need for a lexical injection in Arabic, to suit concepts of the industrial and post-industrial age (such as sayyārah سَيَّارَة 'automobile' or bākhirah باخِرة 'steamship'). In response, a number of Arabic academies modeled after the Académie française were established with the aim of developing standardized additions to the Arabic lexicon to suit these transformations, first in Damascus (1919), then in Cairo (1932), Baghdad (1948), Rabat (1960), Amman (1977), Khartum  [ ar ] (1993), and Tunis (1993). They review language development, monitor new words and approve

9612-511: The newly created Al Wahat District . Besides the main Oasis group of the Kufra basin, four more oases belong to the region, which lie northwest of Kufra basin are Rebiana , Buzema , Wadi Zighen and Tazirbu . The oasis-valleys of Jabal Arkanu and Jebel Uweinat lie southeast of the basin. Libya became independent in 1951 from the colonial empire and generally known for its oil rich resources. As

9720-711: The non-Muslims. Relations between Jews and Muslims in the Arab world and use of the word kafir were equally as complex, and over the last century, issues regarding kafir have arisen over the conflict in Israel and Palestine . Calling the Jews of Israel, "the usurping kafir ", Yasser Arafat turned on the Muslim resistance and "allegedly set a precedent for preventing Muslims from mobilizing against 'aggressor disbelievers' in other Muslim lands, and enabled 'the cowardly, alien kafir ' to achieve new levels of intervention in Muslim affairs." In 2019, Nahdlatul Ulama ,

9828-424: The one whose sound is heard but whose person remains unseen. Now the term al-hatif is used for a telephone. Therefore, the process of tawleed can express the needs of modern civilization in a manner that would appear to be originally Arabic. In the case of Arabic, educated Arabs of any nationality can be assumed to speak both their school-taught Standard Arabic as well as their native dialects, which depending on

9936-549: The overhaul of Arabic grammar first proposed by Al-Jahiz 200 years prior. The Maghrebi lexicographer Ibn Manzur compiled Lisān al-ʿArab ( لسان العرب , "Tongue of Arabs"), a major reference dictionary of Arabic, in 1290. Charles Ferguson 's koine theory claims that the modern Arabic dialects collectively descend from a single military koine that sprang up during the Islamic conquests; this view has been challenged in recent times. Ahmad al-Jallad proposes that there were at least two considerably distinct types of Arabic on

10044-440: The poll tax ( jizya ) but were otherwise equal under the laws of property, contract, and obligation according to some scholars, whereas others state that religious minorities subjected to the status of Dhimmī (such as Jews , Samaritans , Gnostics , Mandeans , and Zoroastrians ) were inferior to the status of Muslims in Islamic states. Jews and Christians were required to pay the jizyah while pagans, depending on

10152-515: The power of intercession; reverence given in any way to any created thing, even to the tomb of the Prophet; such superstitious customs as belief in omens and in auspicious and inauspicious days; and swearing by the names of the Prophet, ʿAlī, the Shīʿī imams, or the saints. Thus the Wahhābīs acted even to destroy the cemetery where many of the Prophet's most notable companions were buried, on the grounds that it

10260-410: The region may be mutually unintelligible. Some of these dialects can be considered to constitute separate languages which may have "sub-dialects" of their own. When educated Arabs of different dialects engage in conversation (for example, a Moroccan speaking with a Lebanese), many speakers code-switch back and forth between the dialectal and standard varieties of the language, sometimes even within

10368-425: The region, although it is abundant with groundwater aquifers. The terrain of all three regions of the county is mostly a flat undulating plain and occasional plateau, with an average elevation of around 423 m (1,388 ft). Around 91 per cent of the land is covered by desert, with only 8.8 per cent agricultural land (with only 1% arable lands) and 0.1 per cent of forests. It is desert climate in all other parts of

10476-598: The region. Dust storms lasting four to eight days are fairly common during the spring. Per 2006 census, there were totally 13,313 economically active people in the district. There were 6,295 government employees, 2,178 employers, 6,454 first level workers, and 1 second level worker. There were 85 workers in state administration, 85 in agriculture, animal husbandry and forestry, 2,445 in agriculture and hunting, 2,029 in education, 1,558 in private enterprises, 584 in health and social work, 85 in production, 2,214 in technical work, and 354 service workers. The total enrollment in schools

10584-458: The same sentence. The issue of whether Arabic is one language or many languages is politically charged, in the same way it is for the varieties of Chinese , Hindi and Urdu , Serbian and Croatian , Scots and English, etc. In contrast to speakers of Hindi and Urdu who claim they cannot understand each other even when they can, speakers of the varieties of Arabic will claim they can all understand each other even when they cannot. While there

10692-458: The sole example of Medieval linguist Abu Hayyan al-Gharnati – who, while a scholar of the Arabic language, was not ethnically Arab – Medieval scholars of the Arabic language made no efforts at studying comparative linguistics, considering all other languages inferior. In modern times, the educated upper classes in the Arab world have taken a nearly opposite view. Yasir Suleiman wrote in 2011 that "studying and knowing English or French in most of

10800-563: The standardization of these new terms throughout the Arabic-speaking world, and toward the development of Arabic as a world language . This gave rise to what Western scholars call Modern Standard Arabic. From the 1950s, Arabization became a postcolonial nationalist policy in countries such as Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Sudan. Arabic usually refers to Standard Arabic, which Western linguists divide into Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic. It could also refer to any of

10908-501: The towns where the inscriptions were discovered (Dadanitic, Taymanitic, Hismaic, Safaitic). However, most arguments for a single ANA language or language family were based on the shape of the definite article, a prefixed h-. It has been argued that the h- is an archaism and not a shared innovation, and thus unsuitable for language classification, rendering the hypothesis of an ANA language family untenable. Safaitic and Hismaic, previously considered ANA, should be considered Old Arabic due to

11016-412: The truth. Arabic poets personify the darkness of night as kāfir , perhaps as a survival of pre-Islamic Arabian religious or mythological usage . The noun for 'disbelief', 'blasphemy', 'impiety' rather than the person who disbelieves, is kufr . The distinction between those who believe in Islam and those who do not is an essential one in the Quran . Kafir , and its plural kuffaar ,

11124-527: The view that the parents of Muhammad are saved and inhabitants of Heaven . Shia Muslim scholars likewise consider Muhammad's parents to be in Paradise. In contrast, the Salafi website IslamQA.info , founded by the Saudi Arabian Salafi scholar Muhammad Al-Munajjid , argues that Islamic tradition teaches that Muhammad's parents were kuffār ('disbelievers') who are in Hell. By

11232-809: The word "native". Currently in South Africa , however, the word kaffir is regarded as a racial slur, applied pejoratively or offensively to blacks. The song "Kafir" by the American technical death metal band Nile on its sixth album Those Whom the Gods Detest uses the violent attitudes that Muslim extremists have towards kafirs as subject matter. Arabic Arabic (endonym: اَلْعَرَبِيَّةُ , romanized :  al-ʿarabiyyah , pronounced [al ʕaraˈbijːa] , or عَرَبِيّ , ʿarabīy , pronounced [ˈʕarabiː] or [ʕaraˈbij] )

11340-451: The world have classes that teach Arabic as part of their foreign languages , Middle Eastern studies , and religious studies courses. Arabic language schools exist to assist students to learn Arabic outside the academic world. There are many Arabic language schools in the Arab world and other Muslim countries. Because the Quran is written in Arabic and all Islamic terms are in Arabic, millions of Muslims (both Arab and non-Arab) study

11448-401: Was 17,364 and the number of people above secondary stage and less than graduation was 875. As per the report from World Health Organization (WHO), there was one communicable disease centre, one dental clinic, one general clinic, three out-patient clinics, five pharmacies, 16 PHC centres, one rural clinic, and no specialized clinics. During 2007, the northern part of Kufra District was moved to

11556-510: Was a center of idolatry. While ibn Abd al-Wahhab and the Wahhābīs were "the best-known premodern" revivalist and "sectarian movement" of that era, other revivalists included Shah Ismail Dehlvi and Ahmed Raza Khan Barelvi , leaders of the Mujāhidīn movement on the North-West frontier of India in the early 19th century. Whether a Muslim could commit a sin great enough to become a kafir

11664-483: Was disputed by jurists in the early centuries of Islam. The most tolerant view (that of the Murji'ah ) was that even those who had committed a major sin ( kabira ) were still believers and "their fate was left to God". The most strict view (that of Kharidji Ibadis, descended from the Kharijites ) was that every Muslim who dies having not repented of their sins was considered a kafir . In between these two positions,

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