Qais

A LINGUIST AT SORAN UNIVERSITY PUBLISHES A BOOK ENTITLED LANGUAGE AND RELIGION

 

Perhaps trying to imagine the existence  or worshiping anything outside language might not make sense or will be difficult to take into consideration. If we take a look at most of the religions on the earth, whether heavenly or unheavenly religions, we will see that they all have manifestations, or their own scriptures.

This means that they have a specific language. Language for them is not only a means for conveying a message and showing the blessings of their religion, but it eventually becomes one of most sacred thing for them. In this regard, when we talk about the various religions and their content, any statement and speech about them will eventually be interpreted as the analysis or sacred meanings of their scripture. Or even the  glory and value  of some of them is connected to the reality that they can’t be easily understood by everybody. Therefore, conducting  research on language of religion and comprehending it, has been an important subject throughout history.

In his latest work, Prof. Dr. Qais Kakil, a Kurdish language lecturer and linguistics specialist in the faculty of Arts, published a book entitled "Language and Religion". In a statement to the university media, Dr. Qais highlighted his book and the reason for investigating this topic in Kurdish community and said "Generally,  Kurdish people are muslims, they use Arabic language everyday for worshiping, supplications and ceremonies and they have a religious understanding of the language. In fact,   they don't consider the religious words and expressions as its linguistic fact, but they consider them as sacred and magical. However, the words and expressions like any other language phenomenon, they can be investigated,   their origin and derivation can be found, the concepts can be discussed and interpreted linguistically away from religion emotion, passion and holiness". As he mentioned, this book is written with this purpose.

The Kurdish language professor believes that most of the derivations and new dealings with religion are done through language analysis and interpretation, that these analysis and interpretations pass from time to time and finally a new understanding, for the way language is viewed, will emerge.

In another part of his statement, by paying attention to the ongoing speeches and writing on religion and the language of religion, he said, "I wanted to present some of the language phenomena in religion from a linguistic perspective".

He further stated that in his book, he doesn’t aim to criticize the principles, beliefs and the understandings of religion. On the contrary, the attention has been given to some aspects of religion language only from a linguistic perspective, so that the sacredness of languages, as some religious scholars describe it, will be illustrated from a different angle. It is worth to mention that in this book, by paying attention to some linguistic schools, some topics related to religion are discussed such as, the relationship between name and the named entity.  In other words, the relationship between dictionary meaning and holiness (Salawat, Bismil, Shahada), greatness of God, the origin and change of words (Jahanam, Adan, Injil, Issa) along with some other topics.