Perhaps because of the low sugar before breakfast time, or the pinch of hunger in the intestines, I had an overwhelming desire to empty some food, which was spinning and buzzing in my head. My manifestations during the hours of hunger are many and varied, some of them digging into the past of my medical career after I retired, and some of them related to the disturbing daily news of the world, and this time it was linguistically Sibawayh. They are seizures that come back to me like seizures of epilepsy, including what is the derivation of names for phenomena and things and the roots of names since the first Arab uttered and became a language and tongue.
I present to you here two manifestations of the word “desert” and the word “Arabs”. In some center of the left cerebral cortex in my head, the question buzzed: Isn’t the word desert derived from the verb “saha” and the verb “saw”? I imagined one morning thousands of years ago when the first Bedouin woke up in his vast desert and had never before had a linguistic dictionary of phenomena and things in his brain. He turned around repeatedly in the four directions around him, and he saw it all as far as the eye could see, sand, mountains and hills. He sighed in relief when the Creator inspired him with the first names of the place before time, and because he first woke up and then saw, he told himself to call this place a desert. He taught her to his owner, and then later taught her backwards from the boys and girls. After a few years, this first Bedouin had the same intellectual maturity that happened to the boy Hayy bin Yaqzan in the philosophy of Ibn Tufayl. Contemplation of the spheres, the lights, inanimate objects, animals, beginnings and endings led him to the inevitability of the connection of these things and phenomena with a creator who created them from nothing.
With the passage of time and the act of reproduction, scattered desert communities were formed, fighting and coexisting, bartering and exchanging benefits, and then realizing what creatures necessarily owe to the Creator. So the realization was made that there is a “Lord” and every speaking of His creatures is a servant of a Lord. From the succession of eras and times and the exchange of tongues, the word Abd Rabb was transformed into Arabic.
Thus, then, it occurred to me that the name Arabs is derived from the servant of God, and the name of the desert is derived from the Saha and Ra’a. Several centuries later, the Lord sent down the hearts of the Arabs to call their Creator “God.” Then, centuries later, the Hebrews called him “Eyl” or “Elohim.” They took the name of the Children of Israel to distinguish themselves from the Arabs, the servants of the Lord. With the Maghrib call to prayer, the utterance ceased, and I rose to the breakfast table.
Jasser Abdullah Al-Harbish