Thursday, December 15, 2016

A Saudi newspaper (Al-Hayat) changes the name of Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm for Wahhabi religious reasons

I am not making this up.  Al-Hayat newspaper (the mouthpiece of Prince Khalid bin Sultan), changes the name of Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm into Jalal Ad-Din.  Do you know why? I will tell you: a writer at Al-Hayat once explained to me: there is a Wahhabi expert at the paper whose job is to go over every word of the paper before its release to make sure that no word violate the Wahhabi doctrine. Thus, the title of Kahlil Gibran's book, the Prophet, is either not printed or changed.  They don't refer to the Bible as "the Holy Book", for example. So Jalal (majesty) is one of the names of God in Islam. So they can't, for Wahhabi reasons, print it and not associate it with God. So they changed the name of Sadiq Jalala Al-Azm into Jalal Ad-Din (which translates into the Majesty of Religion).