Tower of Babylon
A short essay by Saha on the Tower of Babylon. An excerpt:
I am utterly obsessed with language and I always read references to language metaphorically. In this sense, speaking many different languages, causing confusion and chaos is just as applicable today as it was at the time of the tower. But I understand the problem as being tribalism rather than just a matter of language and translation. So from this, I imagine the “pure language” as being knowledge of Allah, because it is only through such knowledge that barriers of language and ethnicity can be overcome.
But, it is only through Allah’s Mercy that we receive such knowledge, thinking that we can gain it through our own endeavours leads us back to the tower of Babel. Arrogance, which is after all, shirk, leads us far away from pure language.
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