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Mushtaq Bilal, PhD

May 26, 2022 • 12 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X

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A (Non-Boring) Twitter History of the Word, Namāz ( نماز#, #नमाज़)

The word “namāz” in #Urdu/#Hindi is used for the five daily prayers that every #Muslim is supposed to offer.

The word for the five daily prayers in #Arabic , however, is salat, صَلاة

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Of Persian import, namāz has a long and extremely complex history, which can be traced back to the pre-Islamic past.

The origin of namāz can be traced back to an ancient proto-Indo-European root, nam (to bow, to bend).

2/12

The verb nam (to bow) and the noun namah-/namas- (prostration, reverence) can be found in both #Sanskrit and Avestan, the Zoroastrian #Scripture .

avesta.org

3/12

The greeting “namaste” in contemporary Hindi is derived from the Sanskrit expression, namas-te (literally, reverence to you).

4/12

The word namah started changing to namāz in Pahlavi (or Middle Persian), the language of the Sasanian empire (224–651).

By the third century CE, the word had changed first to namach and then to namāz and had come to mean “prayer.”

5/12

Mani (216-274 CE), the founder of the Manichean religion, used the word, namāz, in this sense in his scripture, Šābuhragān.

6/12

iranicaonline.org/articles/sabuh…

After the Arab conquest of Iran in the 7th century CE, namāz came to be used as a Persian equivalent of the Arabic salat.

7/12

By the eleventh and twelfth centuries Persian poets like Farrukhi Sistani (1000-1040) and Khaqani Shirvani (c. 1120 – c. 1199) were using expressions like panj namāz (five prayers) in their poems.

8/12

Namāz and salat came to be used interchangeably in the Persian translations and exegesis of the Qur’an.

Check out Travis Zadeh's wonderful book, "The Vernacular Qur'an" if you're interested.

9/12

global.oup.com/academic/produ…

By the time Muhammad Quli Qutub Shah (1565-1612), the fifth king of the Qutub Shahi dynasty in India used namāz in his poems in a language that would later become Urdu, the usage of the word in the sense of five daily prayers was firmly established.

10/12

In contemporary Persian, namāz is also used in a generic sense of worship in religions like Christianity and Judaism.

But in Urdu it specifically means the five daily prayers of (South Asian) Muslims.

11/12

This thread was brought to you with the help of Daniel Sheffield who is a professor of medieval and early modern Persian-speaking world at Princeton.

Thanks for reading!

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More from @MushtaqBilalPhD

Mushtaq Bilal, PhD

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Dec 11

ChatGPT still generates fake references to papers that don't even exist.

And Google just launched Gemini Deep Research.

It generates well-researched articles with references to published sources.

This will change the way we do literature reviews.

Here's how to use it:

1. Open your Google Gemini.

Click in the top-left corner and select "1.5 Pro with Deep Research."

2. Type in your question in the search bar.

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Dr. Ally Louks's PhD thesis is set to be one of the most influential theses of 21st century. Puts forward an original argument with remarkable clarity.

Already has 85M+ views on X/Twitter.

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I have a PhD in literary studies, and in this thread, we'll do a close reading of her abstract to understand her argument in simple English.

Before we jump in, we need to keep in mind that a PhD thesis is written for a small group of 3-5 scholars.

These scholars serve as a candidate's supervisor and examiners. They are the only audience of a PhD thesis.

If you think you can't understand a PhD thesis, it's because you are not its intended audience.

Let's start with the title:

"Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose."

There are three important here: ethics, politics, and smell.

Politics here is not used in the sense of running the political affairs of a country. Here, politics means things related to power.

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If something challenges these power structures, that's considered ethical.

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Literary scholars look at how things are potrayed in literature. We deal with representations.

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Mushtaq Bilal, PhD

@MushtaqBilalPhD

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Sci-Hub — a "pirate" website with 85M research papers freely available.

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Billion-dollar academic publishers would get mad at you. So, do it at your own risk🤷

1. Go to this link: github[.]com/syt2/zotero-scipdf

Scroll down and click on "latest release xpi file."

This will download an "xpi" file to your computer.

2. Open your Zotero and click on "Tools" and then "Plugins."

In the Plugin Manager, click on the gear-like icon and select "Install Plugin From File."

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☹️Google Scholar is a great tool. But it doesn't show you how papers are connected with each other.

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(And export papers to Zotero, Mendeley, or EndNote.)

1. Go to litmaps[.]com and log in to your account.

Sign up if you don't have one already.

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Choose a name for your litmap.

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Then sign up for a free account.

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Its answers were quite generic as if it didn't know much about Fulbright.

Perhaps, their training dataset seems quite different from US-made LLMs, which is understandable.

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Here's how to use it:

1. Go to undermind[.]ai and sign up for a free account.

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