How ironic that 420 falls right before Eid al-Fitr this year 🚬🌿

Ḥashīsh (“herb,” the proper Arabic term is qinnab, “hemp”) was known to ancient Mesopotamians, Egyptians, and pre-Islamic Arabs… 1/8 …who originally called it banj, although this is a blanket term for several kinds of “henbane.” Taqī al-Dīn al-Badrī’s Rāḥat al-arwāḥ, the fullest premodern “adab” text on ḥashīsh, lists dozens of nicknames for the herb, including… 2/8 twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Today’s Arabic etymology: Why do we call them “tabby cats”?

A tabby cat is any domestic feline with striped, dotted, flecked, or swirled shapes, resulting in a familiar blotched or marbled pattern of fur. To refer to such patterns, the word “tabby”… 1/5 … comes from a kind of cloth, “tabby” weave, i.e. plain weave, in which the warp and weft threads form a simple criss-cross pattern. This weave is used in everything from coarse canvases to gauzy muslins (including taffeta, hence “taffeta weave”)… 2/5

[THREAD] Arabic scholars & students: two new etymological dictionaries (like the OED but for Arabic) are now in production, one in Doha (@dohadictionary) & the other in Sharjah (@ArabiclanginShj). The former is online, the latter is only hard copy...1/6

dohadictionary.org ...at least for now. Over at Al-ʿArabī al-Jadīd, Iraqi linguist Ahmad al-Janabi favors us with a preliminary comparison (in Arabic), admitting bias since he worked on the Doha project (see link below; h/t @borfali for posting). Here's the upshot: ... 2/6

www-alaraby-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.alarab…

Comparing things or people to Arabic letters is common in poetry. E.g. the alif-lām combination لا , which is often used as a symbol of union. Why is that the case? A quick🧵on this element of script/calligraphy as metaphor ... 1/6 ... e.g. here is a nice line quoted anonymously by ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, Asrār al-balāgha, ed. Ritter, p. 184:

إنّي رأيتُك في نومي تُعانقني
كما تُعانق لامُ الكاتب الألِفا

In my slumber, I saw you embrace me
like the scribe’s lām embraces the alif

2/6

After playing chutes and ladders with his kids, a colleague did some searching and discovered that it is has very old roots! Originally used by Hindu and Buddhist mystics, during the Mughal dynasty it apparently moved into Arabic as شترنج العارفين (gnostic's chess)...1/2 The words on the board are "states" of being (aḥwāl) in mystical thought. Some are positive, e.g. ṣabr, "patience," and lead closer to God, while others are negative, e.g. nifāq, "hypocrisy," and lead away from Him, with the final goal being divine "union" (wiṣāl). 2/2