Talk:كافر
Latest comment: 3 years ago by 188.245.26.65 in topic Use cases
Use cases[edit]
It would be interesting to see if the word has been used by Christians and Jews to refer to Muslims. If so, that could be a second (rarer) sense. However, this is not currently a normal sense of the word. Rather, kafir is part of an Islamic terminology and means "non-Muslim" (in a derogatory way). Kolmiel (talk) 00:26, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
- There simply too much political and regional bias in that message.
- 1. First and foremost, this word is Arabic. Hence, its use cases must only be observed among Arabic speakers. Languages that have loaned this word assign their own meaning and pronunciation. So, yes, "Kafir", an English word loaned from Arabic, could mean anything.
- 2. Second, Arabic speakers don't use this word to refer to Muslims, Christians, or Jews, regardless of their religion. All of those have their own Arabic words. (Do you realize that "Muslim" itself is a loanword?)
- 3. Third, Muslims (at least, the Arabic-speaking ones) don't uniformly use this word for all non-Muslims, not even as an insult. A مشرك and a ملحد are also non-Muslims, non-Christians, and non-Jewish. And مشرك is a worse insult. All things considered, however, there are metonymical reasons for using this word to refer to the people of one religion who exercise vitriolic hostility towards the people of another monotheist people. After all, a كافر isn't just an atheist or non-believer, but a denier.
- 188.245.26.65 09:52, 20 October 2020 (UTC)