Osama bin Laden as SF fan
Tim May
tcmay at got.net
Wed Oct 31 11:07:21 PST 2001
On Wednesday, October 31, 2001, at 09:53 AM, Ken Brown wrote:
> Ken McLeod posted the following to rec.arts.sf.fandom
>
>> Forwarded with permission from China Mieville, fantasy writer
>> and student of international relations:
>
>>> ------- Forwarded message follows -------
>
>>> My supervisor, an expert in the Middle East, told me about a
>>> rumour circulating about the name of Bin Laden's network.
>>> The term 'Al-Qaeda' seems to have no political precedent in
>>> Arabic, and has therefore been something of a conundrum to
>>> the experts, until someone pointed out that a very popular
>>> book in the Arab world, Arabs apparently being big readers
>>> of translated SF, is Asimov's _Foundation_, the title of
>>> which is translated as 'Al-Qaeda'.
>
>>> Unlikely as it sounds, this is the only theory anyone can come up
>>> with.
A report on this "strange coincidence" is at
http://www.marsearthconnection.com/attack3a.html#foundation
Color me skeptical, though, as there is nothing particularly odd about
"the foundation" being the name of a group. The U.S. media translation
into "The Base" is just a variant of "The Foundation." One might as well
say that the translation of "The Ford Foundation" into Arabic suggests
Bin Laden is somehow connected with Ford..maybe this is why the
Brimstone tires explode?
(Other etymological swirls: Foundation, founder, fund, base, basement,
grundlagen/ground, fundament (ass, too, as in "bottom")/fundamental,
basis, basic, a base observation, etc.--all are related to the concept
of "lowest level" or "basis" or "bottom"; the Indo-European words
obviously come from a "basis" or "foundation" or "fundamental" (fund,
fountain, etc.) in a mix of Proto-Indo-European roots. Arabic is a
Semitic language, like Hebrew, and so "Qaeda" has no particular obvious
connection to foundation/fundament/base.)
"Foundations of Something" = "Grundlagen der...." = "Groundwork
for ... = "The Basics of ...."
Google shows that Turkish uses the words
Kaida/Kayda
for base/foundation, so the cognates amongst the Semitic languages are
obvious. I checked for Hebrew cognates, but am not yet convinced the
connection is obvious.
(I don't have the American Heritage Dictionary of Semitic Roots, or
whatever it is called, though I do have the AHD of Indo-European roots,
one of my favorite browsing sources.)
The Web has the AHD sources of IE words, but not (yet) the Semitic
sources.
--Tim May
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a
monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also
into you." -- Nietzsche
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