Top 215 Arabic Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

It's a funny thing: my name in Arabic means hope, so I suppose I have to live by that principle. Hope is desire, feeling, and investing in a projection of something that doesn't yet exist. At its best, you witness its alchemy in your life, turning something that was once in the mind into reality. At its worst, it's delusion.

Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih, is an eloquent and restrained portrait of one man's exile. It is a rare narrative in that it charts a life divided between England and Sudan. Without a doubt it is one of the finest Arabic novels of the 20th century, and Denys Johnson-Davies' translationdoes the original justice.

I write in Arabic and prefer writing my stories by hand. I need a cup of tea or coffee when I write. When I was in Syria, I was addicted to tea, but now I'm addicted to Starbucks.

That's something the head scarf, in a symbolic way, is meant to do in Arabic culture: it defines your relationship to your husband and the men of your family differently than your relationship to the average guy on the street you've never met.

Iran is not in any sort of routine groupings. It's not an Arab country. It's not part of the Indian subcontinent. So it's in a neighborhood where it has some unique characteristics. We are a country which embraced Islam, learned Arabic, but didn't change its language or its culture... That's what keeps us unique.

I trained to become a professional Koran singer, from the age of 14 until I was 18. This involved learning Arabic harmony, breathing techniques, all of the things that this entails. And, of course, it involved studying the Koran.

It is my great good luck the words I use are English words, which means I live in a very old nation of open borders; a rich, deep, multi-layered, promiscuous universe, infused with Latin, German, French, Greek, Arabic and countless other tongues.

I learned French in Tunis, along with Arabic. I also learned French history. I knew the entire history of the kings of France. And I was fascinated by Versailles.

I began thinking there should be an American phrase book, 'cause I've got an Italian phrase book, and an Arabic one... now a British one. I think it'd be pretty good to have an American phrase book.

In addition to its use in arithmetic and science, the Hindu-Arabic number system is the only genuinely universal language on Earth, apart perhaps for the Windows operating system, which has achieved the near universal adoption of a conceptually and technologically poor product by the sheer force of market dominance.

If you watch a Chinese movie with subtitles, it's just like watching an Arabic movie with Chinese subtitles. That explains why you can't take Chinese language movies and expect them to go abroad.

A lot of Arabic composers such as Mohammed Abdel Wahab mixed sounds and instruments from all over the world. It's important to be able to propose new ways and new sounds without being stigmatised, censored or put aside.

I found poetry at 12 and 13 and, lo and behold, learned that my attorney father had a background in poetry - as he wore dashikis and Afros in the '70s and named his kids Arabic names. He was a poet and a lot like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron and all of these folks. He definitely was an artist.

The international media concentrates on the famous, the big names. Al Jazeera goes to the margins, investigates stories that are still developing and in the future become very big. Why did the Arabic world love Al Jazeera? Everybody felt he was represented in the newsroom and on the screen. That kind of belonging is ours.

I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music - Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering 'The Lost Chord' on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.

I read nasheeds (Islamic songs) in English, in Arabic. I read nasheeds even in Bangla language. Now I don't just travel to meet people from my own country but people from the entire ummah.

Andrew Warren was a rarity in the CIA's Clandestine Service - African-American, fluent in Arabic, and relatively young for an agent who'd already spent nearly a decade chasing terrorists in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq and Algeria, so deep undercover that few of his friends or family knew the nature of his work.

In the Middle East, bread is so essential to everyday life that word for it in Egyptian Arabic is aish, which means life. It's always been the staple grain. But the predicament is that the Fertile Crescent, where wheat cultivation began, has now become the part of the world most dependent on imported wheat.

"eL Seed" was inspired by the French play Le Cid by Pierre Corneille. It was seeing "Le Cid" coming from the Arabic name "el sayed," which means "the master, the man." So I called myself like that because I was 16; I said, "Yes, I'm the man." That's how it started.

Mustafa Ali is who I wanted to see when I was growing up. I'm not wearing anything on my head; I'm not saying anything in Arabic. I'm just going to come out as Mustafa Ali.

The presence of industrial quantities of Byzantine pottery dating from the sixth century AD on the headland at Tintagel, Chinese silk in the tombs around Mecca and 'Arabic' numerals in the 13th-century beams of Salisbury Cathedral tell us we have been interdependent not for decades but across millennia.

Some Englishmen, of whom Kitchener was chief, believed that a rebellion of Arabs against Turks would enable England, while fighting Germany, simultaneously to defeat Turkey. Their knowledge of the nature and power and country of the Arabic-speaking peoples made them think that the issue of such a rebellion would be happy: and indicated its character and method. So they allowed it to begin.

If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.

I've seen it personally that people have a natural sensibility to Arabic script. I don't know it if it's because of the shape, I don't know what it is in this script that makes it so universal. But even if you don't understand it, you still have this feeling; you can feel the piece of art in front of you.

Sharia is derived from Arabic, and it means an "oasis." In the desert, man needs the oasis to survive. Sharia is not like any other religion or law, because Sharia is an entire system of life.

Every mujahadeen who comes in from outside the country finds an environment where Arabic is spoken. So in that sense, it's a tremendous come-on for the young in Islam. But I think much more important is, it just validates so much of what the Muslim world is predisposed to believe.

The poor ignorant fellah [Arabic for peasant] does not worry about politics, but when he is told repeatedly by people in whom he has confidence that his livelihood is in danger of being taken away from him by us, he becomes our mortal enemy. . . The Arab is primitive and believes what he is told.

All religions, they play football - even nowadays all girls and women have the right to play football in cultures like the Arabic countries in the Muslim they play football.

I talked to Beyonce and she wants to learn how to speak Arabic and she wants to jump out of an airplane. I don't want to do that. I just don't want to wash my hair every day.

The fundamental idea which defines a human being as a Muslim is the declaration of faith: that there is a creator, whom we call God - or Allah, in Arabic - and that the creator is one and single. And we declare this faith by the declaration of faith, where we... bear witness that there is no God but God.

My show in Egypt was called, 'The Show,' or, 'Al Bernameg' in Arabic. Basically, it was a political satire show. It started on Internet by three, four-minute episodes, and then it evolved into a live show in a theater, which was something that was unprecedented in the Arab world.

There is an old Arabic proverb, 'When the king puts the poet on his payroll, he cuts off the tongue of the poet', so throughout the ages, people in power have liked to control music, they used to throw songwriters in jail throughout history, and were assassinated.

Allah's the Arabic term for God. Stand up for God, fight for God, work for God and do the right thing, and go the right way, things will end up in your corner.

In fact, for a period stretching over seven hundred years, the international language of science was Arabic. For this was the language of the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam, and thus the official language of the vast Islamic Empire that, by the early eighth century CE, stretched from India to Spain.

Not all my work features black actors. I mean, it's funny: someone was reading back to me all the languages that have appeared in my films, whether they were shorts or features. They span Arabic, French, Mandarin, Cantonese - all kinds of languages. I think it's really cool.

One of the interpreters hired by CBS for the Dan Rather/Saddam Hussein interview adopted a phony Arabic accent. You know, maybe CBS should have hired somebody with a fake Dan Rather accent to ask tougher questions.

We were the outliers: my mother was the only Western woman (khawagayya, in Egyptian Arabic) to have married into the family, and during my childhood, we were the only members living outside of Egypt. So between my father's prestige as the eldest son and my own exotic pedigree, I basked in the spotlight.

I grew up in Jerusalem and went to school here. I studied at the Hebrew University - mostly Islam and Arabic: Arab literature, Arab poetry and culture, because I felt like we are living in this region, in the Middle East, and we are not alone: There are nations here whose culture is Arab.

I might do something in Arabic. I might do something in Hebrew.

I grew up in a kibbutz in the Galilee, but we were surrounded by Arabic villages, so I heard all these sounds and all this music. My father was very close friends with one of the Bedouin tribes, so I would always go there, to weddings, and I was always very fascinated by that music.

If I were to pray in Arabic, I'd pray to Allah. If I were to pray in English, I'd pray to God.

The U.S. government is gradually homing in on the more important chat forums and websites. The problem is, by now, many of these sites have gone underground, in some cases, changing their names and domains, adding logins and passwords, and locking out anyone who doesn't speak Arabic. Government bureaucracies are simply not agile or adept enough to keep up with this constantly evolving challenge.

Growing up, I came to love Egypt and respect Islam, but I never thought to go beyond the surface. Back in Canada, many of my father's Egyptian friends questioned his decision not to raise his only child more strictly in the faith. I was not taught salat, the Muslim ritual of prayer, nor did I study Arabic.

Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Russian, combined.

I have a lot of nice Italian winter clothes that make me look like a sophisticated Lebanese professor, so my friend Robert and I go around pretending to be experts in Arabic politics. It doesn't work in the summer though. I don't have the right clothes.

The ward designs were co-created by myself and Lauren K. Cannon. She read how they were described in 'The Warded Man,' and we had long discussions about what sources to draw from for the symbols, drawing inspiration from Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and Sanskrit.

I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

I grew up surrounded by all types of cultures - French, Indian, Arabic - a melting pot of cultures, sounds, foods, people, and religions. It opened my eyes early, and I'm grateful for that. It's not about success in one area; it's about exploring the world musically and spending time in those places whenever you can.

I have a cultural map in my head, where I find similarities between different cultures. For example, domestic Japanese pop music sounds like Arabic music to me - the vocal intonations and vibrato - and, in my mind, Bali is next to New York. Maybe everyone has these geographies in their head. This is the way I've been working.

One is hard pressed to think of universal customs that man has successfully established on earth. There is one, however, of which he can boast the universal adoption of the Hindu-Arabic numerals to record numbers. In this we perhaps have man's unique worldwide victory of an idea.

In 1993, my first documentary was about the civil war in Algeria. That was in French and in Arabic. Another short film I did was silent. What I'm trying to say is that, yes, I'm Italian, and yes, I make films with Italian money, but personally, I've always been invested in the broader world of film-making.

The word Habib in Arabic means both lover and beloved. At the heart of it is that the Prophet loves God, God loves him. But God designated him to be also the founder of a new world order of a civilization of a society.

All the intelligence services of America and Europe know full well that the disastrous attack ( of 9/11 ) has been planned and realized from the Mossad.. with the aid of the Zionist world in order to put under accusation the Arabic countries and in order to induce the Western Powers to take part in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Cardiff, I've heard a number of accent mixes that weren't previously heard before such as Cardiff-Arabic and Cardiff-Hindi. This pattern is repeating itself in many urban communities across the U.K.; people are especially keen to develop a strong sense of local identity.

Growing up in the Libya of the 1970s, I remember the prevalence of local bands who were as much influenced by Arabic musical traditions as by the Rolling Stones or the Beatles. But the project of 'Arabisation' soon got to them, too, and western musical instruments were declared forbidden as 'instruments of imperialism.'

It was an identity crisis. I was born and raised in France, but I never really felt French, so I needed to find something that I was more connected to. I used to go back to Tunisia every summer, but I was more into the language, my Arabic roots.

Not now, for the last three thousand years, Hebrew has been penetrated and fertilized by ancient Semitic languages - by Aramaic, by Greek, by Latin, by Arabic, by Yiddish, by Latino, by German, by Russian, by English, I could go on and on. It's very much like English.

George Bush, within a week of this [the 9/11 attacks], in a speech, attempting to distinguish US from the Muslim fundamentalists, said Our God is the God who named the stars. The problem is: two-thirds of all stars that have names, have Arabic names. I don't think he knew this. That would confound the point that he was making.

The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation.

Certain readers will read my book not because they are interested in Iraq, but because they read crime fiction. I did want to get beyond just speaking to other Middle East scholars, so I'm happy about that. But this was, nonetheless, a novel I wish I got to read in Arabic and translate.