Favours of the Gracious God — Page 100
100 Arab people. He thinks that when the Arabs refer to non-Arabic speaking peoples as ‘ajam i , this word has been coined by way of grudge and prejudice with the purpose of demeaning other nations. This erroneous belief is only due to his Christian prejudice against investigating whether the expressions ‘arab and ‘ajam are the invention of man or whether they originate from God, although he himself has affirmed in his book that it is not possible for humans to invent the root words of a language. I shall now clarify for him, and for those who share his ideas, that these are two words in the Arabic language which exist as antonyms: the first is ج عر� [‘ arab ] which means the one who is eloquent and possesses great expression, and the other is ‘ajam which is used in the opposite sense and means ineloquent and inarticulate 1. If in Max Müller’s view these two words are not ancient and the followers of Islam have invented them out of malice, then he ought to provide the proof of those words which, in his opinion, were the original words. It is not possible that a people may not be known by any name from ancient times, and when you concede such names to be ancient then you must concede that they are not human invention, instead, 1 ‘ Ajam is the term used for foreigners who do not speak Arabic. [Publisher]