For me as a one time resident of Auburn who worked in Silverwater for a couple of years (no, not for the penitentiary, nor as an inmate!) where Islam features so much and the language of the noble Koran is the second most popular in OZ’s only real metropolis, all this expounding on the link between power, the language of Shakespeare and Arabic, which Baha’u’llah (pr: approx BaHoLa) depicts as “the vastest and richest of all languages” – really resonates.

IMO it’s not so much a feeling or a culture, or a way of thinking in a particular language or in a combo of idioms, or the euphony of this tongue over the other that solves age old questions aired in this splendid podcast but rather that “attitude is everything” as Yanks love to say, or more to the point methinks – the spiritual dimension of the language problem, ever since Babel, so to speak, is at the heart of everything. “Elementary my dear witless”, I hear as a rejoinder. Yes and no, erudite ones, but what is spirituality, mon ami, and where is your spirit located? “Spirituality is love in action.” Like love, sooner or later, everyone knows what spirituality is, especially when one finds oneself in love’s presence – but who can adequately define “either numinous matter” if you’ll pardon my juvenile play on words and apparent non sequitur? On ANZAC Day of all days and dates (five years prior to the eventual blood-soaked landings in the Dardanelles) and of all places in D. C. (the power capital of the world today), Sir Abdul Baha, K.B.E. (one among few Asians to be knighted by the British empire) did state:

“Today the greatest need of the world of humanity is discontinuance of the existing misunderstandings among nations. This can be accomplished through the unity of language. Unless the unity of language is realized, the ‘Most Great Peace’ and the oneness of the human world cannot be effectively organized and established; because THE FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE IS TO PORTRAY THE MYSTERIES AND SECRETS OF HUMAN HEARTS. The heart is like a box and language is the key. We can open the box only by using the key, and observe the gems it contains. Therefore the question of an auxiliary international language has the utmost importance.”