In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Oludamini Oguannaike, Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia.
Tazin and Oludamini talk about how English is used to express concepts that originate from onto-epistemic perspectives that are not historically associated with the English language. They discuss his 2019 article “Islam in English,” which he co-authored with Dr. Mohammed Rustom. They also speak about his book of poetry called The Book of Clouds.
The conversation considers how the distinctive philosophical and metaphysical concepts associated with Islam collide with the use of English as a result of the global dominance of English. Tazin and Oludamini discuss how he has used his research and knowledge of historical religious thought to express these concepts in his English-language poetry.
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References
Ogunnaike, O. (2024). The Book of Clouds. Fons Vitae of Kentucky.
Ogunnaike, O., & Rustom, M. (2019). Islam in English. American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, 36(2), 102-111.
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Transcript
Tazin: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Tazin Abdullah, and I’m a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Oludamani Ogunnaike.
Oludamini is Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia. His research examines the philosophical and artistic dimensions of post-colonial, colonial, and pre-colonial Islamic and indigenous religious traditions of West and North Africa. Oludamini’s recent projects focus on poetry, poetic knowledge, decolonial thought, and praxis.
On this episode, we will do something quite interesting that I have not previously done with a guest. We will talk about Oludamani’s work from two very different genres. We will find out about his article, Islam in English, which he co-authored with Dr. Mohammed Rustom, and then about his recent book of poetry called The Book of Clouds.
Our listeners may wonder, of course, what the connection is. I am going to quote Joshua Fishman, a pioneer in the field of sociolinguistics, who wrote: “I feel strongly that there is more ‘out there’ (even more to the sociology of language) than science can grasp, and I have a personal need for poets, artists, mystics and philosophers too for a deeper understanding of all that puzzles me.” In that spirit, my conversation today with Oludamini will venture into what more is out there to understand about language use in religious contexts.
Oludamini, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today!
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Tazin: To begin with, can you tell us a bit about yourself, your research, and how you came to be interested in linguistic expressions relating to religions, and then, of course, Islam?
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, so I think this, first started…my undergrad degree was actually in cognitive neuroscience. And I worked in a lab that, uh…was the lab that developed this Implicit Association Test, which I’m not sure if you’ve… people have seen before, it’s like a sorting task that you use. And they were gathering data on people from around the world, testing them in different languages, but usually they would test people in, like, India in English, right, because they had the…
And so, I was also majoring in African Studies, and so I had to do something that would combine cognitive neuroscience and African studies. So I was like, alright, I can take this implicit association test to, West Africa, maybe, and test people there. And I was testing… I initially did a short little run where I, like, tested people in Nigeria in English and Senegal in French.
But then I was like, oh, I wonder if it’s going to be different for the same person if you switch languages. Most of the people I was interacting with there were bilingual, trilingual, quadrilingual, and I was wondering if the associations we were measuring between different linguistic concepts would be different if we changed languages.
So, my undergrad thesis was precisely about this. It measured, took the Implicit Association test to Morocco, and to Arabic-French bilinguals. And then in the US did it with Spanish, English bilinguals, and found the same person, same exact test, but you switch the language, and you get very different, scores. So I kind of, in undergrad, I’d been interested in these issues of the relationship between language and thought and affect for a while.
Then, in grad school, I moved on to work in religious studies, particularly African religions, and just spent a ton of time translating things. A ton of them trying to learn, Arabic and improve my knowledge of Yoruba. And, um, studied a few other languages along the way, to a little bit Persian and Bamana, and, yeah, I just spent so much time translating and thinking about… If you spend time, a lot of time reading texts, particularly poetry and sometimes religious texts in another language, you are acutely aware of how much is changed and transformed in translation. And so this really got me thinking, even in another way, about the relationship between language and thought. And because most of what I study is Islam on the African continent, a lot of this had to do with expressions of Islam in Arabic, in African languages, but then also in English and French. A lot of Africans, myself included, my father included, have English or other European languages as a mother tongue.
In addition to all the cool patois and creoles and pidgins and things like that…that we speak, and a lot of the debates and discussions about, political, religious, intellectual, philosophical matters aren’t just taking place in academic English. They’re taking place in pidgin English, they’re taking place in Yoruba, they’re taking place in Arabic, in Hausa, and all of these different linguistic registers. So that’s kind of how I got into it.
Tazin: Oh gosh, that’s fascinating! And in your article, Islam in English, you note that, owing to the global dominance of English, Muslims worldwide use English, but the majority of English speakers do not… are not Muslim. So, you know, when you think of an English speaker, you don’t think of a Muslim.
And, you know, when we hear and we see Muslims speaking English in movies or the media, we do see the framing and the social identities associated with Muslims – the problematic stereotypes, you know, terrorists, oppressors, etc. In everyday lives, people make assumptions about Muslims who speak English. But your work does not so much focus on Muslims speaking in English. It talks about Islam expressed in English. What is the difference? And what do you mean when you say Islam in English?
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, that’s a great question. I’ll start, kind of, where you started. I think there are a lot more… we think about the large number of English speakers in Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, especially who are Muslim. There are a lot more Muslims who speak English on a daily basis than a lot of people think. But as you said, you know, people don’t think of English as an Islamic language. Even though there is a kind of Muslim English, which is one of the things we kind of talk about a little bit in the…If you say, I have never come across or seen in anything published in the 20th century…the terms ablution, circumambulation, outside of a Muslim context. There are certain…as well as, you know, interesting things Muslims do with Arabic and other languages in their English. But what I was really interested in this article was kind of two things. How Islamic, Islamic, Quranic, worldviews are being expressed in English, And then how that is necessarily transforming the English language, even as the English language is transforming and having an effect on those, ideas, expressions. So that was… that’s one, this kind of connection between language and thought.
And then the other one, kind of drawing on the example of the Han Kitab in China,
which was this major translation of… a very creative translation of works of Islamic philosophy and mysticism and other texts into Chinese. But it wasn’t just a straightforward translation, because you’re translating into a new conceptual vocabulary, developing a new conceptual vocabulary. So having…having Islam… in English, being the…the creation in English of new categories that correspond to Islamic categories, but also are legible and accessible to contemporary English speakers, who are growing up with different idioms, different frames of reference, different metaphors, all of those different things.
Because it’s one thing to have footnotes explaining, let’s say, a metaphor in Arabic or Persian. It’s quite another thing to creatively translate that to another metaphor that will work in a similar way for contemporary English speakers. And so those are the kind of two things…how that we’re kind of, trying to talk about how to…transform English to express, Islamic ideas, concepts for which there’s sometimes not a good equivalent or translation in English. And then the other one is how to make these terms, ideas, worldview, accessible to English speakers. They’re related, but they’re slightly different. And that’s kind of what the two parts of the article are about.
Tazin: You also highlight that, English carries with it the markers of many historical and contemporary ideologies, understandably those associated with Europe. Despite its worldwide dominance, English is neither a neutral nor a universalizing language. For example, you know, you noted that colonialism finds expression in our everyday and literary expressions of English. How does this make translation of Islamic concepts problematic? Can concepts just be translated by picking out, you know, English words?
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: I mean, yeah, you can do that, that’s kind of the plug-and-chug…
Tazin: What happens, yeah!
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: model, that’s, you know, that’s what often happens, but I think to do good translations, you have to really understand the language, the history of the etymology of the words, and as, yeah, as you’re saying, the English language, like every other language, carries with it its whole accumulated history of terms, metaphors that people use, which they’ve even forgotten what the original metaphor referred to, but we just use it. There’s a great scene in the autobiography of Malcolm X, both the book and the movie, where he goes through the dictionary, looks at everything black.
Everything black is bad, sinful, this, that, that. And then white, pure, holy, righteous, this, all of these, all of these associations. That’s just one very obvious example of the different associations. That different terms, different words, different images, different concepts will have. But English language bears all of these, because English is a wild language. Like, it’s, you know, you’ve got Greek, you’ve got Latin, you’ve got, you know, Saxon, Anglo-Saxon stuff, Germanic, and then…With the colonial things, you get things from Urdu, and then you’re getting things from Arabic, and you get… it’s just… it’s a wild language with all kinds of different things, and because it was really, like, a kind of trade pirate language for a while, it just… it picked up a lot of interesting things and structure, so it has…it has a lot of these… I forget who said language is like an amber, which carries all of these things that got stuck in it. And so English has a lot of these heritages. The issue…
Tazin: I like your categorization of English as a wild language.
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, yeah, it’s a… it’s a really…
And it’s… we don’t really… I mean, we have the Oxford English Dictionary, we don’t have anything like the Académie Française, you know, that’s really regulating English very, you know, very tightly, we don’t have…tremendously old traditions of English philology and, like they do in Arabic and other traditions. So it’s a… it’s an interesting kind of language. But the…um…because of this, you can’t just immediately translate, okay, prayer, for example. In Arabic, you have salat and dua.
You translate them both as prayer? They’re very different things in Arabic.
Very different things you do with your body, very different kinds of prayer, but…in English, okay, that’s prayer. Okay, maybe we say petitionary prayer, but how do you translate salat?
I run into this all the time when I translate poems, and it’s like, Allahumma Salli Alah or Sallahu Alika
May God… what is Salli here? God pray on the Prophet? God bless the Prophet? God…
What are… this… there’s not, there’s not really an exact…term. Even the English bless is a really fascinating word. It comes from this old…I think Germanic route, which you put blood from a sacrifice on something, and that’s… you put a kind of sacred quality on that. But then that gets transformed to its Christian meaning, and then… So, these translations are not a simple plug-and-chug, one-to-one. The…the terms… very rarely can you just do the kind of flashcard thing. Just replace one word with another one. Because the words are different, the concepts are different, the linguistic and conceptual universes that they belong to are different. So you have to be creative.
There’s no way around, being creative in some way, and finding ways to make it make sense to an Anglophone audience. And oftentimes, as you’ll see in other Islamic languages, where there’s not such a easy translation, they’ll just keep the Arabic word. Let’s say if they’re translating from Arabic. Right, so languages that a lot of Muslims have spoken for a long time, you will see lots of Arabic loanwords in there, particularly related to religious things, or related to the Qur’an, where there’s often not an equivalent. But where there are equivalents, you’ll find people use both words. So, like, in Persian and Urdu and things like that, people will say, Khuda Hafez or Allah Hafez, right? Khuda was close enough.
That’s, you know, it has a kind of coexistence, along that… along those lines. Yeah, so this… I don’t think you can translate concepts just by picking out English words. You can pick out an English word. And then, through its usage, you know, you pay, alright, I’m gonna use this English word for this, let’s say, Arabic word. And then through the way in which you use it, you can actually transform the usage of that, the meaning of that word in English. So, William Chittick is a kind of master of this in his translations. He has a very strict translation policy in which if he’s translating a word from Arabic, he will use the same English word or if, you know, a word derived from the same root, you’ll use a variant of that English word in the exact same way. So that English word then starts behaving in his translations like the Arabic word, not like the English word that it, you know, originally referred to.
And like I mentioned earlier, you can kind of already see this with ablution. I’m sure there are other people who talk about it. Use the term ablution and write about ablution, but the only time I’ve seen ablution, you know, in my life is Wudu, as a translation of Wudu.
Tazin: Yes, it’s not used in any other context except the Muslim context.
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: that I’ve come across. I’m sure there are other contexts, but, you know.
Tazin: Context words used, yes, but in English, yes.
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: In my experience of English, that’s, you know, I’ve only ever seen it as a translation of Wudu. I’ve only ever seen circumambulation as a translation of Tawaf. And so the Arabic uses of those words are now, you know, at least in my English circle, my idiolect, determining the, they’re determining the range, the role that those words play in English.
Tazin: And just for our listeners, ablution is the ritual purification before prayer for Muslims, and Tawaf that you referred to is the circumambulation, which is also the only way I’ve ever.
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah.
Tazin: Around the Kaaba that Muslims perform, and it is very interesting how it’s so difficult to actually get those words out, out in English. So how… how can you make English speak Islam, and Islam speak English?
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, this is a question. So I was… I tried to, kind of, Islam… Islam speaking English. I’ll start with English speaking Islam.
If English speaking Islam is… you have a form of English, whether it’s in academic articles, treatises, poetry, not books, creative works, whatever, just people on the corner talking. That expresses fluently an Islamic kind of worldview – Weltanschauung. And it’s not one thing, but it does have certain principles, and those are informed by the Qur’an and the hadith, and then the tradition. That’s… that’s past those things. And so, this has been the case with, Islamic languages all throughout history, all throughout the world. Islam comes to a place, usually the language that people speak there, especially the Muslims there
transforms under the influence of the Qur’an, under the influence of poetry, under the influence of translations of the Qur’an, of poetry, of hadith, of other things, in khutbahs, in lessons, in things like that. And it starts to transform the language in.
Tazin: And Oludamani, may I ask you, in the spirit of this conversation, for our listeners, would you translate khutbah and hadith? Because our listeners may actually not know.
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, yeah…sorry, sorry.
Tazin: You have slipped into your Arabic terms.
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Khutbah is, to give a rough translation, like a kind of Friday sermon. It’s something that the Imam, the person who’s leading the Friday prayers, it’s kind of like a sermon that they’ll give right before the prayers.
And a hadith is a saying or tradition about the Prophet Muhammad. Usually it’s something that he said or did, recorded in a narration that’s then passed down through a chain of transmission. Yeah, so that’s…
Tazin: And two excellent examples of how… of the complexity of trying to express.
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Exactly.
Tazin: these concepts in English.
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Because a khutbah is like, let’s say, a Protestant sermon or a homily. In some ways, but it’s also not in other ways. The genre’s different, you know, you gotta sit down in the middle, different formulas, it’s much shorter than… if you go to a Nigerian church, those sermons go on for a very long time, it’s not like the…It’s a different, it’s a different kind of genre, but close enough. So these, these…the expressions of these ideas, this worldview, these ways of being, of imagining and speaking about the world, really come into English, and they… they necessarily transform the English. The English then comes to speak Islam.
So if you can speak in a way about… and oftentimes this will come from having loan words, like khutbah, like, you know, like zakat, for example. One word I know a lot of, at least in my circles, Muslims don’t translate zakat. I’ve never said to anybody, oh, I gotta pay my poor tithe.
Tazin: Poor tax!
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, I’ve got to pay my poor tax, or I’ve got to pay my… no, I’ve got to pay my zakat, because the translations are too… feel too clumsy. And so, I think of this as kind of…I think it was Wade Davis who said something like, language is like a forest, and the usages are like paths that people have cut through. And so as, Muslims, but not just Muslims, other people speaking about Islam, cut a path through the forest of English, trying to express these notions. And just like a path in the forest, that path gets influenced by the terrain that’s already there, even as you are shaping that terrain as well. So that’s Islam speaking English. That’s… or, yeah, that’s Islam speaking English.
I think I thought, I’m hoping I didn’t get it.
Tazin: No, no, no, that’s beautiful, and it’s actually a perfect, segue to my next question, where I was going to talk about…um…I was going to read a small excerpt from your book of poetry, the Book of Clouds. And as I was explaining to our listeners, I chose this because it’s so great to see this connection between your academic research and then your literary work. Your book is a beautiful articulation of the ideas you introduce in your article, and in your book, you express very significant Islamic concepts, but in English.
And I chose a little excerpt from your poem “The Wine Odes”, where you write:
This life’s too hard to live sober
so drink and try to die a drunk
For heaven’s but a hangover
for those who drink from your mouth’s cup
My question, as would be, you know, the question of many others – wine, drinking, hangover, how is this Islam expressed in English?
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, good, good, good question.
So, yeah, this, this can be… if you are not familiar with, traditions of Arabic and really broader Islamic and Islamicate poetry, this sounds blasphemous, maybe. And that’s… that’s part of the point, but…the… there’s a very, very long tradition, from the earliest days of Islam of, I guess you could call them mystics or spiritual people, speaking about the remembrance of God, love of God, the experience of love and remembrance of God, being in the presence of God, in terms of wine.
And this kind of has Qur’anic precedent. The Qur’an talks about the Sharabun Tahurun, the pure wine that people drink in paradise. So, down here, you’re not supposed to drink wine. Up in paradise, no problem.
And so… And I teach my students about the Islamic poetic tradition, I like to say that, especially Sufi poetry, this kind of mystical poetry, it’s always speaking in three dimensions. It’s speaking about things on the macrocosmic level, out there in the world, you know, so a cup of wine. On the microcosmic dimension, things inside of you, the feeling of intoxication, from… could be remembering God, feeling in love, states of meditation and intimacy with God, and then the metacosmic, with God or in paradise, you know, this…this, wine. So when they’re speaking about wine, they’re using it as a symbol and a metaphor, but for the Sufis in particular, the real wine is the wine of paradise.
The wine down here is just a reflection… the, you know, the stuff you make from grapes is just a reflection of…that higher reality. So Ibn al-Farid is probably the most famous, influential Arabic mystical poet has a very famous poem where he says,
شربنا على ذكر الحبيب مدامة
سكرنا بها من قبل أن يخلق الكرم
(Sharabna ‘ala dhikril habibi mudamatan
Sakirna biha min qabli an yukhlaqal karmu)
We drank a wine in remembrance of the beloved.
We were drunk with it before the vine was even created.
So, it’s like, just letting you know, I’m not talking about the… the grape stuff.
Tazin: I was gonna say!
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, so, but… I mean, I…But he’s talking about drunkenness.
So this… this life’s too hard to live sober. You can’t live without love. Try to live without remembering God, or try to live without love. It’s too hard. It’s too hard. Most of us couldn’t make it a day, I think. So drink and try to die drunk. Ibn al-Farid and lots of others, Hafez, even Rumi, say things like this, so, you know, remember God, be in love, fall in love, and try to die, try to die to yourself, to your ego, try to experience that, in… don’t stop, keep going. Keep going so far in love that you… that you lose yourself.
For heaven’s but a hangover for those who drink from your mouth’s cup. So this is a famous kind of saying in Sufism that you seek the gardener, not the garden. That paradise is often called, in Arabic, Al Jannah, which means the garden. So, you don’t want paradise just for the…the wine and the good stuff there. What you’re really seeking is… is God, is the Beloved. So, heaven’s just but a hangover. And also, heaven is the result of… if you do a lot of the Sufi-style drinking down here, a lot of remembrance of God, a lot of loving God down here, then heaven’s just a hangover of that. And what you really want is the drink from the beloved’s mouth cup, which is a kind of standard image in Arabic and Persian, for kissing. And, yeah, so if you… if you are fortunate enough to have that kind of intimacy with… with God, Heaven’s kind of a hangover.
Yeah, so that’s… it’s a… it was an attempt to express in English, in meter, in rhyme, slant rhyme, at least. The ethos, a lot of the ideas, some of the images, even some of the jokes that you find in Arabic poetry, Persian poetry, Urdu poetry, Turkish poetry, Hausa poetry, Swahili poetry, kind of…Javanese poetry. Almost everywhere, every language, Islamic language, a language that has a lot of… a lot of Muslim speakers for a long time, that has a poetic tradition, I see images like this. So, I was trying to do something like that in English in a way that didn’t sound corny.
Tazin: Well, it sounds beautiful, and I think it’s an excellent example of what we were talking about, is that, you know, the use of language that is familiar to us in English to express a concept that comes from Islam, and you’ve done that so beautifully. And, you know, I would like to ask, especially, you know, in the current… the two things in the current context. One is, of course, migration, with so many Muslims coming to English-dominant countries, where we are interacting. You know, I myself am a Muslim, come from a Muslim immigrant family, right, where we’ve had to interact with English in different ways. And that’s the story of many, many, many Muslim immigrants. And, of course, the onset of AI, where you have these plugins, where you have words just put into machines and coming out. What, you know, as a sociolinguist myself, and for those interested in language use, what can we glean from your work? In English-dominant societies, where English use is tied to socially ascribed identities, how do all these varied speakers of English lay claim to their chosen representation?
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, my favorite, analysis of this actually comes not from the, my studies of Islam but from my studies of Yoruba, Yoruba linguistics, and. So Wole Soyinka is our most famous, Nobel Prize-winning author. And one of the, he actually just passed away. I was kind of, almost like an uncle of mine, Biodun Jeyifo, who was a great scholar of Wole Soyinka and comparative literature.
And he called what Soyinka’s English – Big English. He called it Oguntoyinbo. It would take a long time to explain what Oguntoyinbo, but it… the name Oguntoyinbo means…Ogun, who’s the Orisha, the kind of god of iron war in traditional Yoruba language, is equal to the Oyinbo, is equal to the foreigner, is equal to the European. And he said, what Soyinka did with English was he made it it’s his own. And he did things in the language that surpassed what even the supposed owner of the language ever could have imagined doing in it. And what… he quoted one review that was an Irish… I think it was an Irish…reviewer who reviewed one of Soyinka’s plays and said, Wole Soyinka is waking up the napping English language to its kind of magical and metaphysical possibilities inherent in the language, which we’ve forgotten since Spencer or things like that. But, Uncle BJ, as I called him, Jeyifo said. he’s not just waking up the napping English language and taking it back somewhere for the sake of Englishmen and English women, but rather he’s taking it to places that people have never imagined before. Based on his, in Soyinka’s case, his mastery of the Yoruba language. He was growing up steeped in, a lot of beautiful Yoruba oratory traditions. He then brings that to English and transforms and does things in English that you couldn’t imagine doing before.
Because it’s something that’s just ordinary in Yoruba playing with tonalities, or a long string of alliterations, or something like that. He brings it to English, and wow, it’s fireworks! But it’s something that is kind of unprecedented. So this, this is what I think, it’s hard because of, relationships of power, relationships of prejudice, and, and these kinds of things. But people who are sensitive or who have the good sense to appreciate the tremendous gift that people who are coming into English Bring with them. They’re bringing a tremendous gift, they’re enriching and enlivening the English language with new vocabulary, new idioms, new phrases, all of these things. When the language stops growing and adding new phrases, new words, and things, it’s dead. That’s when it’s… that’s when it’s dead. Now, it’s not like everything new that is added is great, you know, there’s a process, you know, usually if it’s…If it speaks to people, if it fills a need in some way, it’ll catch on, and if it doesn’t, it’ll fall by the wayside. How many new words Shakespeare credited with just coming up with himself? English is alive and, you know, fertile and bubbling. Then, and, you know, got a little stultified, and I think now with this wave of people coming in from all over the world, bringing all these different languages… I mean, there’s so many, so many new phrases get added to the OED every year from, let’s say, like, Nigerian English. So, like, “next tomorrow” has been added. And I think also, I didn’t even know this was in Nigerianism, Ember months. So the Ember months are those at the end of the… do you say this in Australia, too? No? No? No? Ember months are…
Tazin: What, you mean the autumn months? Is that what you’re…
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Well, so it’s, it’s the months of the year that end in Ember. September, November.
Tazin: Oh, right, sorry, sorry.
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: But it also has big… but it, you know, it also has that, like, an embers, like the, you know, the end of a fire. Yes. So it just, it works perfectly. So, Nigerian English, they call it the ember months, you know, from September onward, those are the ember months.
Tazin: We won’t have that in the Southern Hemisphere, because that’s when it starts to get warm for us.
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: It’ll be the opposite, it would be the opposite. But it’s the end of the end of the year, right? So it’s the, you know, just if the year is a fire, as it goes out, you have the embers. But so all of these things are being added to the language, and Islam and Muslims are adding so much. I mean, our poetic traditions have influenced English for hundreds of years. From the Transcendentalists all the way back to probably the sonnet form itself, which was developed in Sicily, probably as, under the influence of the Arabic Ghazal tradition. So, our languages and our literatures in the Islamic world have been influencing English for a very long time, indirectly, and now, English gets the benefit from direct infusion of energy, new concepts, metaphors, and things like that.
In fact, it’s almost like the King James Bible brought a lot of Hebraisms. Things from Hebrew into English, like Song of Songs, Holy of Holies. That’s a construction that you find in Semitic languages. And then, you know, it was brought into Latin, and then from there into English. And that made beautiful English. And now, too, we’re having things… we’re getting infusion of all kinds of different possibilities that can make for a really beautiful and dynamic English. If we can get over some of the narrow prejudices, racial, cultural, otherwise, that close people off to experiencing, things like that.
Tazin: What a wonderful, you know, thought to leave this with – that English is enriched by all the contributions that people from around the world and from different traditions make to it. So, thank you for that. That’s really wonderful. My final question to you is, what is next for you and your work? What other research projects are you working on now?
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Yeah, so I’m finishing up a book. Well, I sent it to the press, but I’m sure I’ll have corrections and things on, Layla poetry, poetry about the figure of Layla in a particular North African Sufi order, mystical order, called the Shadhiliya. So, Layla is this, kind of the Arab or OG Romeo and Juliet. Layla is the Juliet’s. Her name means night, or technically intoxication, and her Majnoon, a young man named Qais, fell in love with her and became Majnoon, which means crazy. He’s usually known as Majnun Leila.
And so the Sufi tradition, or this particular Sufi tradition, whenever they want to talk about the divine essence, that which is beyond language, they very often turn to writing poetry about Layla to talk about that which is beyond speech. So the book’s an attempt to figure out what’s going on here, why are they using poetry about Layla to eff the ineffable? What is it about poetry, and what is it about this kind of genre of poetry in particular that makes it, felicitous, for that kind of thing?
Yeah, and I’m still trying to write Qasidas and Ghazals in English. Qasida is a kind of long… tends to be longer, monorhyme, form, and the Ghazal is, a kind of shorter, poetic form with its own rules, but, yeah, I really love writing them, and yeah, I continue to write them, and maybe there’ll be another collection of poetry, in a few years, Insha’Allah.
Tazin: That’s wonderful, and thank you for your time today, and we look forward, actually, to reading more of your work.
Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike: Thank you so much, this was really fascinating. Appreciate you. Thanks.
Tazin: And thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, The New Books Network, to your students, colleagues, and friends. Till next time.
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