Ali sends this article along, and I’d highly recommend it. A taste:
“At the heart of all things is the germ of their overthrow,” wrote Egyptian author Adhaf Soueif in her Booker-nominated novel The Map of Love. She was indulging in a very beautifully written digression about Arabic grammar, comparing words derived from the same root: in this case, qalb, ‘heart’; and enqilab, ‘overthrow’. At this level, where the interplay of meaning and construction is visible, Arabic becomes an extraordinary language, forcing into cooperation concepts and ideas that are entirely unrelated in English. Despite the tremendous conceptual range and utility provided by the root-and-pattern system of the Arabic language, I have always been disappointed by what I believed to be the absence of an equivalent for a word I particularly admire: agape, a Greek term used by Christians to mean the boundary-less, self-sacrificing love between believers, or between a believer and God. More ardent than filia, less explicit than eros, agape is love stripped of expectation, in which the lover is humbled and disciplined before the beloved.
There are many words for ‘love’ in Arabic: hob, the catch-all, is equivalent to the English ‘love’, which can be turned toward spouses, parents, children, favorite foods and books, favorite places. The rest, however, are implicitly romantic: ‘aishq, the union of lover and beloved; hayam, love that causes one to wander in distraction; gharam, love so intense it causes pain. The list goes on. But love that originates in spiritual bliss, in the restraint and desire to serve that it inspires; there seemed no word for it in Arabic, and without a word for it in Arabic, there seemed no place for it in Islam. Running a Google search for ‘agape’ and ‘Islam’ yields literally hundreds of Christian sites claiming as much, and painting Islam as a cold, dispassionate religion in its absence.
Read the whole thing.