'God Willing': Really? A Note on the Ambiguities of an Interfaith Expression.

Roeber, A.; Harvey, Paul

We seek here to investigate and clarify the origins of the popular pietistic expression 'God willing'. We discuss the historical relationship between that Christian affirmation and expectation of divine aid and the common Arabic Islamic expression inshallah ('if/when Allah wills'). Philological and historical investigation indicates that 'God willing' can be traced back through Christian triumphal affirmations to classical Latin and koine (New Testament) Greek commonplace expressions. The ultimate origin may well be a classical Greek Stoic expression which made its way into common parlance. We propose that the philological, semantic, and historical evidence suggests that Arabic inshallah may well have been an Islamic adoption of a Latin and/or Greek phrase encountered in the era of the Crusades.

ARABIC Islamic literature; ANCIENT philosophy; CHRISTIANS; MUSLIMS; JUDAISM; LATIN literature; POLITICAL culture

Neophilologus, 2011, Vol 95, Issue 3, p373

0028-2677

Academic Journal

10.1007/s11061-011-9252-6