Thou or You
The current state of the world has caused a lot of people to stay home. In many places (not here, but many places) churches, temples, and mosques have closed down services in order to keep people safe. For some in the Ismaili community, this means that instead of congregating inside Jamatkhana to pray, drink chai, and socialize, people now congregate outside Jamatkhana to pray, drink chai, and socialize. Of course, that’s not a safe response, but what some people have done is instead turn to technology and use phone trees or video conferencing to hold congregational prayers.
My brother and his friends in Canada have been hosting an online congregation which, for legal reasons, is not Jamatkhana. But because it’s not Jamatkhana, they’ve been able to do things that wouldn’t be sanctioned in an official Jamatkhana: children are able to practice their prayers without judgement from old people, husbands and wives can sit next to each other, and they’re featuring translations for prayers and devotional literature in real-time.
Presenting the translations has helped these young adults to understand the prayers that they say every day, but it has led to one point of contention. In older translations of the Isma’ili Du’a, Allah is referred to as “Thou” but in newer translations, Allah is referred to as “You”. Between the two translations, nothing else has changed. So is it just a side effect of language changing within the 20 or so years between publications, or is there something more important here?
These two simple words have a very storied history in the English language. Here, I’m going to go through two historical interpretations of “you” and “thou” and how they relate to the Divine: Plurality and Formality.
Singular or Plural
To understand the difference between “thou” and “you” in English we first have to go back all the way to the beginning of English, itself. Back in the 5th century, Angles and Saxons travelled from Anglia and Saxony in modern Germany to settle in Englaland (the Land of the Angles) in modern England. Here they spoke what we refer to as Anglo-Saxon, or simply Old English. While it’s called English, it hardly sounds like what’s spoken today. If you’re studying the language, like in school, you can see how certain words and grammatical structures have carried over but, on its surface, Old English sounds completely foreign. For example, here’s the opening lines of Beowulf, one of the most famous pieces of Literature in English history.
In Today English, we have one second-person nominative pronoun. That’s a fancy way of saying “you”. If we’re talking to one person, we say “you”; if we’re talking to multiple people, we still say “you”. Dialectical English sometimes has a plural form of “you” such as “youse” or “y’all”. Old English, on the other hand, had three kinds of “you”.
þu
git
ge
means “you” but for one person. (sounds like “thoo”)
means “you” but for two people. (sounds like “yeet”)
means “you” but for more than two people. (sounds like “yay”)
Fast forward another 600 years and the language spoken in England has changed (as all language tends to do, over time). Now we have what we call “Middle English”. If you squint your ears and turn your head, Middle English sounds a lot more like Modern English (at least to the point where I could understand what we were reading in class without studying too hard). Here’s an example of Middle English from The Canterbury Tales, another of English’s most famous literary works.
By this point, the second-person nominative pronouns have changed quite a bit. For example, there’s no more dual case, so it will either be “one you” or “multiple you”.
þou
3e
means “you” for one person. (sounds like “thou”)
means “you” for more than one person. (sounds like “yay”)
So, which one is correct?
When choosing between using singular or plural to refer to the Divine, the answer is really easy in the Muslim context. We need to look no further than the Chapter of Sincerity, one of the most pertinent chapters of the Qur’an.
قُلْ هُوَ اللَّهُ أَحَدٌ
Say “He is Allah, [who is] One, (112:1, Sahih International)
Open and shut case. Allah is singular, so we should use the singular pronoun. Except, it’s not that simple because it’s never that simple, because of course it’s not. The Qur’an is said to be narrated by God. But when God refers to Himself, he uses a first-person plural pronoun: نَحْنُ (nahnu in Arabic). For example, I’ll use this verse from the Qur’an which also appears (in part) in the Isma’ili Du’a:
Indeed, it is We who bring the dead to life and record what they have put forth and what they left behind, and all things We have enumerated in a clear register. (36:12, Sahih International)
إِنَّا نَحْنُ نُحْيِي الْمَوْتَىٰ وَنَكْتُبُ مَا قَدَّمُوا وَآثَارَهُمْ ۚ وَكُلَّ شَيْءٍ أَحْصَيْنَاهُ فِي إِمَامٍ مُّبِينٍ
So people are instructed to refer to Allah as singular, but Allah refers to “themself” as plural. How does that make sense? How does that work?
Recently, I took on an art project that involved examining the 99 Names of Allah. I found 16 names in 8 contradictory pairs, things like: “The Creator” and “The Destroyer”, “The Giver of Life” and “The Bringer of Death”, and stuff like that. Most of the time, these names are right next to each other, in the same sentence, in the Qur’an. Ascribing these contradictory descriptions to Allah is an artistic way of describing the Divine’s all-encompassing nature. So if Allah can be both “The Expander” and “The Restrainer”, it’s entirely possible that Allah can be both "singular” and “plural”. As Imam Jafar asSadiq describes, the true nature of Allah is simply beyond human understanding.
Informal vs Formal
The English language, though confined to an island for most of its history, certainly did not evolve without the help of other languages. One major influence was from the French-speaking Normans who conquered England in the 11th Century (just as Middle English was solidifying its place as a language). We can still see the French influence in our language today, the most obvious examples coming from the differences in social class. For example, if you’re a poor 11th Century farmer, you may have to deal with cows (from the Old English cu) and chickens (from the Old English cycen). But if you’re a rich Norman aristocrat, you only interact with those animals on a plate, so you’d call them beef (from the Old French boef) and poultry (from the Old French pouletrie). If you’re a poor person, you may live in a house (from the Old English hus), but if you’re a rich person, you’d live in a mansion (from Old French). But the Normans didn’t just add words, they also changed words. Old French, like Middle English, had two second-person nominative pronouns.
tu
vos/vous
an informal way of saying “you”, like to a child
a formal way of saying “you”, like to a parent. Also used as plural.
As the languages interacted, the Middle English words began to take on the same meaning as their French equivalents. By the 1300s, “thou” came to be informal and “you” became the formal in addition to the plural. However, with the advent of Modern English in the late 1500s, “thou” went from “informal” to “downright rude” thanks to the work of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. If there’s two things Shakespeare is famous for, it’s 1) shaping the English language into what we know today and 2) insulting people in fun, creative ways (I guess he also wrote, like, some plays and stuff? I don’t know). Shakespeare would use “thou” in his insults (unless he was being sarcastic), for example:
Romeo, the love I bear thee can afford
No better term than this: thou art a villain.
Romeo, you ignorant slut!
Romeo and Juliet (3:1:32)
The word “thou” became so insulting that we straight-up don’t use it anymore. For context, the French still use both “tu” and “vous” for their respective definitions, but the English were too offended that we just stopped using that word. Well, most of the English. It seems this memo was lost on the writers of the King James Bible.
While Shakespeare was busy dying, King James was busy commissioning a Bible. But not just any Bible, the Bible to end all Bibles: a Bible for the people. His team of scholars pulled resources from all over, in multiple languages to make sure their new Bible was not only accessible and understandable to the people, but also as grandiose as a Bible should be. And what language did they decide to write this Bible in? Not the newfangled “Modern English” that had come into fashion just decades prior, but Middle English. Y’know, the language of the people. Because they used Middle English, they of course used the Middle English version of “thou” and “you”: with “thou” being singular and “you” being plural. God, of course, is singular (arguments about the Trinity aside). So “thou” was employed to refer to God. Coincidentally, the French did something similar with their Bibles but for a completely different reason.
In French, God is also referred to as “tu”: the singular, informal second-person pronoun. But the French chose informal on purpose. Before the printing press, and the widespread literacy that came with it, religious texts were relegated to the elite, preachy, rich people. That has the nasty side-effect of a certain class of people controlling everyone’s interpretation of the religion. So as religious texts became more popular reading material, the French wanted to emphasize that personal connection with the Divine. No longer was God a fancy man that only speaks Latin and only lives in Church. Now, God was with you and wanted to help you and be your friend. So the French used their language to promote that familial relationship. That interpretation has later been applied to English translations of the Bible, some of which still use the informal “thou”, whether or not that’s the intent of the author. More often than not, “thou” is used in a religious context because it’s not used in everyday language. “Thou” sounds old, and it sounds fancy. And when you’re talking about traditions that stretch back thousands of years, maybe you want to use “ye olde languageth” to help you get your point across.
So which one is correct?
The idea of a Personal God is very enticing. In fact, that’s one of the reasons Islam was so difficult to catch on. The Chapter of Sincerity, part of which is cited above, is a direct response to this idea. Polytheistic religions often have pantheons of related deities. In Ancient Greece, for example, the gods of Olympus were all siblings (and the next generation were cousins). In Hindu tradition, many gods are reincarnations of each other. In Ancient Egypt, many of the gods and goddesses are siblings or spouses of each other. So, in this context, the Prophet Muhammad was asked “where does this new god you’re talking about fit in? Who’s his family?” and the response was the Chapter of Sincerity: that God is singular, self-sufficient, and specifically without family.
But the understanding with the pantheons is that different gods had different traits and watched over different aspects of life. If you were trying to harvest more, you’d pray to one god; if you were trying to have a baby, you’d pray to a different god; if you want to partake in drunken necromancy, you’d pray to a different god. Many families would often have patron gods, or gods that looked after them and their descendants specifically.
In some sects of Christianity today, the idea of a Personal God is still very much promoted, especially with the story of Jesus’s sacrifice. Within the current pandemic, I’ve seen a number of posts on social media thanking a personal God for creating a global pandemic so that they could take some time to relax at home. In cases like this, the idea of a Personal God or a Familial God, seem a bit selfish.
In Islam (at least what’s taught, this may not be what’s practiced), the Divine is very impersonal. Since its inception, the idea of understanding the Divine is labelled as (almost) unattainable for man, often described as beyond the possibility of human comprehension.
“There can be no doubt that the second word of the declaration [Allahu Akbar] likens the character of Allah to a matrix which contains all and gives existence to the infinite, to space, to time, to the Universe, to all active and passive forces imaginable, to life and to the soul.”
But in the same way, the Divine is extremely personal. Islamic belief describes humans as not only being the favourite of God’s creation, but also having the breath/light/essence of the Divine residing within them.
And We have already created man and know what his soul whispers to him, and We are closer to him than [his] jugular vein (50:16, Sahih International)
وَلَقَدْ خَلَقْنَا الْإِنسَانَ وَنَعْلَمُ مَا تُوَسْوِسُ بِهِ نَفْسُهُ ۖ وَنَحْنُ أَقْرَبُ إِلَيْهِ مِنْ حَبْلِ الْوَرِيدِ
Conclusion
As discussed earlier, the idea of the Divine in Islam transcends these linguistic containers. If it’s entirely possible that God is both singular and plural, it stands to reason that God can also be both personal and impersonal. The choice of using “thou” or “you” to describe the Divine is less about who/what God is and more about who you are and what your relationship is to the world around you. If you see God as an unobtainable other, as described in the Pir tradition, you can use the formal “you”. If you see God as manifested in you and those around you, as in some Sufi traditions, you can use the informal “thou”. If you see God as sitting on a throne in heaven, as literally described in the Qur’an, you can use the singular “thou”. If you see God everywhere you turn, like Imam Ali, you can use the plural “you”. If you see God as some old-word tradition, you can use the archaic “thou”. If you see God as an integral part of your daily life, you can use the modern “you”. There really is no “correct” answer. When it comes to the sheer magnitude of the Divine and the universe, small word choices don’t matter. But when it comes to personal belief and personal expression, the words we use can affect what we believe. So choose carefully.
And if whatever trees upon the earth were pens and the sea [was ink], replenished thereafter by seven [more] seas, the words of Allah would not be exhausted. Indeed, Allah is Exalted in Might and Wise. (31:27, Sahih International)
وَلَوْ أَنَّمَا فِي الْأَرْضِ مِن شَجَرَةٍ أَقْلَامٌ وَالْبَحْرُ يَمُدُّهُ مِن بَعْدِهِ سَبْعَةُ أَبْحُرٍ مَّا نَفِدَتْ كَلِمَاتُ اللَّهِ ۗ إِنَّ اللَّهَ عَزِيزٌ حَكِيمٌ
“Far exalted is [God] to be compared to a majestic king, for He is beyond analogy, and similitude, beyond the limits of description, attributes, opinions, and estimations of direction.”