Osama bin Laden as SF fan

[Tim May]

On Wednesday, October 31, 2001, at 09:53 AM, Ken Brown wrote:

> Ken McLeod posted the following to rec.arts.sf.fandom
>
>> Forwarded with permission from China Mieville, fantasy writer
>> and student of international relations:
>
>>> ------- Forwarded message follows -------
>
>>> My supervisor, an expert in the Middle East, told me about a
>>> rumour circulating about the name of Bin Laden's network.
>>> The term 'Al-Qaeda' seems to have no political precedent in
>>> Arabic, and has therefore been something of a conundrum to
>>> the experts, until someone pointed out that a very popular
>>> book in the Arab world, Arabs apparently being big readers
>>>  of translated SF, is Asimov's _Foundation_, the title of
>>>  which is translated as 'Al-Qaeda'.
>
>>> Unlikely as it sounds, this is the only theory anyone can come up 
>>> with.


A report on this "strange coincidence" is at 
http://www.marsearthconnection.com/attack3a.html#foundation

Color me skeptical, though, as there is nothing particularly odd about 
"the foundation" being the name of a group. The U.S. media translation 
into "The Base" is just a variant of "The Foundation." One might as well 
say that the translation of "The Ford Foundation" into Arabic suggests 
Bin Laden is somehow connected with Ford..maybe this is why the 
Brimstone tires explode?

(Other etymological swirls: Foundation, founder, fund, base, basement,  
grundlagen/ground, fundament (ass, too, as in "bottom")/fundamental, 
basis, basic, a base observation, etc.--all are related to the concept 
of "lowest level" or "basis" or "bottom"; the Indo-European words 
obviously come from a "basis" or "foundation" or "fundamental" (fund, 
fountain, etc.) in a mix of Proto-Indo-European roots. Arabic is a 
Semitic language, like Hebrew, and so "Qaeda" has no particular obvious 
connection to foundation/fundament/base.)

"Foundations of Something"  = "Grundlagen der...."  =  "Groundwork 
for ... =  "The Basics of ...."


Google shows that Turkish uses the words

Kaida/Kayda

for base/foundation, so the cognates amongst the Semitic languages are 
obvious. I checked for Hebrew cognates, but am not yet convinced the 
connection is obvious.

(I don't have the American Heritage Dictionary of Semitic Roots, or 
whatever it is called, though I do have the AHD of Indo-European roots, 
one of my favorite browsing sources.)

The Web has the AHD sources of IE words, but not (yet) the Semitic 
sources.

--Tim May
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a 
monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also 
into you." -- Nietzsche