Dressed in his robe and turban, Sheikh Khaled Al-Guindy sits in the plush offices of the main benefactor of his new satellite television channel and speaks about how modern technology can be turned to service for Islam. The al-Azhar scholar, who in 2000 launched a phone-in service for Muslims seeking religious guidance, is one of the founders of Azhari, a 24-hour channel due to launch on the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which this year will start in mid-August. Read my interview with him here.

(Photo:Sheikh Khaled Al-Guindy, 31 May 2009/Tarek Mostafa)

The channel will be broadcast on both main satellite channels operating in Egypt and will be accessible worldwide. It will initially transmit in Arabic with some English and French programming and there are plans to add content later in Urdu and Turkish. Azhari received its initial 15 million Egyptian pounds funding from a Libyan businessman and philathropist, Hassan Tatanaki.

Guindy told Reuters the plan really got going about a month ago, when he officiated at the wedding of Tatanaki’s daughter. “The father of the bride and I forgot completely about that wedding and started to talk about a new wedding, about how to introduce this new channel to the rest of the world,” he said.

(Photo: Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, 13 July 2006/Suhaib Salem)

Guindy is hopeful that a new age, which he dubs the Age of Obama, is dawning in which a dialogue between Islam and the West will flourish. And he hopes his channel will play an important role in that conversation. Yet for all his modern touches, Guindy retains a deeply traditional side. He preferred to conduct our interview not in English or everyday modern Arabic, but in precise classical Arabic.

Sitting through a media briefing in Amman on Pope Benedict’s visit to Jordan starting on Friday, I whiled away the news-free parts trying to decipher the Arabic writing on the official logo (photo at right). I never fully mastered the Arabic alphabet or the Urdu language (which uses it) during my time in Pakistan over 20 years ago. But some hard-won bits of linguistic trivia remain stuck in the brain and come in handy at the most unexpected moments.

With some effort on my part, that arc of Arabic calligraphy up top revealed itself as saying al-haj al-babawi. The haj of baba … hmmm… Arabic has no “p,” so that could be the haj of papa. The Italians call him papa, so it must be talking about the pope and saying the pope’s haj. Huh? The pope’s haj?

Of course, the word haj simply means “pilgrimage” in Arabic. Western languages have taken it over as the specific term for the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. But the pope has a snowball’s chance in you-know-where to get there. Haj means pilgrimage, no more and no less, and it describes the pope’s visit just the same way as he does in the words of the many western languages he speaks.

This momentary hesitation over the meaning of haj reminded me of the dispute in Malaysia over whether Christians can use the word Allah for God when they pray in the Malay language. Bill Tarrant brought this story up to date on this blog today. Muslims say they pray to the same God as Christians and Jews, and Allah is only their word for the deity. But Malaysia’s Muslim establishment seems to have been westernised to the point that it confuses the root meaning of Arabic words it uses.

Just to check, I asked a Jordanian Roman Catholic how he recites the opening phrase of the Nicene Creed, the prayer in which Christians proclaim they “believe in one God.” Can’t claim I understood the first part of the phrase, but the end of it was crystal clear. The word he used for God was Allah.

(Photos: Papal visit logo above, Papal Nuncio Archbishop Francis Assisi Chullikat at briefing with logo below, 6 May 2009/Tom Heneghan)