Why Does the Quran Refers to Allah as "He" | Nouman Ali Khan

Why Does the Quran Refer to Allah as “He”?  Nouman Ali Khan
https://www.youtube.com/c/PembelajarQuranChannel
http://pembelajar-quran.blogspot.com

Assalamu'alaykum everyone
During my Gulf Tour in Kuwait, I was giving a lecture and somebody ask a really cool question and I thought I should share the answer with everyone.

The question was that in reading the Quran you found the God use the word He for himself like He is the creator the sky and the earth or He is one, and the word He is obviously male so how can we use a male word for God eventhough Allah is beyond gender.

So that was a pretty cool question i thought  and so i decided to make this video and share with you some thoughts on how to address this problem.

First of all we have to understand that the Arabic language which differently than the English language.
In the English language you have three (3) options, you can use He or you can use She or you can use It
He obviously has male conotation, She has female conotation, It is beyond gender
So you would have the choice of It but the only problem is the word It is for inanimate object, It would be inappropriate for Allah because It necessity the assumption for non living things
None of those three options can truly do justice to the word for God
Now Allah chose, this kind of give me more confidence and remind me even more why Allah chose the Arabic language for His revelation

In the Arabic language things work very differently from English
First of foremorst they don't have the pronoun It, they only have He and She, Huwa and Hiya, there is no inanimate object pronoun. There is no gender neutral, there is no such things in the Arabic,

The second thing to note, in the Arabic, gramatically speaking the word He / Huwa serve 2 functions, now please pay attention to this part cause it gets a little tricky
It serves 2 functions, it serves the function of male and also serves the function of masculine
Actually before he even serves the function of male, its primary purpose is to communicate the masculine

The Arabs makes a distinction in their grammar between masculine and male, this is actually not that different from Spanish

you know when you have L, liberal and La, liberateca, they take inanimate object even and end it with a gender

a book is masculine and the library is feminine right, so in the Arabic language, the word Huwa can be use for things that have gender and things that don't have gender and to them, masculine is not actually about a biological gender, it's a grammatical concept

so a boy is actually a male but a tree is actually just it's an It, in Arabic syajaroh is feminine that doesn't mean tree is female, but to them tree is feminine similarly to the them the sun is feminine. Asy-Syams is feminine to them
Not because the tree, the sun, biologically female, so masculine and feminine are different from male and female

All questions assume because the English language uses word He for male
the Arabic equivalent Huwa must all to be use for male, it's not the case

it's actually use for masculine or for the male but still you know the question is why use the masculine anyway why not use the feminine ?

Here's where understanding Arabic linguistics and the overall sturucture Arabic language help

As an overview the Arabic Language is a contract has a certain principles that dictate how the whole languages organize. Those guidance principles, if that's the masculine, it's the default
it's kinda when you have like a word will remain masculine until there's a reason to consider it feminine. You don't get out of the masculine gender unless you have some grammatical reasons, so the fact that the masculine is use for Allah, Huwa is use for Allah, actually in the case, this is the default state is how is supposed to be

Using the feminine word would actually be the problem that would be leaving the natural default state, the truly neutral state in Arabic and going to the unnatural state which is
the feminine form in the Arabic language

So the problem does not exist at all in Arabic and exist certainly in the English language
which is why for you know, since the beginning of the Quran, nobody actually attribute masculinity to Allah, even among the Pagan Arab, they didn't have this problem because they just they know this talking about define being, the word that has to be use for him, appropriate to him has to be one does not limited self to any connotation and that word in Arabic, it certainly be Huwa

We'll still gonna be limited in English, we're gonna have to use the word He because we don't have a better word

that at the end of the day serve one purpose and one purpose alone to me, that is nothing in the end will be truly equivalent to the word of Allah as He revealed it

Barokallahu lii wa lakum..wassalamu'alaykum warohmatullahi wa barokatuhu

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