Last week, I shared my experience of learning a new language from scratch from my time in India.

The main take-away was that it’s best to learn just a few words at a time but on a very consistent basis (we’re still working on the consistency bit here on our end, but we can at least start the few-words-at-a-time part right now 🙂 ).

We’re going to start learning the meanings of the words in the prayer that you read before eating, which was introduced a couple of weeks ago.

Right now, we’re going to go over the first three words that you see on the page here:دُعَاء قَبْلَ الْأَكْل (du‘aa’ qabla al-’akl) means “prayer before eating”.

Here’s the word-by-word breakdown:

دُعَاء

du‘aa’ – supplication, invocation, prayer

Although it’s often translated at supplication or invocation, the word “prayer” is more  more practical to use when explaining to children. To make a دُعَاء (du‘aa’) is to ask God for something.

This word comes from the same root as (da’wah), which means call or invitation.  When you make a دُعَاء, you’re inviting God to help you.

دُعَاء is a singular noun and the plural is اَدْعِيَة (ad‘iyah).

قَبْلَ

qabla – before

قَبْلَ (qabla) is a very common word.  Books about remembering God will often have a section about what to say قَبْلَ الّمَغْرِب (qabla al-maghrib), i.e. before sunset.  In this case, we’re learning about what to say before eating, or قَبْلَ الْأَكْل (qabla al-’akl).

The opposite of قَبْلَ is بَعْدَ (ba‘da), which means after.

You might have heard in Friday sermons or speeches, at the beginning you’ll hear verses of the Qur’an or  hadeeth (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him) and then the speaker will say اَمَّا بَعْد (ammaa ba‘d) and then actually start the talk.   اَمَّا بَعْد means, “as for what follows” — he’s basically saying “after all that…”.

قَبْلَ (qabla) means “before”.  بَعْدَ (ba‘da) means “after”.

الْأَكْل

al-’akl – the eating

الْأَكْل is actually two words.

ال means “the”.  You’ll see this word all over the place as well (kind of like how you see the word “the” all over the place in English).

If you look at calligraphy of the 99 names of Allah, you’ll see ال in front of each of them.

The cover of the Qur’aan will often have القرآن الكريم written on it.  This means “The Noble Qur’aan”.  Notice that both القرآن and الكريم have ال in front of them.

The second word here is أَكْل which means “eating”.

In our Arabic Alphabet song you’ll see this a couple of times:

In the song, we say “Alif is for rabbit, who runs and plays…”

يَأْكُلُ جَزَرَاً كَي لَا يَتْعَب

ya’kulu jazaran kay la yat‘ab

“he eats carrots so he does not get tired”

يَأْكُلُ means “he eats”.  Notice that it has the same letters that are in أَكْل which means “eating”.

There’s one more instance of أَكْل in the Arabic Alphabet song and even an instance of بَعْدَ but we’ll leave those for you to find as a fun exercise 🙂

So in summary, here are the words that we learned today:

Our next post in this series will be on the next few words: بِسّمِ الله