INSHALLAH
You are in the grocery store…Can I have my shopping delivered? Inshallah - the cashier replies. Will I get a call tomorrow? Will the plane arrive on time? Will I get my telephone line connected? Inshallah…
Impatience sets in…It appears that every little request or question is answered with an ambiguous Inshallah. Soon you find yourself wondering YES??? …NO??? What is it, dammit????
At first, the concept of Inshallah seems difficult to grasp for us, the clueless foreigner infidels.
You look it up in your dictionary. Inshallah literally means ‘God’s willing’ but it soon becomes clear that it’s meaning goes a lot further than that, and it is an integral part of the culture and its deep religious identity.
Yet, you still need to know if your groceries will be delivered? Inshallah Yes? You ask. Yes, five-ten minutes, inshallah. That normally means that it will be delivered sometime during the day.
****PS: A curiosity from my beloved Wikipedia:
The Spanish phrase, ojalá (que), and the Portuguese phrase, oxalá (que), are both derived from the Arabic law šāʾ Allāh (as in Inshallah) This phrase is an example of the many words borrowed from Arabic due to the Muslim rule of some areas of the Iberian Peninsula from the eighth to fifteenth centuries.
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