Fitna (word)

Fitna (or fitnah, pl. fitan; Arabic: فتنة , فتن‎: "temptation, trial; sedition, civil strife") is an Arabic word with extensive connotations of trial, affliction, or distress. A word freighted with important historical implications, it is also widely used in modern Arabic. As with any word in Arabic, one should distinguish between the meanings of fitna as used in Classical Arabic and the meanings of fitna as used in Modern Standard Arabic and various colloquial dialects. Furthermore, because of the conceptual importance of fitna in the Qur'an, its use in that work will be considered separately, though in addition to, the word's general lexical meaning in Classical Arabic.

Root and forms

Arabic, in common with other Semitic languages like Hebrew, deploys a system of root letters combined with vowel patterns to constitute its whole range of vocabulary; it is, therefore, essential to identify the root letters of any word, in order to better understand the word's full semantic range.

Fitna

Fitna may refer to:

Word

In linguistics, a word is the smallest element that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content (with literal or practical meaning). This contrasts deeply with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own. A word may consist of a single morpheme (for example: oh!, rock, red, quick, run, expect), or several (rocks, redness, quickly, running, unexpected), whereas a morpheme may not be able to stand on its own as a word (in the words just mentioned, these are -s, -ness, -ly, -ing, un-, -ed). A complex word will typically include a root and one or more affixes (rock-s, red-ness, quick-ly, run-ning, un-expect-ed), or more than one root in a compound (black-board, rat-race). Words can be put together to build larger elements of language, such as phrases (a red rock), clauses (I threw a rock), and sentences (He threw a rock too, but he missed).

The term word may refer to a spoken word or to a written word, or sometimes to the abstract concept behind either. Spoken words are made up of units of sound called phonemes, and written words of symbols called graphemes, such as the letters of the English alphabet.