I have seen more than one post here say that
Islam means
peace, and, while the connection between the two words isn't nonexistent—for reasons that I will clarify in this post—it is clearly not the case that
Islam means such. The word actually means
submission;
peace is
salaam, not
Islam.
To explain the fairly subtle connection between the words
Islam and
salaam, which may be the reason for the conflation between the meanings of the two by some people, I'm going to have to touch on three fundamentals of the Arabic language:
1) Derivation of nouns from verbs
2) Verb roots
3) The omission of additions to verb roots to reach the verb root's basic form, which is used to search for it in an Arabic dictionary.
Obviously, since I have to explain mostly in English, I won't be able to get into all of the nuances of these rules, but hopefully I'll be able to explain enough to achieve the purpose of this thread. Furthermore, to avoid lengthening the explanation more than is necessary, I'm going to avoid using diacritics unless they're absolutely necessary for clarity.
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1) Derivation of nouns from verbs:
In Arabic, there are two types of nouns: derived nouns and "rigid" nouns, which aren't derived from any verbs. There is what is called a "balance of verbs" that determines the noun denoting the action that the verb refers to, and it is based on the word
فعل ("[he] did"), in the masculine past tense form.
Note that when you want to derive a noun from an Arabic verb, you generally conjugate the verb in the masculine past tense. (There is only one form for the past tense of verbs in Arabic, unlike in English.) This is the starting point, and it determines what type the verb belongs to out of four possible types:
1)
Tholathy, with three letters in its masculine past tense form
2)
Robaay, with four letters in its masculine past tense form
3)
Khomasy, with five letters in its masculine past tense form
4)
Sodasy, with six letters in its masculine past tense form.
With some exceptions, each of these types have certain patterns that they follow when they are used to derive nouns. In the case of the two words
Islam and
salaam, these are the respective verbs from which they are derived, juxtaposed with
their counterparts in the "balance of verbs," i.e., the standard forms they take:
1) Islam:
أسلم
أفعل
2) Salaam:
سلم
فعل
In the case of verbs taking the form
أفعل, like
أسلم, their corresponding nouns take this form:
إفعال
So
أسلم (
aslama) makes
إسلام (
Islam).
أسلم (
aslama) means "[he] submitted," hence
Islam's meaning, "submission."
In the case of the verb
سَلِمَ (
salima), meaning "[he] became safe," it makes
سلام (
salaam), meaning "peace." (Note that I used diacritics in the case of the verb
salima because otherwise it is very easy to confuse with other verbs made up of the same three letters.)
So we can see that "peace" and "submission" are two different words in Arabic and are derived from different verbs. But where is the subtle connection that I mentioned in the beginning of the post? This is where I touch on the second thing I mentioned in the beginning:
2) Verb roots:
The vast majority of Arabic verbs can be broken down into three-letter roots. This is first done through the "balance of verbs" by juxtaposing the verb with its counterpart in the standard form:
أسلم
أفعل
سَلِمَ
فَعِلَ
This gets me to the third and final point of the explanation:
3) The omission of additions to verb roots to reach the verb root's basic form, which is used to search for it in an Arabic dictionary:
In the vast majority of cases, to reach the root of an Arabic verb, you need to carry out step (2) as in the above and then omit all letters that are added to the word
فعل, on which the balance of Arabic verbs is based, as I said in the beginning of the post. So we get this:
أسلم
أفعل
This is a
mazeed verb, meaning that it has one or more letters than are in the base form and that they can be removed while maintaining the meaningfulness of the remaining word. It is a
robaay verb, so there is only one letter that we are going to remove to turn it into the three-letter root by only leaving the word
فعل:
أسلم
أفعل
After removing the extra letter (colored blue), we end up with this:
سلم
Written in the root form with the letters separated, we get
(س ل م).
Now let's do the same with the verb
salima:
سَلِمَ
فَعِلَ
We get this:
(س ل م), which is the same root the verb
أسلم has.
So, while Islam and salaam are derived from different verbs and have different meanings, the verbs from which they are derived have the same root. This doesn't mean that they are synonyms, however—Islam means submission while salaam means peace, regardless of their verbs' having the same root and regardless of the slight similarity in the way both words sound.
Finally, sorry if this post was too long. I wanted to be as precise as possible without getting into details that would be unnecessary to the purpose of this thread in addition to possibly being too complicated to explain with little or no Arabic writing.
