Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

 I am so into this book right now; I would read it to my SOAR class but...  The selective, but effective, use of profanity prevents that.  Still, students of any language (especially an old one) would do well to remember the following exchange between the titular character, Alif, an American academic and a jinn named Vikram:

"... How do you translate ذرة in your English interpretation [of the Quran]?"
"Atom," [she] said.
"You do not find that strange considering atoms were unknown in the sixth century?"
[She] chewed her lip.  "I never thought of that," she said.  "You're right.  There's no way atom is the original meaning of the word."
"Ah."  Vikram held up two fingers in a sign of benediction.  He looked, Alif thought, like some sort of demonic caricature of a saint.  "But it is.  In the twentieth century, atom became the original meaning of ذرة, because an atom was the tiniest object known to man.  Then man split the atom.  Today, the original meaning might be hadron.  But why stop there?  Tomorrow, it might be quark.  In a hundred years, some vanishingly small object so foreign to the human mind that only Adam remembers its name.  Each of those will be the original meaning of ذرة."
Alif snorted.  "That's impossible. ذرة must refer to some fundamental thing.  It's attached to an object. 
"Yes it is.  The smallest indivisible particle.  That is the meaning packaged in the world.  No part of it lifts out--it does not mean smallest, nor indivisible, nor particle, but all those things at once.  Thus, in man's infancy, ذرة was a grain of sand.  Then an atom.  And so on.  Man's knowledge of the universe may grow, but ذرة does not change."
...
"I don't understand," said Alif.  "What does this have to do with The Thousand and One Days?  It's not a holy book.  Not even to the jinn.  It's a bunch of fairy tales with double meanings that we can't figure out."
"How dense and literal it is..."
"Your mother's dense," Alif said wearily.
"My mother was an errant crest of sea foam.  But that's neither here nor there.  Stories are words, Alif, and words, like ذرة, sometimes represent much grander things..."

G. Willow, Wilson. Alif the Unseen. New York: Grove Press, 2012. 207-208.  

What really interests me is how I am reading this two years after this article by Rober Krulwich tickled my fancy in a similar way.  Krulwich tells a story of the (not-quite-yet-Buddha) prince Siddhartha contesting for his bride-to-be.  One challenge in these contests is a mathematical problem: how many Xs in a yojana (~10 kilometers) where X is the smallest possible unit imaginable.  And he's not far wrong!  He estimates the approximate size of a carbon atom. 

The moral of the stories?  Just because someone lived a thousand, two thousand or more millennia ago does not de facto make them a moron. 

That, or the Buddha was a jinn, but that's mixing mythologies.  ;)