Quick question to Arab friends

osher

Jedi
I have difficulty finding confirmation for this:
Firstly the well known translation of 'Al-Qaeda' is ‘The Base,’ which is actually not the the only translation of the ominous term. Al-Qaeda also translates to ‘The Toilet.’ The Arabic word ‘Qa’ada’ means ‘to sit’ {on the toilet bowl}. Arab homes have three kinds of toilets: ‘Hamam Franji’ or ‘Al-Qaeda’ or foreign toilet, ‘Hamam Arabi’ or Arab toilet, and a potty used for children called ‘Ma Qa’adia’ or ‘Little Qaeda.’ ‘Ana raicha Al Qaeda’ is a colloquial expression for ‘I’m going to the toilet.’ Why would a terrorist group call itself ‘The Toilet’?
(from http://theinfounderground.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5367)
What do you say? It became matter in dispute on facebook with my acquaintances.
 
Qaad means to sit down and in toilet Western type toilet you sit down, so it is not wrong in that way. Yet Al-Qaeda is not exactly like toilet, because Qaeda's exact translation may be "base", but also fits in with "pedestal". In Arabic Language, one single root can mean all kinds of things if you change one letter. Qaad may be the root for this toilet(which I have never heard, but I am not using Arabic everyday, so I wouldn't know) but with a single change in letter these two words, toilet and base are completely different from each other. So, to say that these are the same is not correct. We can only say they share the same root: Qaad which can mean to sit down, to be placed etc.
 
"al qaida" is the arabic name for "the base", it means literraly "the sitting" or the "the sitting one". So many derivatives from the root "to sit" may also be deduced. However, the form "al qa'ida" today is mostly used for the base as in a military base for example.
 
Thanks! So, not confirmed - yet. Maybe someone somewhere uses this word as such, but it's not very popular. "Pedestal" and "to sit" makes some sense though.
 
I was once told that it meant "database", but that could just be a potential derivative from that same root word...
 
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