Two Troublesome Thoughts, In Increasing Order

(1) This morning, I was reading through some chapters of a Mediaeval text called The Wisdom of the Prophets (Fusus al-Hikam) written by the Spanish mystic Muhyi-d-din Ibn' Arabi. The edition that I was browsing through was an English translation from a French translation from the Arabic. What if I were to spend the next two years learning Arabic so that I become proficient enough to re-translate the English back to Arabic? Would I be able to come up to the beauty of Ibn'Arabi's Arabic prose?

(2) In the afternoon, I was walking towards Sainsbury's when I saw a little girl, around two years old, being taught how to walk by her father. Now the very first question that we ask when we are told that Miss X has had a baby is whether the baby is a boy or a girl. I am beginning to wonder if five years down the line that question will become outlawed as politically incorrect (at least in the West) : why zoom down into the baby's sex (or should I say gender?) when you can ask a potentially infinite number of other questions such as 'Is it overweight or underweight?', 'Does it have two hands?', 'Does it have brown hair?', 'Does it cry too much?' and so on and on?