Translation
Ziauddin Sardar likes a new translation of the Koran by Tarif Khalidi.
The best way to demonstrate its newness, and how close it is to the original text, is to compare it with an old translation. The translation I have in mind is Khalidi’s predecessor in the Penguin Classics: The Koran, translated with notes by NJ Dawood…It has been a great source of discomfort for Muslims, who see in it deliberate distortions that give the Qur’an violent and sexist overtones. It is the one most non-Muslims cite when they tell me with great conviction what the Qur’an says.
Hmm. That’s interesting – because one has to wonder what Muslims Sardar has in mind. Most Muslims, certainly including most Muslims in the UK, after all, don’t know Arabic – so when these Muslims that Sardar mentions ‘see’ in Dawood’s translation ‘deliberate distortions that give the Qur’an violent and sexist overtones’ – how do they know about the distortions? Unless Sardar means only Muslims who do know Arabic – but in a UK context (which this is, being the Guardian) that would be a pretty small and rarified bunch, so you would think he would specify that was what he meant. But perhaps he didn’t mean only Muslims who know Arabic – but then what did he mean? How do Muslims in general know what is or isn’t a distortion of a translation of the Koran when they can’t read the Koran in Arabic themselves? It’s interesting that Sardar chose the word ‘see’ there. That’s consistent with just seeing violent and sexist overtones and then concluding that they are the fault of the translation. It’s not a tremendously straightforward way to say things though. And then there are those wicked non-Muslims who cite Dawood’s translation. Well granted that is very naughty of them, but then what about the Muslims Sardar knows? Don’t any of them cite translations when discussing what the Koran says? Does he not know any Muslims who don’t know Arabic? In short, is he trying to bamboozle the reader? I kind of think he is.
Dawood translates Az-Zumar (chapter 39) as “The Hordes”, suggesting bands of barbarian mobs; Khalidi renders it as “The Groups”…The old Penguin translation uses rather obscurantist images throughout to give the impression that the Qur’an is full of demons and witches. For example, in 31:1, Dawood has God swearing “by those who cast out demons”. Khalidi translates the same verse as: “Behold the revelations of the Wise Book.”
Okay. But which is more accurate? Sardar doesn’t say. Maybe Khalidi’s is; but Sardar doesn’t say.
So this translation is a quantum leap ahead of the old Penguin version.
Not quantum; wrong word; ten points off. But more to the point: is it? There’s only one place where Sardar actually says Khalidi translates something correctly; all the rest of it has to do with whether he translates it flatteringly. That’s a different issue. It’s not clear that a more flattering translation is a leap ahead. It may be a more accurate translation, but one can’t tell whether it is or not from Sardar’s review. That’s either careless or…not.
Sadar says that the “correct” translation of the famous verse often translated as men in the garden of paradise being “wedded to chaste virgins” is…. “In these gardens they have immaculate spouses.” How’s that for obscure. What does it mean? Their wives are nicely turned out? Their wives are returned to a virginal state? Their wives are replaced by virgins? It might be poetic by some standards, but it far from clear. Funny, that.
Well I took that to be a gender-neutral term – but I also found that somewhat credulity-straining. Damn – any Koran experts who do know Arabic reading this? Is it really gender-neutral?
Actually another reason for strained credulity is that if that were the case, surely we would have heard about it some 9 bilion times by now. I haven’t heard that before.
Does it not depend to a large extent on whether one chooses a literal interpretation of the Koran?
Translations on top of translations on top of interpretations on top of etc.
Does it not depend to a large extent on whether one chooses a literal interpretation of the Koran?
Translations on top of translations on top of interpretations on top of etc.
Does Khalidi’s revision mean that women also get to have their 72 immaculate spouses? I might yet convert!As might those with same-sex preferences. I have a feeling the islamists might soon be burning Khalidi’s Qu’ran on the streets of Lahore. Penguin will be accused of stealth attempts to destroy the faith.
I am tempted to try and out do DFG by responding in triplicate.
Mirax I think the final straw will be the prophet Mohamadette peace be upon her.
So it’s the English translation that’s responsible for the “Qur’an violent and sexist overtones.”? Sounds like the Taliban, the Saudis, and most other Muslims have been reading the English translation then. Someone give them the real thing, for Allah’s sake!! Presumably it promotes pacifism and the equality of women…
>Sounds like the Taliban, the Saudis, and most other Muslims have been reading the English translation then.< Wonderful! Over to you, Sardar. Sardar on the Qur’an:
>How close does it get to communicating the meaning of the original, that inimitable oral text, the very sounds of which move men and women to tears and ecstasy?< So we know that any commentary by Sardar on the meaning of the Qur’an is dispassionately objective.
And also that Sardar is really sharp. He doesn’t pause to consider that the being moved to ecstasy by the very sounds might possibly be connected to knowing that the sounds are supposed to be holy.
You know, whenever I read about the UN HRC I also read that Slovenia is valiantly speaking up for the sane view and then I remember that Tea is from Slovenia. Coincidence? I think not!
:- )
Here’s an interesting non-sequitur in Sardar’s article:
“If the prophet was fallible, then most assuredly Muslim scholars of the classical and contemporary era are even more fallible.”
One might have thought exactly the reverse to be the case. Surely, later scholars can correct the mistakes of earlier ones. And if the prophet was fallible (which, of course, as a human being, he must have been), then there is no reason for thinking that later generations cannot correct his mistakes, moral and otherwise.
For instance, the Qur’an contains numerous examples of having been influenced by Jewish or Christian scriptures. Clearly, Muhammad must have picked them up at second, third and fourth hand from local believers who had an imperfect grasp of their sacred stories. A study of these influences would certainly be less likely to be wrong than an unquestioning acceptance of the Qur’an’s account of these beliefs as reliable.
Someone responded to Sardar’s reference (in his second article, “Remaking History”) to Ibn Ishaq’s Life of Muhammad by suggesting that it depicts Muhammad as unpleasant and immoral, which it does, and that this is hardly likely to commend Islam to non-believers. The conclusion?
“If Islam is forced to rely on Ibn Ishaq to make sense of the Quran then the game really is up.”
Well, doesn’t that mean that the game really is up? After all, the Sirah (including Ibn Ishaq’s Life) is accepted as one of the primary sources of Islam. And yet there is not one comment (so far as I can tell) by a non-Muslim on the Sardar-Bunting triptych of articles. Usually, Guardian blog articles attract hundreds of responses, often unkind. In this case, only a few, none seriously critical. What explains this unnatural reticence?
Oh, by the way, regarding the translation of 31.1 (2 in the Pickthall translation), Pickthall is basically the same as Khalidi. Here’s how it reads in the Everyman Qur’an. “These are revelations of the wise Scripture.” Of course, this doesn’t prove that this is literally what is said, and I have no Arabic.
Great point. That is indeed a fascinating non sequitur. I suppose he was thinking something like…even if the proph was fallible, he was still the proph, so much less fallible than ordinary people, and Muslim scholars of course come after him and derive their wisdom from him and are not prophets themselves, so on all these counts they must be even more fallible. Not so much standing on the shoulders of giants as diluting the pure clean water.
I don’t know about this Sardar-Bunting triptych, must find it.
Oh right, it’s the blogging the Koran thing. I didn’t realize Bunting was taking part. I’ve been meaning to look at it but haven’t gotten around to it…I wonder if the sparse comments hint that other readers also haven’t gotten around, or if the Guardian is throwing most of them out. Touchy subject, no doubt…
I get it; the proph was less fallible non sequitur comes from ‘Remaking history’ not from the article on translation. (I didn’t realize the translation article was part of the Koran series, I thought it was a stand-alone.)
I love this comment on the latest Madeline Bunting piece on the “Blogging the Qu’ran” website:
>I’ve wandered into this by mistake. Where’s the Blogging Darwin threads?<
So did I!
I posted a comment meself, but who knows if it will make it past Madders.
I don’t have a copy of Dawood’s translation, but Sura 31 is reproduced on http://www.nathanielturner.com/luqmandawoodtranslation.htm
It begins with – guess what? – “These are the revelations of the wise Book”. Even I can see (from the USC-MSA website’s transliteration) that the verse has the word ‘kitab’ (i.e. book) in it, so Sardar’s report of Dawood’s “by those who cast out demons” is a little, shall we say, careless.
Oh, I do know some Arabic then, because this (‘kitab’) is the same word as the Urdu word for book (often used in Hindi instead of the Hindi word pushtuk).
Ah, Adrian – I’ve been meaning to ask you what you think of Sardar’s review.
Yes, indeed, and, since Adrian has written so capably about the Qur’an, perhaps he could also explain in a bit more detail how the process of abrogation works. Since extra-Qur’anical texts are used in order to assess whether a verse is or is not abrogated, how do Muslims maintain their view of the Qur’an as a matchless piece of text (which, presumably, means, in itself)?
Eric
“How do Muslims maintain their view of the Qur’an as a matchless piece of text?”. How indeed!
As a quick response: I think it’s because Muslims believe that everything in the Quran is literally, undeniably true. The Quran says (or at least hints) that it is perfect and inimitable, so that must be the case, so that’s what Muslims tell us and each other. The Quran also describes how ‘God’ sometimes replaces one verse by a better one, so that makes abrogation a divinely-sanctioned piece of dogma.
I was always puzzled as to how text in the Quran could be abrogated by non-Quran material, but I believe it goes back to the Quran itself: somewhere (I forget where) it tells Muslims to follow both it and Muhammad, thereby allowing Muhammad’s rules to complement or supersede Quran rules. Weird, but that’s the wacky world of theology for you.
What do I think of Sardar’s review? Don’t get me started. It seems to possess the type of mindset that even educated Muslims seem unable to avoid: a mixture of conspiracy theory and victimhood. Dawood (a Jew) is guilty of ‘deliberate distortions’: can it be coincidence that Verse (4:46) tells us: “Some of the Jews pervert words from their meanings…”: a reference to the Islamic belief that the Jews altered the scriptures that they were given. Since everything in the Quran is true, then this is the sort of thing that Jews do: QED. Yes, it could be me that’s paranoid – you’ll have to call it the way you see it.
Unfortunately, conspiracy theory and victimhood go down a storm in Al-Guardian.
I mentioned Sardar’s odd account of the start of Sura 31 above. The remark about the ‘hordes’ is misleading also: the word refers to groups of unbelievers and groups of believers and uses the same Arabic word for both. I’m sure that Muslims would have no objection to the use of ‘hordes’ if it referred only to unbelievers.
Re. OB’s comment earlier: when the Arabs didn’t think the Quran was holy (i.e. the 1st 13 years, when Mo lived in Mecca) they were so underwhelmed by it that he accumulated only about 100 followers in the entire time. And like the early posters, I like Khalidi’s idea that Heaven is full of Stepford wives.
I could rant on and on, but I’m shortly off on a long weekend trip – cheers.
FYI, there are so few commenters on the Quran blog because it is especially heavily PRE-moderated -Georgina Henry admitted to this special protection for this blog- and also, because many of the critical commenters have stayed away in protest(I have read the occasional comment alluding to this). How else could a bunting + islam blog survive intellectual scrutiny?
So when is Georgina Henry planning to do this for the Bible, one wonders, and who will play the parts of Sardar and Bunting? I can hardly wait to find out.
Whaddya know, my comment made it past the filter. I was careful to be mild, of course.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/quran/2008/06/madeleine_week_25.html
This does raise questions of the freedom of the press with a vengeance. Why does Islam get gentle treatment? The point that Jylands-Posten was trying to make with the motoons needed to be made, and still needs to be made. This is an incredibly disturbing occurrence. Thanks to mirax for the info.
Islam gets gentle treatment? So the scare tales and rece baiting in the Tabloid news are gentle?
>FYI, there are so few commenters on the Quran blog because it is especially heavily PRE-moderated – Georgina Henry admitted to this special protection for this blog-…< >This does raise questions of the freedom of the press with a vengeance.< I really don’t see a problem here. The weblog was set up for discussion of the interpretation of the Qur’an. It’s entirely up to the people who set up the blog to place restrictions on commenters when they attempt to post comments that do not relate to the purpose of the blog. An analogy. Suppose there was a weblog set up specifically for the discussion of interpretations of relativity theory, and of the scope of its validity. If this were on a well-known website, there are plenty of people out there (and I’ve done a lot of websurfing on this) who would jump at the opportunity of bringing up all sorts of extraneous claims about Einstein (plagiarism, etc, etc) that fall outside the purpose of the blog. It would then be perfectly legitimate for the editor to limit the comments to the purpose of the blog, interpretation of relativity theory.