Q14:4 and translations of the Qur'an

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Jun 26, 2008 at 06:21

I very much agree with you that you do not have to go any further than Q14:4 (and there are other verses in the Qur'an that stress the same) and the concept of al-wali wa al-mawali to realize that indeed Islam is the religion of the Hijazi Arabs only.

>I don't accept this, believing all languages are translatable such that the meaning of the original can be communicated, and don't believe that 7th.century Arabic is incapable of being adequately translated. Neither does M.A.S.Abdel-Haleem, an Egyptian born, al-Azhar educated hafiz Qur'an, Professor of Islamic studies and Director of the Centre of Islamic Studies, at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and who says of his translation, "The Qur'an, A New Translation," that he intends to "go further than previous works in accuracy, clarity , flow, and currency of language." A pity I can't find it online, otherwise I would be quoting him.

I'm not familiar with Abd al-Haleem's work. The difficulty with translating the Qur'an as I wrote before is which Qur'an should be translated? The original rasm that we do not know what it really means? And how can this be done without a new masora activiy? and you can see what happened to Prof Abu Zaid when he proposed that the Qur'an should be read as literature at a point in time? Or the Cairo Qur'an? or the Tunisian Qur'an?But if it is to be either the Cairo or the tunisian Qur'an then we will have more of the same

And there are indeed good translations, as i indicated before, and they happen to be by Arabs. I like Rashad Khalifa's translation and yes he was a nut case but he knew his Arabic grammar very well

The worst translations are by Pakistanis and the most shameful one is that of Yusuf Ali. You might be aware that there is a project here in the US to correct his tendentious, poor and at times bizarre translation

The other difficulty with the Qur'an or the history of early islam is that without reading the history of the Middle East in the late antique period and without real knowledge of Syriac and Hebrew and Greek (and oh there is even a Latin word in the Qur'an and that is Sarat and an Ethiopian word or two eg: haawaariyuun) so how can Abd al-haleem be able to provide us with a good translation if he is, as I suspect, in not fluent in the above languages?

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