Q17:1

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Jul 27, 2008 at 13:16

Very interesting indeed and thank you Dr. Pipes for great information which I did not notice before

Well Quran 17:1 says: subhana al-ladhi aasraayi bi 3abdihu laylaan (i3rab) min al-masjad al-haram ila al-masjad al-aqsa and it means: glory to he who took his slave/servant (during the) night from the forbidden/inviobale place of prostration to the distant place of prostration (root SJD)

The above translation is tarjamit al-kilma and for this see below

Yes I realize that the tradition tells us that "al-tafseer lil sahaba wa al-ta'weel lil fuqaha" or "the exegesis (tafseer) is for the companions of Muhammad (eg: Ibn Abbas) and the exegesis (ta'weel) (by others than the companions of Muhammad) is for the doctors of islamic law or fuqaha" which really means that you can explain what the Qur'an really says but it does not mean that you are right or wrong as you were not there (only the sahaba or the companions were there) when the Qur'an was "revealed" to Muhammad. and I read this as more evidence that no one really understand what this opaque revelation is really saying (the locus classicus has always been the word Ilaf in Surat Quraish and no one seems to have a clue what it really means not back then and not now) and it is an open seaon for all. This does not mean that the Qur'an cannot be translated but one have to make a clear distiction between tarjamit al-kilma or linear translation and tarjamit al-ma3na (exegesis) or the translation of the meaning of the sentence (see Suyuti)

>Aug. 13, 2007 update: Quran: A Reformist Translation, translated and annotated by Edip Yuksel, Layth Saleh al-Shaiban, and Martha Schulte-Nafeh, offers a stunningly different translation of 17.1:

Glory be to the One who took His servant by night from the Restricted Temple to the most distant temple.

This is a very interesting translation of Q17:1

Quran: A Reformist Translation, translated and annotated by Edip Yuksel, Layth Saleh al-Shaiban, and Martha Schulte-Nafeh..

>What's so interesting here is that the translators understand masjid not in its technical Islamic meaning of mosque but in its generic pre-Islamic sense of temple. That conceptual breakthrough makes good sense to me.

The word temple means ma3bad or haykal or sadgh and it does not mean masjad and if you check the early Syriac sources about islam you will realize that we are told that the tayayye or mhgaraye (Syriac words for The Arabs that invaded the Middle east starting in 633CE) pray at a "masjida" or a place of prostration or they pray where ever they happen to be and I suspect that the Arabic word here would be a masjid or a place of prostration (sajada is the verbal noun for prostration) and we are not talking about a building here.

Now the words jami3 really means a mosque and the word masjad acquired the meaning of mosque (the building itself). So what did Muhammad call an Islamic house of worship? We will never know and we only know what the tradition told us in the 3rd century of Islam and I suspect that if Muhammad indeed existed and if islam was really a fully fledged religion in 632CE then he would have been wondering about what is really a jami3 (mosque) and what is really a masjad (mosque) and yes al-masjad al-aqsa is the first mosque/jami3 in the history of islam and what is amazing about it it looks like a Byzantine Chruch which indeed makes you wonder that the Arabs were still working out what is really a masjad and what is really a jami3? and they were imitating what the old civilizations of the Middle East have done from time immemorial as in the need for having an enclosed space to worship as rain or snow have never been issues in the. Hijaz

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