Prashant: Translation of which Qur'an? Hafs or warsh or 30 other Qur'ans?

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Apr 8, 2021 at 18:07

Prashant:

Well, if your question is: Can we translate the Qur'an? My answer would be: Which Qur'an? Othman's Mushaf (Codex)? The answer is no because we do not have it.

So what do we have? We have what Muslims call روايات or "Novels" and one of them is رواية حفص عن عاصم or the version of the Qur'an of the "novel" or Hafs from 'Asem or رواية ورش عن نافع or the "novel" of Warsh from Nafi'? One canonized in Cairo and one in Tunisia this past century, yes this past century and not 1400 years ago. So which one would you want to be translated and they are very different? Notice that both Rawis transmitted the Qur'an orally! or so we are told.

More? Western scholarship in the past 100 years proved again and again that the Qur'an that al-Tabari (Allah's editor in-chief) was editing in the late 2nd and early 3rd century and it was was a text of unknown provenance and he was struggling with reading the words (example in Surat al-Fatiha: MLK is it Maalki or Maliki and if this was indeed was transmitted orally then he would have been able without any hesitation to know if the Rasm of MLK was Maaliki or Maliki)

So let us say we decided to translate Hafs Qur'an. We all know by now that the Qur'an is "Text with no context" and the context was made up 2-3 centuries later. So it was Muslims trying to explain what the Qur'an is saying by creating "context" through the Ahadith and the Sira and al-tafsir and non of it is real or trustworthy.

So what do we do now more so when almost every 5th word in the Qur'an (see Puin) has no clear meaning? And what do we do with words that have no meaning and there are plenty of them in the Qur'an? and what do we do with foreign words? and what do we do with sentences that have no clear meaning? and what do we do with mistakes in grammar and very strange syntax? An example of sentences that have no meaning in in Surat Sad: 3 as I explained in another post

The only way out is to translate what we know and to leave untranslated (transliterate instead) what we do not know. However, the reality is no brave Muslim or non Muslim would be able to admit that he/she can translate only what they know.

Last, I urge you to check CIRA International YouTube channel. al-Fadi was able to find, with the help of his team at least 30 versions of Qur'an! It is hard to believe right? And this is indeed why al-Azhar university in 1923 decided to have only one copy on the Qur'an! Why? because there were many versions of Qur'ans in Egypt.

I would love to have a copy of a Qur'an printed in India in Arabic some 100 years ago because every time I read Yusuf Ali's translation I always discover very odd Rasm (the basic layer of the Qur'an) in the Arabic text that is very different from the 1923-1924 Cairo Qur'an

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