What can Mr. Kahttab learn from The Persians Mufasereen and the earliest "translations" of the Qur'an!

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Apr 30, 2021 at 12:22

Dear readers: as was mentioned before, 'Ali Dashti claims that 70% of the books of Islam (be it al-Ahadith, al-Tarikh, al-Tafsir) were written not by Arabs but by Persians. And in the case of the Ahadith literature, the so called 6 collections of al-Ahadith al-Sahiha were written by non Arabs and almost all of them were Persians

https://mawdoo3.com/%D9%85%D8%A7_%D9%87%D9%8A_%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%83%D8%AA%D8%A8_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%A9

In the case of al-Tabari he was born in Tabaristan which is about 2760 kilometers from Mecca! He wrote his books some 250-300 years after the death of Muhammad!

The Iranian Mufasereen realized that the Qur'an is a very difficult book to translate, because the context was not known and it had to be invented. But more significant facts is that the Qur'an has many words that have no clear meaning, grammatical mistakes when the grammar of the Quranic text is compared with the 3rd century grammar of Classical Arabic, many foreign words, strange syntax as in the case of al-Iltifat (which will be discussed during reading of Q4:3).

And in typical Iranian way we have a "translation" dated to the late 9th or early 10th century AD. Michael Cook's comment on the text of the translation: "Here the Arabic text appears in a large bold Naskhi script beneath it in small and typically Persian hand is a humble word-by-word Persian translation.....and the Arabic word order overrides the normal syntactic pattern of the Persian..."

And the outcome is an interlinear translation of the text. the order of the words in Persian might not make sense because "the verbs come early in the verses instead of at the end."

And may be a lesson for those translating the Qur'an to English is to do "Interlinear Translation" than what is becoming Tafsir and not Tarjama.

BTW: In the Persian text the word Allah is translated as the Persian: خدا وند and not Allah

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".