Muslims need translations to read Koran

When we non-Muslims venture to offer our views about the Koran, Muslims typically inform us that we don’t have a right to an opinion on that subject, because we don’t know Arabic. The Koran can only be understood properly in the original language, they tell us, and Muslims all learn Arabic for this purpose. Well, as it turns out, most Muslims, including Arabs, are no more able to read the Koran in the original classical Arabic than we are. Here are excerpts from a talk by Ibn Warraq, author of Why I Am Not A Muslim, delivered at the Americans for a Safe Israel conference, New York City, December 5, 2004.

Muslims in general have a tendency to disarm any criticisms of Islam and in particular the Koran by asking if the critic has read the Koran in the original Arabic, as though all the difficulties of their Sacred Text will somehow disappear once the reader has mastered the holy language and has direct experience, aural and visual, of the very words of God, to which no translation can do justice.

However, the majority of Muslims are not Arabs or Arabic speaking peoples. The non-Arabic speaking nations of Indonesia with a population of 197 million, Pakistan with 133 million, Iran with 62 million, Turkey with 62 million, India with a Muslim population of about 95 million, out- number by far the total number of native Arabic speakers in about thirty countries in the world estimated as 150 million.

In other words, the majority of Muslims have to read the Koran in translation in order to understand it. Contrary to what one might think, there have been translations of the Koran into, for instance, Persian since the tenth or eleventh century, and there are translations into Turkish and Urdu.

Even for contemporary Arabic–speaking peoples, reading the Koran is far from being a straightforward matter. The Koran is putatively written in what we call Classical Arabic, but modern Arab populations, leaving aside the problem of illiteracy in Arab countries, do not speak, read, or write, let alone think in Classical Arabic.

Though some scholars do allow for some change and decay, they paint a totally misleading picture of the actual linguistic situation in modern Arabic speaking societies. These scholars imply that anyone able to read a modern Arabic newspaper should have no difficulties with the Koran or any classical Arabic text. They seem totally insensitive “to the evolution of the language, to changes in the usage and meaning of terms over the very long period and in the very broad area in which Classical Arabic has been used.” Anyone who has lived in the Middle East in recent years will know that the language of the press is at best semi-literary, and certainly simplified as far as structure and vocabulary are concerned. For an average middle class Arab it would take considerable effort to construct even the simplest sentence, let alone talk, in Classical Arabic.

The style of the Koran is difficult, totally unlike the prose of today, and the Koran would be largely incomprehensible without glossaries, indeed entire commentaries. In conclusion, even the most educated of Arabs will need some sort of a translation if he or she wished to make sense of that most gnomic, elusive and allusive of holy scriptures, the Koran. [Emphasis added.]

The Koran is indeed a rather opaque text but it is opaque to everyone. Even Muslim scholars do not understand a fifth of it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 12, 2005 12:18 AM | Send