Modifying the Qur'an

Having already spent a year in prison, Ahmad Ghaws Zalmai is facing the death penalty in Afghanistan for "modifying the Qur'an," according to this article by Heidi Vogt of the Associated Press. But his alleged crime, more specifically, is that he was responsible for the printing of a translation of the Qur'an that "did not include the original Arabic verses alongside the translation."

Vogt continues, "It's a particularly sensitive detail for Muslims, who regard the Arabic Quran as words given directly by God. A translation is not considered a Quran itself, and a mistranslation could warp God's word."

The article doesn't explain exactly how Zalmai's translation "modifies" the Qur'an, just that it does.

I've touched on this belief that the Qur'an cannot be translated in a previous post, in which I quoted a passage from Irshad Manji's The Trouble With Islam Today. In that post I wrote,

On the one hand, many Muslims insist that the Qur'an cannot be translated, per se, and that any attempt inevitably corrupts the meaning of the text. On the other hand, the teachings of the Qur'an are often thought to be particularly clear. Manji asks, "if the Quran is as straightforward as the purists tell us, then aren't its teachings easily translated into a thousand tongues?" (24).

It's a good point. But it's a rational argument -- and if religious extremists could be persuaded by rational arguments, they wouldn't be extremists, would they?

The Qur'an in Translation, Part II

Men have charge of women
because Allah has preferred the one above the other
and because they spend their wealth on them.
Right acting women are obedient,
safeguarding their husbands' interests in their absence
as Allah has guarded them.
If there are women whose disobedience you fear,
you may admonish them,
refuse to sleep with them,
and then beat them. (Sura 4.34)

One of the more controversial passages from the Qur'an, as rendered in the translation by Abdalhaqq and Aisha Bewley. The final words, apparently permitting men to "beat" their disobedient wives, are a translation of the Arabic adribuhunna, which Reza Aslan, in his quite good book No god but God, focuses some attention on.

Aslan notes that the word adribuhunna can be translated "beat them," but he asserts that it "can equally mean 'turn away from them,' 'go along with them,' and, remarkably, even 'have consensual intercourse with them'" (70).

My knowledge of the Arabic language is virtually non-existent, but it seems unlikely to me that the text really means that men should have consensual intercourse with their wives for being disobedient (although the translation by Ahmed Ali, which is not very highly regarded, gives it precisely that meaning).

Aslan makes, in my opinion, a very problematic assertion:

If religion is indeed interpretation, then which meaning one chooses to accept and follow depends on what one is trying to extract from the text: if one views the Quran as empowering women, then Ali's; if one looks to the Quran to justify violence against women, then Fakhry's (a translation that, like that cited above, translates the word in question as "beat them"). (70)

While there is no question that personal biases influence which translation a person will prefer, it seems to me that Aslan is taking a rather black-and-white view of this problem. Personally, I would love to believe the Qur'an empowers women. But I'm not going to presuppose that it actually does before I read it. It seems to me that the more woman-friendly translation here is very unlikely, given the context.

Granted, I'm in a very different position from a Muslim, as I don't feel any obligation to accept what the Qur'an says.

I'll have more to say about Aslan's book very soon...

The Qur'an in Translation

Irshad Manji, in her book The Trouble With Islam Today, makes an interesting point about two widely held beliefs about the Qur'an: on the one hand, many Muslims insist that the Qur'an cannot be translated, per se, and that any attempt inevitably corrupts the meaning of the text. On the other hand, the teachings of the Qur'an are often thought to be particularly clear. Manji asks, "if the Quran is as straightforward as the purists tell us, then aren't its teachings easily translated into a thousand tongues?" (24). I hadn't thought about it before, but there is a real contradiction here.

Obviously the problem with any translation is that the source text might have a range of possible meanings, and one might argue that no translation can capture the full range. Additionally, there is the possibility that the translation might suggest meanings that are not suggested by the source text. This is why it is important for scholars to be able to read texts in their original language. I've come across numerous interpretations of passages from the New Testament that might have sounded plausible to someone who had only read it in English translation, but which could not be supported by the original Greek text.

In reality, though, there are limits to the number of plausible interpretations a text can yield. One can look at a dozen different translations of a particular passage, and while there might be significant differences in the wording, it is essentially the same meaning conveyed by all of them. When the meaning of one appears to be quite different, it is very often a bad translation. At least, that is my experience of interpreting the New Testament, in the original Greek, as well as in English and Latin translation.

In the Catholic tradition, the Greek text of the New Testament has been far less important than the Latin translation, particularly the Vulgate of St. Jerome. One might think that the prejudice against translation found in the Islam would find no parallel in the Catholic tradition. Of course, the opposite it true. Translations into vernacular languages were stringently suppressed until relatively recent times.

It's difficult to shake the suspicion that this stigma against translation is nothing more than an authoritarian attempt to control how the people understand their own tradition. Contrary to what one might think, the large majority of Muslims do not read Arabic. Like a lot of Catholics who pray in Latin, most Muslims don't really understand the words they are saying when they pray. Unless, of course, those words have been translated for them.

What is Islam? And who is a Muslim?

Religious identity can be a tricky problem. I remember one time seeing a man standing on a street corner with a sign that said "Jews for Jesus." Some time later, I was not surprised to learn that orthodox Jews deny that such a person could even exist -- that if a Jew decides to be "for Jesus," they cease to be a Jew. So as a non-Jew, what am I supposed to decide? Was the man with the sign a Jew? Whose side was I supposed to take?

Actually, this wasn't really that much of a dilemma. I was a Religious Studies major at the time, and the question of identifying a person's religious identity had been addressed in several of my classes. The simplest solution was this: if someone claims to be a Jew, we, in the field of Religious Studies, would call them a Jew.

Conversely, if someone did not identify themselves as belonging to a particular religion, we would not label them as if they did. So the Apostle Paul was not, strictly speaking, a Christian, because he never identified himself as such. Describing him as a Christian might be acceptable from an insider (i.e. Christian) perspective, but it is not from such a perspective that one partakes in the academic discipline of Religious Studies. As a Christian I can (and do) identify St. Paul as a Christian. As a student of Religious Studies, I don't. And when it comes to non-Christian religions, I'm inclined to accept that a person's religious identity is whatever they happen to say it is. So if the man on the street corner insists that he's a Jew for Jesus, I'm not going to argue with him.

It has become fashionable among well-meaning people to say that the extremist ideology espoused by Osama bin Laden is not a true form of Islam (and that, consequently, the adherents of this religion are not true Muslims). This is understandable, and there is no doubt that Islamist extremism represents in several respects a radical departure from the Islamic tradition. But as an outsider to that particular tradition, I'm not sure if I'm comfortable defining what is and is not authentic "Islam." After all, I'm not opposed to radical departures from a religious tradition. My own particularly progressive brand of Catholicism would have had me burned at the stake a few hundred years ago, and I don't have any illusions about that. Strict definitions can create the illusions that religious traditions are static and unchanging. But no religion deserves to be unchanging. The kind of Islam I would like to see would also be a radical departure from tradition -- except that it would be in the opposite direction that Osama and his ilk have taken it.