The Message of the Qur`an - Muhammad Asad - (6)

[Peter Kellett]

test
"Anjum" <anj...@msn.com> wrote in message
news:f7KZ7.3227$iM....@news1.bloor.is...
> In the name of the Most Merci-giving
>
> Foreword [Continues from previous]
>
> Another (and no less important) point which the translator must take fully
> into account is the ijaz of the Qur'an: that inimitable ellipticism which
> often deliberately omits intermediate thought-clauses in order to express
> the final stage of an idea as pithily and concisely as is possible within
> the limitation of a human language. This method of ijaz is, as I have
> explained, a peculiar, integral aspect of the Arabic language, and has
> reached its utmost perfection in the Qur'an. In order to render its
meaning
> into a language which does not function in a similarly elliptical manner,
> the thought-links which are missing - that is, deliberately omitted - in
the
> original must be supplied by the translator in the form of frequent
> interpolations between brackets; for, unless this is done, the Arabic
phrase
> concerned loses all its life in the translation and often becomes a
> meaningless jumble.
>
> Furthermore, one must beware of rendering, in each and every case, the
> religious terms used in the Qur'an in the sense which they have acquired
> after Islam had become "institutionalized" into a definite set of laws,
> tenets and practices. However legitimate this "institutionalization" may
be
> in the context of Islamic religious history, it is obvious that the Qur'an
> cannot be correctly understood if we read it merely in the light of later
> ideological developments, losing sight of its original purport and the
> meaning which it had - and was intended to have - for the people who first
> heard it from the lips of the Prophet himself. For instance, when his
> contemporaries heard the words islam and muslim, they understood them as
> denoting man's "self-surrender to God" and "one who surrenders himself to
> God", without limiting these terms to any specific community or
> denomination - e.g., in 3:67, where Abraham is spoken of as having
> "surrendered himself unto God" (kana musliman), or in 3:52, where the
> disciples of Jesus say, "Bear you witness that we have surrendered
ourselves
> unto God (bi-anna muslimun)". In Arabic, this original meaning has
remained
> unimpaired, and no Arab scholar has ever become oblivious of the wide
> connotation of these terms. Not so, however, the non-Arab of our day,
> believer and non-believer alike: to him, islam and muslim usually bear a
> restricted, historically circumscribed significance, and apply exclusively
> to the followers of the Prophet Muhammad. Similarly, the term kufr
("denial
> of the truth") and kafir ("one who denies the truth") have become, in the
> conventional translations of the Qur'an, unwarrantably simplified into
> "unbelief" and "unbeliever" or "infidel", respectively, and have thus been
> deprived of the wide spiritual meaning which the Qur'an gives to these
> terms. Another example is to be found in the conventional rendering of the
> word kitab, when applied to the Qur'an, as "book": for, when the Qur'an
was
> being revealed (and we must not forget that this process took twenty-three
> years), those who listened to its recitation did not conceive of it as a
> "book" - since it was compiled into one only some decades after the
> Prophet's death - but rather, in view of the derivation of the noun kitab
> from the verb kataba ("he wrote" or, tropically, "he ordained"), as a
> "divine writ" or a "revelation". The same holds true with regard to the
Qur'
> anic use of this term in its connotation of earlier revealed scriptures:
for
> the Qur'an often stresses the fact that those earlier instances of divine
> writ have largely been corrupted in the course of time, and that the
extant
> holy "books" do not really represent the original revelations.
Consequently,
> the translation of ahl al-kitab as "people of the book" is not very
> meaningful; in my opinion, the term should be rendered as "followers of
> earlier revelation".
>
>
> [more to come]
>
> http://www.nuradeen.com
>
> http://www.islamicperspectives.com
>
>
>
>