and a warner, but most of them turn aside so they hear not.) and in Surah 41:44
they would certainly have said: Why have not its communications been
made clear? What! A foreign (tongue) and an Arabian! Say: It is to those
who believe a guidance and a healing; and (as for) those who do not
believe, there is a heaviness in their ears and it is obscure to them; these
shall be called to from a far-off place.
came to earth. As a result, Muslims have traditionally claimed that it is essentially
untranslatable; its recitation must be performed in Arabic, regardless of one's native
tongue, if that recitation is truly to be of Allah's own words. The pseudonymous writer
Ibn Warraq (1995:xiii) indicates he grew up in an Islamic republic (which he leaves
unidentified), and: "Even before I could read or write the national language I learned to
read the Koran in Arabic without understanding a word of it a common experience for
thousands of Muslim children." Such is the fastidious commitment of Moslems to holy
writ in the language of heaven.
revelation...the doctrine [of its inspiration] applies both to its form and its substance."
This is why Pickthall called his English translation The Meaning of the Glorious Qur'an
while A.J. Arberry (cited in ibid) would call it The Koran Interpreted. The reticence
regarding translation also was made evident in Mohamed Raza M. Dungersi's "Preface"
to the English translation (by M.H. Shakir) that I have used for this paper. Dungersi
states:
by only that scholar who is anchored in the `Quranic culture', who is also
an authority of that brand of the Arabic language that is used in the
Qur'an, and who has a complete command of the language in which he is
translating the Qur'an. Moreover, this rare scholar must also be in
complete control of all the varied and disparate intellectual disciplines that
transverse the substance and structure of the Holy Qur'an. In absence of
such a rare polymath endowed with a competence in `social sciences' and
in `pure sciences' simultaneously, a par excellent translation is, to say the
least, very unlikely.
What Dungersi offers in principle he negates in reality, as shown further in his comments
on the English translation he commends in that Preface:
perfection, as in its `correctness' in terms of the literal translation from the
original Arabic text, and by the way of its adherence to the translation