Episode Transcript
[00:00:30] Speaker A: Hello, everyone. Assam Alikum. Welcome to the Islamic Mary and the A Common Word podcast.
So for today, we're. I'm super excited to have Dr. Shoka Tarawa, someone who I've been following for a long time, and I admire his work deeply, and he'll be here to speak about his book, the Devotional Quran. So welcome.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.
[00:00:51] Speaker A: All right, wonderful. So one of the things we always do in the beginning of the show is for the guests to speak about their spiritual biography and how that led them to write their particular work. So, please.
[00:01:05] Speaker B: So spiritual biography is a. Is a tricky one.
I. I was raised in a Muslim household.
Observant parents, but I lived. Maybe there shouldn't be a but in there, but. But I lived in Muslim minority context, Right. So my parents met, were from the island where they passed away from the island of Mauritius, but they met in England, and I was born there. And then I grew up in. In London, in Paris, in Hong Kong, and then in Singapore. And it wasn't until I reached Singapore that I was in a place that had more than a, you know, a very small percentage of Muslims. And so a lot of the process of raising me involved exposing me to Islam in ways that had to be manufactured, as it were. Right. I mean, there was the. There was the Central Mosque in Paris. I remember going there with my dad for Friday prayers. But it was really lots of books that my father would buy and place in the home, which I would happen across, right? So stories of the Sahaba or different translations of the Quran, biographies, I was. I was fortunate to go to a very good school. My English was good, my French was good. I was reading this stuff from quite young. By the time I got to Singapore at the age of 10 or so, it was clear that at that point, in addition to or beyond being taught how to read Quran, which is something I learned from a Senegalese Azhar graduate in Paris.
My father. My parents both. But my father specifically decided that I should have a private teacher. I wasn't able to go to the Singaporean equivalent of the madrasa because they accommodated Singapore school schedules and I was going to a foreign school.
So we engaged a teacher, Molly Babusaib, who is a Tamil Singaporean Alim. And he used to come to my house, and it was great. He used to teach me aqeedah and fiqh and other things based on this Arwi text, because he was trained in Tamil in India and he was Shafi, but he was teaching me Hanafi, a law, because I was Hanafi or Hanafi practice.
He was an influential figure for me.
Asked him lots of questions. He was, I think it's fair to say, very religiously conservative, but not socially. That is to say, he understood that Singapore was multicultural, that you needed to live with other people, that science was important, that progress was important.
So I was, you know, Sarah, I was in a context of family that was a cosmopolitan, I guess, is one way to describe it, Muslim family. I had a relatively cosmopolitan set of teachers.
So I think of myself as being the product of a cosmopolitan spirituality as opposed to a very singular.
Right. So although there was. It was Hanafism, although I should say my mother was born and raised Bori Dowdy Bora, which she shed, actually, when she met my dad and practiced Sunni. But a lot of my closest friends growing up, a lot of the families we spent time with were Boras, just because of the family affinities. And I once, I remember I was at a speaking to the vice chancellor of the University of Malaya, where my parents were living in Malaysia. My father took me to meet him and he said to me, he said, so if I understand this right, your garden is Sunni, but many of the trees in the orchard are Shia. And I said, that's a fantastic way of describing this. And I'd extend that and say I think of my spiritual life as being a garden, right? With many different kinds of flowers and ponds and birds and so on, and they come from different places. So in Singapore, I met a very.
Another very influential figure on me who was a qadiri sheikh. I didn't take bay', ah, but became influential and important in helping me think about things.
So that's, you know, that's where the spiritual life or the spiritual side comes from. I mean, of course, the person I should credit the most is my mother, as we all know. It's the. You know, I don't for a fact remember, but I can only imagine that it was my mother who first taught me how to recite certain surahs, would read Ayat al Kursi with me at night before going to sleep, you know. And these are practices that my wife continued with our children and that I continued. So I feel very, very much part of a sil. Sila is probably the wrong word, but very much part of a traditional. Of, I guess, South Asian cosmopolitan Islam. And I want to be. I just want to specify that cosmopolitan is not meant to be a substitute for progressive or. Which I. Which I am certainly politically or. It's not a placeholder. I literally Mean someone who grew up in many different places and was exposed to many different varieties of Islam. And so even though I perform or practice or embody or appear to one of them, I actually think of myself as constituted by a lot, lots of these. Of these strands.
[00:06:28] Speaker A: Oh, wow. Yeah, absolutely. And I could definitely see that in the book. There's so much going on, whether it's. And literature and rhyme. So your cosmopolitan background definitely emerges. So could you speak about your book in particular, the title, in particular. Why did you pick their verses and chapters to translate?
For instance, you mentioned that Sword Mariama chapter that you translated for the Journal of Chronic Studies is not part of the devotional practices. So you didn't include it, but included other surahs like Suryasin.
[00:07:02] Speaker B: Yeah. So the book has a history or a prehistory, which is.
I started translating surahs, typically short ones, for the journal or not, for which I then published in the Journal of Quranic Studies. And that became kind of the place that was publishing them. So in the end, I started publishing them for the Journal Quranic Studies.
And it was mainly driven. That was that initiative, that move on my part was driven by the desire to produce translations that paid attention to the rhyme and the rhythm in the surahs. I had noticed from very young, actually, I had noticed that the translators in all languages paid very little attention to that. It had not bothered me too much.
I understood more or less what the translations are saying. You know, the age of 18, I started actually learning Arabic. I already knew how to read it, but I started to learn it because this is what I decided to major in.
And so in a way, the need for the translation diminished slightly.
I got interested in Arabic literature, not in the Quran. So the. I paid not that much attention to the Quran other than in devotional life or in. In as much as authors might quote or cite, cite the Quran.
But two things happen. One is I started teaching a course on the Quran at Cornell and was frustrated that I.
That there wasn't really a very good translation. There were serviceable ones, but not a very good one. And around the same time, my daughters, who are Anglophone, growing up in the States, at that point, when they would ask me what something meant, I realized that when I went to a translation, often that translation was anywhere from.
And I say this with no disrespect, from gibberish as a rendering to extremely inaccessible and wooden. And I thought, what if one did something that was a little bit different? But the main thing I noticed was that no one paid attention to rhymes. So I started doing that. And over the years, many years, translations appeared in the journal Quranic Studies. And in that time, colleagues, which is the main readership for that journal, said, oh, this is great. You're doing a great job. Thank you. This is helpful. When we teach the Quran, we can give students this, and they can hear some of that.
But it also became increasingly clear to me as I read those translations with distance, right, after a few years and so on, that they were too. They too were wooden.
And even though a lot of attention was being paid to rhyme and rhythm, I wasn't really producing translations that were, for want of a better word, beautiful.
Appealing. Let's say appealing instead of beautiful. Appealing. Yeah.
And, you know, didn't really have a view on that, but. But realized that, you know, I came to the kind of rapid realization a lot of people said to me, Colleagues said to me, you know, why don't you put the translations together in a book? Why don't you bring it together? Why don't you translate the whole Quran? I have never had any interest in translating the whole Qura.
Maybe a book is, you know, maybe a book is a good idea. But how does one organize? I mean, how could I publish a book that's essentially surahs I have translated over the years, right? I mean, that's essentially what they were.
So I took a long, hard look at what I translated and realized that most of what I had translated were surahs, and that are of what I was then calling liturgical interest to Muslims, ones that they use in forms of devotion and devotional practice. And I thought, well, that's an interesting idea. What if I imagine a book that consists of those passages and those surahs that Muslims use in their devotional life?
That would be a reasonable way to circumscribe a set of surahs.
And I ran that idea by friends, by colleagues, and they all thought it was a great idea. And they said, that sounds like a good idea.
It's meaningful.
It's defensible. Right. Which is my main concern. It's defensible. And you've already done many, evidently, of the ones that you would include. Of course, I had not done all the ones that I would include because I realized that there were important surahs missing.
But I also realized that there were surahs I had translated. You've mentioned Maryam, which I translated and published, but I've done others, like Surah Luqman and some others, Surah Yusuf. I just recently translated and published Surah Yusuf. As a play script.
[00:11:28] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[00:11:29] Speaker B: And those do not make it into this book because although it's true that there are no doubt some parts of the world where Muslims might use those surahs in devotional context. For example, I know that in Egypt sometimes Surah Mayim is recited by women who are expecting or who want to conceive.
But it's not a widespread practice, and I thought I should at least put together a book in which everything that's in it, people will recognize as being appropriate to it and not worry about what might be missing. So it's entirely possible that someone, yourself, anyone, might say, well, it would have been nice if you'd included Surah Dukhan. Would have been nice if it included Surah Fat. Yes, absolutely. But no one, I think, and certainly no one has so far looked at one passage or entry and said, why is that in there? That doesn't belong.
Right. And because I realized that it was important for me to also show that that was the case, not just assert that these are devotional surahs, I include this small appendix, which is really the only scholarly apparatus in the book, really to speak of, in which I say, here are a series of booklets and wazifahs and things in the world of Muslims where they're told, here you should recite the following. And I show the overlap between what I've selected and what those books contain, just so that the uninitiated reader is secure in the knowledge that what I've selected in fact is part. So Muslims recognize them immediately and say, oh, that makes sense. Oh, that's right. I see why that's there. But a non Muslim might say, well, how is this.
Isn't this just to Rawah putting his Sunni or his South Asian or his American academic stamp on it? And I wanted to remove that and say, no, this is what the world of Muslims values. This is a subset of what the world Muslim Muslims value. And so. So that's why Mariam is not in there. And it's one of my favorite surahs.
[00:13:26] Speaker A: Yeah. And I would encourage folks to look at the appendix, actually looked at some of those wadifas, and. And as you mentioned, those are found within the Muslim world, but they may not always be known that a lot of Muslims may not be aware of these devotional texts. And you're right, in my teaching of chronic studies and also devotional practices, it's either someone translates the whole Quran or nothing at all. So I think I found this really unique, you finding a way to focus on some Key passages that are relevant and important.
[00:14:01] Speaker B: Well, as you know, there is a tradition of selections, right. So in the American Academy, there's of course, Michael Sells, yes, approaching the Quran, the early revelations where he focused on the Meccan soras. There are in all those wazifahs and so on, a selection of surahs that are, that are included. Mahmoud Ayyub translated Juz'. Amma, Right.
He called the whole thing the great tiding. There is a tradition of doing this. And of course, even within the Muslim tradition, right. There isn't this idea that the Quran only functions as the entire text does in fact operate in different ways and different pieces of it, as it were. So that was also reassuring to me, as it were. I wasn't doing something. I mean, I was perfectly happy. I was perfectly happy to be radical. But I was pleased that for something as important as this, it wasn't some radical departure from what's available in the tradition. It's in fact something that the tradition does.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: That's a great point. And since you mentioned Michael Salz and Mahmoud, would you say your work builds off them or draws from them, or what would you say your relationship between those authors are?
[00:15:08] Speaker B: I would say this book as an initiative is inspired on, dependent on the initiative that Michael Sells took, that Mahmoud Ayub took. But I did not use their translations or turn to them.
I'm a huge admirer of Michael Sells as a scholar and a translator. I'm not a great lover of his translations.
In approaching the Quran, I think, you know, he also had a specific point he was trying to make, which he successfully made about the way that the language works.
So I liken those translations to my Journal of Quranic Studies translation.
Whereas what I tried to do with the Devotional Quran is also address another audience.
Well, I had two other desiderata. One was thereby to point out to anyone who was willing to pay attention. But I specifically had in mind my colleagues, your and my colleagues both in the Western world who study Quran, that the surahs that matter to Muslims are not necessarily the surahs that they study or that we study. In fact, you know, writing about Surah Maryam, which both of you and I have done, is part of what we would do. We do because we are part of the academy and we realize that Surah Maryam is a surah that deserves our scholarly, academic, interreligious, whatever attention. Right.
How many articles are there on Surah Yasin? How many conferences are there in which Surah Yasin figures? Very few. And yet Yasin may be the Surah that is the non short surah that is the most widely recited, used, invoked probably in the world. And it's quite, it's quite amazing. It was quite amazing to me that really none of our colleagues pay any attention to Suryasin. And I thought it would be nice to have a book in which, you know, which basically says, here are the ones that actually matter.
Yeah, right, These are the ones that matter. And there's overlap, of course. Surah Kahf 18 is very important to Muslim devotional practice and also very interesting to scholars.
And by Western, I don't just mean non Muslim, I mean the modern enterprise of the study of the Quran, whether it's by Muslims or non Muslims, but in the west, in Western languages.
So that was one. And then the other was, I noticed some years back when I was looking for many years back, looking for passages of the Quran in translation to assign to students that the Norton Anthology of World Literature and the Longman Anthology of World Literature had excerpts of Quran in them. And I thought to myself, when reading those excerpts, those translations, the reader who is interested in world literature, interested in high level literature from around the world, from different contexts, different time periods, would immediately understand why the Quran has been included because of its significance as a text. But there really was nothing about the actual translation that led one to believe that this was world literature of great quantity.
And I thought it was important to at least try to translate the Quran in a way that when people read it, they get a sense of that beauty and that awe and that gravitas that the Arabic does have, that even non Muslim readers of the Arabic recognize and say, this is an amazing piece of writing or amazing recitation. I want to think about it. Certainly an amazing piece of literature. And so that was another, another idea is, you know, try and produce translations. Which is why my Journal of Quranic Studies once had to undergo some changes because they're quite wooden. And I wanted something that someone could read out loud and just on reading or on hearing it say, okay, I get it. I get why they, whoever they is, say, this is an important piece of writing.
This is literary. This has qualities that, that Muslims even go as far as saying are inimitable.
You know, I obviously haven't succeeded in that, but I gesture toward that, I think in some of the translations.
[00:19:27] Speaker A: Yes, no, I agree. And since you mentioned world literature, I teach here at Shenandoah University and I teach in general education.
Do you see the class on the Quran as part of the great Books or part of part of a canon that students in Western academia should look at or study or.
[00:19:48] Speaker B: Sure. I think, I think there have to be parameters. One has to decide, you know, certainly it belongs in a, in a, a course on important texts. If by great one means books that have had an impact on human society.
Absolutely. But I think it's also fair to say that, you know, the, there's a big difference between reading Ulysses by James Joyce and reading the Quran. Right. Or by reading Hamlet and reading the Quran. I mean, there are generic genre differences. There's also a question of impact. And we know that if we're looking at the King James Bible and English literature, one can make the connections between the, the King James translation and how that has impacted English literature. It will be harder, it will be impossible to have students read the Quran in translation and then try to demonstrate how it's had a similar impact on Arabic literature and on the literatures in the languages where Muslims have, have in which Muslims have written.
Yes, I think it belongs, but I can also imagine a course in which it would not be present.
I think that one of the difficulties we have, you and I and others is on the one hand we feel correctly, I think that the materials from the traditions that we study belong in a course or a series of courses on the world and on world literature.
On the other hand, it has to be done in a way that is not too instrumental and too tokenized. Right. I think maybe a chapter from the Quran chapter from the Rig, A part of the Rig Vedas or part of the Bhagavad Gita part. I mean, I think as a part of a selection of different ways in which authors. Right. Because inevitably one has to talk about authors have engaged with the divine, for example. I mean, that would be really powerful for students in a world literature course so they can situate it somehow.
The Quran, as you know, is a very. In the form that we have, it is a very decontextualized text. And it's hard to just give the Quran to a student and say you're reading. It's a great piece of writing.
That's a challenge.
[00:22:09] Speaker A: No, that makes sense. And you're right. So maybe we can move to what make your translations unique. So of course there's tons of translations out there, different styles.
But what really draws me to your translation and something you speak about yourself is the rhyme or the seja. In particular, you make these four points in the introduction. You say, first, I want to show that difficult as it is to translate the Quran while being attentive to rhyme is certainly not impossible.
Second, I want to demonstrate the meaning in here is in the deployment of, of sounds in the Quran. Third, I want to convince readers and listeners that the sonorous qualities of the Quranic Arabic can be conveyed to a non Arabic readership and listenership.
And fourth, I want to make clear that inattention to the original's rhetorical and literary character comes at a great cost. One only underscored by the fact that millions of readers interact with the Qur' an in translation.
So that really nicely summarizes your, your thinking behind your specific translation. Could you provide a commentary of this? Explain this further for us?
[00:23:19] Speaker B: One thing I want to say was I couldn't have said it better myself, but then of course I said that. So it took me a long time to write that paragraph, which you know, which is from the introduction to the book, because I thought, okay, what is it I'm doing? Right? I have to be explicit, what am I doing?
I hesitate to call my translations unique.
I'd say they're.
It's an attempt to move the needle in Quran translation in an attempt to show the importance of sound, that is to say, sound matters for the Quran.
I want to show in translations that sound matters. I think one of the things that has tripped people up, including me, is this idea that the sound has to operate exactly the same way that it operates in the Arabic.
And it was when I realized that that didn't need to be the case that I was able to, well, feel liberated actually from that, from what I would actually call the tyranny of the Arabic syntax. Right. People felt and, oh, well, it's phrased in a particular way. I have to phrase it that way. But if you phrase English with Arabic syntax, then it's not going to sound sonorous, it's going to sound forced. It's going to sound.
Wouldn't. I mean, if I were a poet, maybe I could sound, I could make it sound good, but I'm not a poet. So the challenge was being attentive to rhyme.
And maybe that sentence should have said while being attentive to rhyme and rhythm, right?
But I think, as I recall, I only wrote rhyme in that sentence because there are translators who have said, I have been attentive to rhythm. I've paid attention to cadence. A recent translation by Rafi Habib and Bruce Lawrence has appeared with Norton in which they use English verse to try and do just that.
What how successful people have been varies widely, based not only on their choices, but also on their abilities and I've never been terribly happy with any of that. And so I was trying to, as I said, move the needle a bit by showing that it was actually possible to do not, here it is, I've done it, but it's possible to do it.
Right. So that, that's what I meant by difficult. It is to translate while being attentive. It is not impossible because there are people who say, oh, it's impossible and just foreclose on everything. You know, the late great translator Humphrey Davis, who I don't believe ever translated the Quran except in the context of other things he was translating. He was once asked about the poet Mutanabbi. He was asked, you know, people say mutanabi is untranslatable. What do you think? And he said, there are only two positions. Either everything is translatable or nothing is translatable.
And he's just so. Right, right. Because the problem with saying it's not possible to translate something is it forecloses on everything and we have to translate. And of course, the Quran itself is a translation.
God is, according to the Quran, beyond anything humans can describe or conceive of. He therefore cannot be constrained by human language.
This Arabic Quran is a translation through revelation into a human language.
And so this idea that it's, oh, it's impossible. It's impossible. Is tied to theological ideas about inimitability and so on. So, you know, I'm not. Not something I'm interested in. So I also wanted to show that meaning inheres in the deployment of sounds. I'll just give you one example. The very beginning of Surah Baqarah, the closing word of the first three ayahs all have kafs in them.
Right?
Why?
There has to be a reason.
So one reason could be. Well, it's part of the rhythmic literary structure. Right.
The fact is those are very important verses, right? Those verses are about belief. And so I think to not realize that those sounds are being deployed in a specific way. Now, I can imagine someone coming along, someone who's trying to construct some kind of explanation. They might say, oh, well, the kaf is just like the kaf of Kul or so on. I'm not interested in that. I'm not interested in a kind of meta.
I'm very interested in the metaphysical, but I'm not interested in a metaphysical explanation for the literary text.
But it's clear that sounds operate in a particular way. It's clear that a surah, like in Shira, like alumna Shahlaq Sadrak, is full of very hard, dark Arabic letters.
Purpose. These sound is being deployed.
These are not accidental choices.
Right. They're being deployed in a particular way. So that's important.
The sonorous qualities of the Quran being conveyed to a non Arabic readership. This is part of the idea that while it's impossible to do in English what the Arabic does, I'm willing to concede that it's impossible to do in any language what the original language does. But it is possible to do in the target language things that the target language is good at and thereby show the sophistication of a text. So I thought that was important to do. And my fourth point that you mentioned was what the cost is. Right.
[00:28:43] Speaker A: So.
[00:28:45] Speaker B: And maybe I'll reread this. So. And fourth, I want to make clear that inattention to the original's rhetorical and literary character comes at a great cost.
One only underscored by the fact that many millions of readers interact with the Quran in translation.
So this is the idea that we've, we've kind of accepted as readers of the Quran that it's okay not to pay attention to sound, because we haven't typically, and therefore that must be okay.
So when I say to people, when I pay attention to Ryan, they say, well, aren't you worried that you're sacrificing meaning? And my answer is, usually, what makes you think that the way you're doing it isn't sacrificing meaning?
It's decided as a kind of baseline.
Meaning does not exist in the rhyme. Meaning only exists in the literal, almost exact translation of the Arabic syntax. That's where the meaning resides. And I think that's actually not the case. And the reality is that the sound and the rhetorical and literary structures, which are not just syntax, also are repositories of the meaning. And we have to try and find a way in English to convey those.
So that's my general strategy.
[00:30:04] Speaker A: Oh, great. Yeah, I really found that introduction helpful to give the theory behind your translation and how you're going about translating. So since this podcast touches upon Islam inter religious studies, could you speak about various Christian or biblical influences? We already spoke about Surah Maryam and also the King James Bible.
So you are a scholar of not just Quran, but of literature. How's the Western canon or the Christian biblical tradition influence your work?
[00:30:37] Speaker B: So I'm not sure I know the answer to that. I think it's inevitable. As someone who was. Who went to English language schools almost my whole life, preschool was in French, but everything else after that was in English.
And it's impossible, right, for someone, especially someone who's interested in literature.
That is not only just as an academic, but I'm an avid reader.
Been very fortunate to have read a lot of the English literary tradition. It's impossible not to have been impacted by the rhythms of the King James Bible and the, you know, the way that it's worked throughout literature, but also just other translations and, and things biblical. I think in that sense I, I must be very impacted by it, but I don't and haven't typically turned to. I'm not a scholar of religion, I'm not a scholar of Christianity. I was a unofficial medieval studies major in school and know a lot about medieval Christianity and the papacy and so on. But, but I wouldn't say that I'm a scholar of Christianity. So I'm not sure that a lot of it impacted me in, in doing the translations. Perhaps the one exception is in my translation of Surah in Shirah which I mentioned, which I originally, you know, which as you know, opens alumna Shahlaqa Sadrak and you know, which I originally translated. Did we not your breast prize open?
Believe it or not, terrible translation.
And it's only, you know, that really bothered me a lot. I thought, I can't believe I thought that it was okay to translate something that way.
Besides the fact that I didn't even think that's what it meant.
That is to say, you know, I've, I've often felt that, that, that that has to be about consolation.
Just like it is elsewhere in the Quran. Where is it Moses? I can't remember who says which doesn't mean prize my breasts open, right? Means, you know, calm me down. And so that translation now in the book, instead of opening, did we not your breast prize open now opens. Didn't I soothe your heart when you were down?
And I close that. The Surah, as you know, closes with it doesn't close, but toward the end is Innamal usri yusrin in Nnamal usri yusra that now reads this shall pass.
This too shall pass.
Most readers who are aware of the of it have looked at me and said, well that's a very Christian way of translating that.
To which my answer would be it is true that the expression this shall pass is something that emanates from the Christian tradition, but it's become part of the general fund of the language.
We know people have used that in non religious contexts. Even friends might say don't worry, this will pass or this shall pass. So I felt entitled. I think that's the only direction use in a translation that does not appear in the book, but it's in the journal Chronic Studies, though I translate a particular passage as, this is the omega and the alpha instead of beginning and end. And that too, is something that I pulled in, but I didn't pull it from Christianity. I pulled it from the English language.
[00:34:05] Speaker A: Gotcha. Okay, great.
[00:34:06] Speaker B: It's not that I have any problem with Christianity, to be very clear, it's just that I don't think that that's how this has entered. Right. It has entered through my exposure to.
[00:34:13] Speaker A: Literature, to literature in general. All right, wonderful. So maybe we could speak about some of your translations. So we spoken about your background, introduction. Now we can dive into some of the translations themselves, in particular that of Surah Fatiha, of course, the most important chapter in the Qur', an, especially in terms of devotional practices. Do you mind reading this for us? And then you can maybe give a commentary? Take us behind the scenes of what you're doing here with the translation.
[00:34:43] Speaker B: Sure. Okay. So in the name of God, ever compassionate and full of compassion.
Praise God, Lord of all creation, ever compassionate and full of compassion, Master of judgment day, you alone, we beseech, and to you alone we pray.
Guide us to the right path, the path of those who please you, not of those who earn your wrath or who have gone astray. Amen.
[00:35:12] Speaker A: Great. So, yeah, that was beautiful. So. So could you speak a little bit about how you're incorporating sound or some of the words you choose? Sure.
[00:35:22] Speaker B: As is clear from the Basmala, which also appears in the opening of the Surah Fatiha, I wanted Rahman and Rahim to both be the same word because of their shared root. So, as you know, people often say the beneficent, the merciful, any number of different ways. I thought it was important to have the word compassion in both.
And quite a long time ago, I decided that that was the only responsible way to translate this from my perspective, hence that translation. And it's important because then it appears in the Surah, you know, something like, praise God. You know, I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to pull my hair out when people say things like, praise be to God. No one says that. Right? No one says that.
It's wooden. It's not English.
It just makes no sense to me. And it's so simple to just say praise God.
I mean, one could say, God be praised.
And I did consider that God be praised. But the Problem is, a problem for me was that this surah tends to be prescriptive, and I wanted it to be potentially read as a command, right? So this is an example, I suppose, of using what English can do, right? In Arabic, you could not confuse the indicative verb and the imperative, but in English you can. And so that's a resource that English has that can be put to use, right? So that's one of the things I try to think about.
The rhyme is relatively clear. Compassion, creation, day, pray, path, Wrath, sorry, day, pray, astray, path.
But beseech.
And beseech does not rhyme with anything.
And one of the things I learned from Peter Cole, the great poet and translator to whom I showed this before I dared show it to the world, once said to me, you know, the best rhymes are the ones that you don't notice.
And I think it's important.
That was an important lesson because there were times when I wanted to rhyme, but there were times when I wanted to sort of make sure that it didn't, as it were, so it wouldn't sound like dog roll or like limit, right? Which is what. What happens. And so what I do with beseech is beseech and please are the two that both contain this long E sound, right? And so still a way in which they relate.
Now, there are choices that I've made that have annoyed some people.
When I was at the book launch for this book at SOAS at the University of London, one of the speakers was one of the people asking the question, was quite unhappy that I had inverted IYAK and abudu wa iyak and astaen.
So instead of saying to you alone we pray and you alone we beseech, I inverted it.
And he said, you know, how can you do that?
And I said, well, first of all, this is what it does in the English.
I'm not suggesting that the Arabic be reordered. The Arabic is doing what the Arabic does. It just. It doesn't read as well in English to pray and then beseech. It works better in English to beseech and then pray.
And I also said to him, but I think it was lost on him, because he was quite exercised about this, that in that very same ayah, the word order is inverted in order to preserve rhyme. So instead of saying, it says so that it rhymes.
And so I felt perfectly authorized to do an inversion because the line itself does an inversion.
This is another example of trying to do things in the English that the Arabic is doing without it necessarily having to be the identical thing.
I didn't change word order, but I did change the sentence order in the English.
The rest of it is fairly straightforward.
But it is the case that if you're going to say path, then rough suggests itself.
You know, rhyme. Rhyme is of course very hard in English, but English is not rhyme poor.
It's just harder to do than it is in Arabic, some languages because of Arabic's morphological structures. It's easier to rhyme because if English doesn't have a morphologically based, or at least not a system of forms that are based on morphology, it is harder to do, but it is not impossible.
[00:40:04] Speaker A: Yeah, and you mentioned that inversion here. So I'm curious. There is this debate, as you know better in translation studies of the literal versus more the meaning.
So would you say you lean more to the meaning, general meaning, or how would you.
[00:40:18] Speaker B: I would say I try with every, you know, with a short surah, I can do the whole thing. I mean anyone can take the whole, the whole package with longer ones in segments. I try to get a sense of what is trying to be conveyed and then I try to convey that.
So I suppose that answer means that I'm looking at meaning. But the Quran is an ancient, quirky, archaic text and I don't want to lose that when I'm doing what I'm doing. It's important for me to make sure, for example, beseech. Not a common word, right? Not a common word. But it was important to me to have a word like that in there because it needed to retain some of that character.
And that's another mistake that I think people, myself included, may have made and make, which is in order to make it sound like God, want to make it sound old, then use inverted syntax or use Victorian English. You don't need to do that. There are other ways of doing that. You can just throw in a little specific word, a word that's slightly more obsolete, and it can change the character of an entire passage.
That's all you really need to do. Or just a word order once and the whole thing then acquires that because it kind of has a hue about it as opposed to trying to be, you know, with every single sentence trying to be Victorian or archaic.
[00:41:43] Speaker A: Yeah, I noticed that reading your translation, there's no thighs and thou's like in terms of trying to elevate the language to sound more Victorian or Kim James like so. But there are these words like wrath or beseech that are elevated. There aren't just the common everyday speech. Well, so maybe we could look at another one Here that I found very impactful. It was sort ikhlas. And yeah, do you mind reading that for us? And also doing the same thing, just taking us behind the scenes of how.
[00:42:11] Speaker B: You translate in the name of God, ever compassionate and full of compassion, declare God is peerless.
God is flawless, unbegetting and birthless without any partner, matchless.
So this is one of the surahs. So whenever a new translation comes out of the Quran of the attack Quran comes out, or even a partial translations, I go and I always look at the Fatiha, the opening of Surah, Baqarah, Surah, Ikhlasp, Surah Inshirah, and surah.
If those five don't pass my little bar, I don't use that translation because I figure those are fairly short passages.
It's not that hard to not screw up, right? And ikhlas is one of them. Because I remember once, and I don't remember whether this, what I'm about to describe came before I made a decision to translate or after, but I do remember once one of my daughters, I don't remember which, asking about the meaning of surah class. And we read a translation that was at hand and it said, say he is God one.
And my daughter looked at me and said, what does that mean? And I said, that's a really good question.
I'm not entirely sure what say he is God one means. She goes, what does it mean? I said, well, it's saying you should believe that there is only one God. And then she said, why doesn't it say that? I thought of myself exactly. Why doesn't it say that? Right? Why doesn't it say a couple of things? One of them is declare. So I think one of the not. I think I know one of the great losses in Quran translation is the, is the decision by translators to translate qul every time as say.
And yes, qul is the imperative from the verb to say say. But any reader of Arabic knows that qala means he said, kala means he answered, qala means he continued. I mean, it means any number of things. It's a very versatile verb in Arabic. And it struck me here as elsewhere in the Quran where it says, including these four surahs that are called the four quls, right, the four surahs that begin with the word qul that it doesn't mean say, right? It might mean something like affirm, declare, believe.
And so I thought that in the case of ikhlas, since it is a creedal statement and since we talk about a declaration of faith, and when we declare things, we have some attachment to it. I thought declare would work very nicely as the translation for Qult.
And then when translating, you know, say he is God, one, I thought, I need to find a way that is both categorical but also gentle.
And Peter Cole said to me when he saw this, he said, you know, I like it. The poet, I like it. But you know, the Arabic ends in hard letters, right? It's he, right? And.
And you've gone with S, which is a sibilant in English, and it's soft. And I said, yes, agreed. But the fact that it's a negative. Peerless. Flawless, I said, for me, captures some of what the surah is trying to do, because, you know, in a larger theological sense as well, you know, a lot of the creedal statements, I mean, la ilaha illah is a negative statement, right? There is no God but God. And I just thought, you know, peerless worked well. And so I thought, okay, let me see that. And then I thought.
Then flawless came.
I think, actually, I think it started out as God is matchless, and then flawless just flowed naturally. And I thought, this is perfect because there's all this polemic and discussion and criticism, literary criticism, around what the word samad means and.
And who knows? A lot of people go with something like eternal or long lasting and so on. But certainly at root, the word is something that's intact, and possibly it's something like a rock in which there is no fissure.
And I thought, well, flawless, which will of course invoke a diamond in people's minds, like this perfect thing. Perfection, I thought, worked really well for. For that. And then I had to do unbegetting and birthless. And unbegetting is an example of, again, of using a slightly archaic term. Birthless, of course, is not a word.
And I was perfectly comfortable doing that because samad is a hapax. It's a word that occurs only once. And I thought, well, there's no harm using a word that probably will appear only once also in my translation.
And so birthless, the hardest part was the closing verse. In the case of the Arabic, it's the same word, right? It's ahad, both in the first position.
First ayahu allahu ahad, and then lamyakun lahu, right? Kufu and ahad. It's the same word. But I thought, this is another example of the word not meaning the same thing.
And that's another thing that translators do. They will try to translate every word the same way, as if as if all words only ever mean one thing in language.
And maybe one would be entitled to think that if the Quran had been put together in an instant, but evidently it was received by people. Or maybe it was put together in an instant, but it was certainly not received in an instant. But it was received over time. And so I thought, no, I'm not going to put.
I think it was matchless in position one and position four. Matchless both times. I'm just gonna use another word that just means the same thing.
And so peerless, matchless, and match I liked, because, you know, without any partner. The idea is that it's not just that there is no peer, but there is a sense, at least according to the theologians, in which it's meant to be a refutation of God having a spouse.
And of course, the word match evokes that. So it worked. It worked pretty well for me. People have responded well to this translation in some ways. I mean, it's both one of the ones that's most distant from the Arabic syntax, but also one that is, I guess, paradoxically, the most successful for people when they read it. And in a way, that's great vindication for me. It's like, okay, maybe this is how we need to be doing things, because this has invited people into the surah in ways that these translations that my daughter couldn't handle, in fact, keep people outside of the surah and outside of the Quran because they can't get into it, they can't make sense of it. And surely that is not the intention. The intention is, in fact, to invite people into the text and into its meanings.
[00:49:20] Speaker A: Yeah, no, absolutely. When I read this myself, I was awestruck with the rhyme. The peerless, flawless, birthless, matchless. And also, the meaning is very clear and I think does capture what the chapter is all about. And I found this interesting here, the hyphen, which is also the punctuation that you use sometimes in your translation. So here you have declare, and then you have this hyphen, and then without any partner, hyphen, and then matchless.
So that is unique to stop the reader.
[00:49:48] Speaker B: Right? So, I mean, any kind of sejura in writing will always force the reader to stop. Now, you could say, you could argue, well, you know, you stop at the end of a line anyway, but it forces you not to go immediately to the next line.
Just declare. And of course, that's how he said.
Right? I mean, people say.
But they will say alone and not say anything else. Yeah, it works reasonably well at the end of Surah Kaf.
There are. There's a succession of three QULs, and if memory serves, I translate those all in a different way.
I think it's affirm declare.
Well, I'm not remembering. Let me see if I can find it.
A test, I think a test affirm declare, which seemed to me to capture a lot of what Kull is trying to do.
[00:50:47] Speaker A: This has been a great conversation. And is there anything else you would like to share regarding the Quran or your work on the devotional Quran?
[00:50:56] Speaker B: No. I'm grateful. I'm grateful for this opportunity to discuss what I've done. I think it's a wonderful podcast and I'm glad it exposes people to different aspects of the tradition. In terms of my own work, I guess I should advertise my translation of Surah Yusuf as a play script, which is also an attempt to use the resources available in within genre to try and show what Asura is doing successfully. Right. So that Sora is very.
There's a lot of action. It's very cinematic.
Though the idea of translating it as a play script was not so that it. So that it gets performed, but so that the, The. The language form, the form of the language I've used helps to underscore what the. The Quranic text is doing. And so I think what I'd urge people to do is to explore and be more creative. I think 20 years ago, I might have had to say to be more daring, but I don't think there's really any real threat perceived anymore by translators doing interesting things with the Quran. I think if it's done with, with, in good faith, with the right, with the right reasons in mind, Muslims or non Muslims, if they're trying to just make and every translate, I have to say, including the ones who produce translations I don't like, have been driven in the last, you know, 75 years, have been driven by a desire to make the Quran more accessible. I don't think there's any out there to, you know, it's not like in the 17th and 18th centuries when there was a disparagement, disparaging of Islam. Now it's clear people don't spend their lives translating the Quran, don't have a great deal of affection for it. So.
[00:52:38] Speaker A: All right, great. Yeah, I look forward to reading that script and maybe having you again on the show. So, yeah. Thanks so much, Shaka Torah.
[00:52:46] Speaker B: My pleasure.
