When we prematurely raise the issue of certainty we automatically step into the domain of philosophy. The obvious answer to how can we ever be sure of anything is verification and validation. What was said to the Prophet Muhammad Pbuh is perfectly preserved in the form of the Arabic version of the Quran, yes that is right even the Arabic Quran is a copy of the Quran and this Arabic book is always open for all comers to verify its content and authenticity, from within. That just leaves us with the issue of translations. Is it possible to ensure that nothing or very little is lost in translation. In my opinion yes.
Before I get into the specific issue of trusting a translation, please bear with me for a bit. All our actions are based on probabilistic faith, even crossing the street has elements of faith in it, you don't know for sure if you will make it to the other side but you take a calculated risk and back yourself in making the correct call when determining the speed of a 2 ton projectile that will reduce you to pulp if you get it wrong. Some may object to comparing crossing the street to believing in God but on closer scrutiny the only difference is of degrees. I am not pretending that crossing the street is an act of faith, what I am saying is that there are elements of faith in it. Prior experiences are an indication of future events but not a standard of certainty, there is no distinctions or types of faiths, they all have the common denominator of non testability. Just because you have a perception of the reality of the street or its crossing and the fact that just because it is testable with a set of verifications does not guarantee its certainty till you actually cross it. The element of faith was always going to be part of that equation and that is where I ''think'' the training of our souls come into play.
My argument of the crossing the street has to do with verification and validation in light of what you already know, meaning the perceived settled issues in your understanding, your starting point hence is different from mine or a third person, if I were to challenge your assumptions about logic and reason, you will be on very shaky grounds from where I am standing. In the final analysis, your standards of understanding are neither better nor worse but different than mine. The only constants are inductive truths embedded in Revealed text.
Belief in God and determining the best course to acknowledge His existence are all done through a process of verification. That very process which is seriously handicapped due to the incompleteness of available information to us and time constraints (average 70 years from an individual's perceptive) brings into focus our faculty of faith. Of course faith is not something illogical, it is one more faculty of humans like the ability to reason. It boils down to what degree of verification will satisfy you, using both your faculties of reason and faith. We use this to determine any truth from crossing the street to determining your best chances of getting close to God.
You must be wondering what does all this has to do with trusting a translation ? A lot. Twenty years back it was a serious issue and a huge challenge for anybody to take on the monopoly of the so called "scholars". The new communication mediums of today make it that much easier to call these self styled custodians of Islam on issues that were a given for most Muslims. By given I mean tricked into acceptance through an elaborate historical deception. The deception was hatched by necessity. Before Islam it was business as usual for the emperor and the high priest to do whatever they wanted with the hapless followers. The same strategy was attempted by tweaking the translations by both Muslims and non-Muslims and it did work for a while but the shear speed of changes in the modern mediums of communication and data manipulations caught the Mullah brigade off guard.
The genie is out of the bottle and it appears for good. If you want to ensure against taken for a theological ride, the first step is to nail down the theological positions of the Quranic message and then try and tackle the issue of translations. Personally for me, there are certain red flags that are a dead giveaway. Some of the Umbrella issues that are alien to Islam are routinely passed on as instructions from God and our very salvation is tied to them by mere mortals. The following is a short list of deviations confronting Muslims on a daily bases.
1. Punishment and reward after death and before the Day of Judgment (a total absurdity)
2. Unqualified intercession on the day of judgment (the aim of this innovation is obvious, ''I can fix it for you")
3. Predestination (especially helpful to corrupt and incompetent rulers who can blame everything on God, also very useful for sending soldiers on suicide missions)
4. Abrogation of Quranic words (this one takes the cake and needed most by the enemies of Islam)
5. Additional Revelations during the process of Quran's Revelation and after the death of the Prophet Pbuh.(how else to counter the words of God, with..... of course other ''words of God''.
6. Specific prophecies (all tied to fixing it for you)
7. Exaggerated rewards linked to rituals (an old trick of keeping followers busy in thought stopping activities)
The above list simultaneously helps you guard against false and fabricated reports wrongly ascribed to the messenger. Now coming to the issues of trusting a particular translation, finally. Since the translated words lose the internal checksums to some extent, the crosschecking with the original Arabic is the only sure method of ensuring that the message has not been tampered with. But you will still have to understand it. In 99% instances it is the issue of corpus versus Noam Chomsky's approach that will continue to be a source of debate irrespective of the language of understanding the Quranic message.
Chomsky's works are based on the premise that a lab based approach is needed to improve performance related errors in language. The approach had a positive impact on formal languages but had an opposite effect on natural languages. Recent corpus based efforts has further highlighted this shortcoming. In my opinion Quran was never intended for us to fixate on a single word or term. In fact all the innovations and misinterpretations can be traced back to this latter approach. Quran in fact facilitate the meanings of words and terms by their usage. Hence the ideal methodology would be a Tasreef based translation. Essentially what it means is that Quran uses same words and concepts in different verses hence ensuring understanding and certainty of usage simultaneously. Some of the earliest Tafsirs (exegesis or commentary) were also Tasreef based. Ibn Mas'ud, Mu'ath bin Jabal and Mujahid are reported as practitioners of Tasreef. Among the modern practitioners Mohammad Asad and Shabbir Ahmed are often mentioned. But that was then and this is now. We are getting warmer now. So how is it done now ?
I did mention the corpus approach and guess what the good people at http://corpus.quran.com/ are doing just that, so start your verification. I was not happy about the use of Ibn Kathir's tafsir as one of the resource but a closer look points to a more likely scenario that will expose some of the blunders in the tafsir. The most famous one is atributed to Ibn Mas'ud "We keep the words, but change the meaning'' The words were supposed to explain the alien notion of abrogation.
I would recommend the corpus quran to both Arabic speakers and other Muslims as well as non Muslims. This particular resource should address a lot of your concerns. Needles to say it will resolve almost all issues related to the use of certain words and terms in the Quran. Out of the 80,000 or so (with repetition) word Quran you may have to research less than a 100 in order to resolve some of the contentious issues. That would just leave you with the topic of grammar. For now it should not pose a big problem, just make sure you consult at least three different translations and on very rare occasions you may have to enter into discussion with others to further clarify matters. Once again verification and validation.
By the way, part of the Quran itself is a translation. Research it.
May God help you secure your Heaven and ease your way getting there.
Before I get into the specific issue of trusting a translation, please bear with me for a bit. All our actions are based on probabilistic faith, even crossing the street has elements of faith in it, you don't know for sure if you will make it to the other side but you take a calculated risk and back yourself in making the correct call when determining the speed of a 2 ton projectile that will reduce you to pulp if you get it wrong. Some may object to comparing crossing the street to believing in God but on closer scrutiny the only difference is of degrees. I am not pretending that crossing the street is an act of faith, what I am saying is that there are elements of faith in it. Prior experiences are an indication of future events but not a standard of certainty, there is no distinctions or types of faiths, they all have the common denominator of non testability. Just because you have a perception of the reality of the street or its crossing and the fact that just because it is testable with a set of verifications does not guarantee its certainty till you actually cross it. The element of faith was always going to be part of that equation and that is where I ''think'' the training of our souls come into play.
My argument of the crossing the street has to do with verification and validation in light of what you already know, meaning the perceived settled issues in your understanding, your starting point hence is different from mine or a third person, if I were to challenge your assumptions about logic and reason, you will be on very shaky grounds from where I am standing. In the final analysis, your standards of understanding are neither better nor worse but different than mine. The only constants are inductive truths embedded in Revealed text.
Belief in God and determining the best course to acknowledge His existence are all done through a process of verification. That very process which is seriously handicapped due to the incompleteness of available information to us and time constraints (average 70 years from an individual's perceptive) brings into focus our faculty of faith. Of course faith is not something illogical, it is one more faculty of humans like the ability to reason. It boils down to what degree of verification will satisfy you, using both your faculties of reason and faith. We use this to determine any truth from crossing the street to determining your best chances of getting close to God.
You must be wondering what does all this has to do with trusting a translation ? A lot. Twenty years back it was a serious issue and a huge challenge for anybody to take on the monopoly of the so called "scholars". The new communication mediums of today make it that much easier to call these self styled custodians of Islam on issues that were a given for most Muslims. By given I mean tricked into acceptance through an elaborate historical deception. The deception was hatched by necessity. Before Islam it was business as usual for the emperor and the high priest to do whatever they wanted with the hapless followers. The same strategy was attempted by tweaking the translations by both Muslims and non-Muslims and it did work for a while but the shear speed of changes in the modern mediums of communication and data manipulations caught the Mullah brigade off guard.
The genie is out of the bottle and it appears for good. If you want to ensure against taken for a theological ride, the first step is to nail down the theological positions of the Quranic message and then try and tackle the issue of translations. Personally for me, there are certain red flags that are a dead giveaway. Some of the Umbrella issues that are alien to Islam are routinely passed on as instructions from God and our very salvation is tied to them by mere mortals. The following is a short list of deviations confronting Muslims on a daily bases.
1. Punishment and reward after death and before the Day of Judgment (a total absurdity)
2. Unqualified intercession on the day of judgment (the aim of this innovation is obvious, ''I can fix it for you")
3. Predestination (especially helpful to corrupt and incompetent rulers who can blame everything on God, also very useful for sending soldiers on suicide missions)
4. Abrogation of Quranic words (this one takes the cake and needed most by the enemies of Islam)
5. Additional Revelations during the process of Quran's Revelation and after the death of the Prophet Pbuh.(how else to counter the words of God, with..... of course other ''words of God''.
6. Specific prophecies (all tied to fixing it for you)
7. Exaggerated rewards linked to rituals (an old trick of keeping followers busy in thought stopping activities)
The above list simultaneously helps you guard against false and fabricated reports wrongly ascribed to the messenger. Now coming to the issues of trusting a particular translation, finally. Since the translated words lose the internal checksums to some extent, the crosschecking with the original Arabic is the only sure method of ensuring that the message has not been tampered with. But you will still have to understand it. In 99% instances it is the issue of corpus versus Noam Chomsky's approach that will continue to be a source of debate irrespective of the language of understanding the Quranic message.
Chomsky's works are based on the premise that a lab based approach is needed to improve performance related errors in language. The approach had a positive impact on formal languages but had an opposite effect on natural languages. Recent corpus based efforts has further highlighted this shortcoming. In my opinion Quran was never intended for us to fixate on a single word or term. In fact all the innovations and misinterpretations can be traced back to this latter approach. Quran in fact facilitate the meanings of words and terms by their usage. Hence the ideal methodology would be a Tasreef based translation. Essentially what it means is that Quran uses same words and concepts in different verses hence ensuring understanding and certainty of usage simultaneously. Some of the earliest Tafsirs (exegesis or commentary) were also Tasreef based. Ibn Mas'ud, Mu'ath bin Jabal and Mujahid are reported as practitioners of Tasreef. Among the modern practitioners Mohammad Asad and Shabbir Ahmed are often mentioned. But that was then and this is now. We are getting warmer now. So how is it done now ?
I did mention the corpus approach and guess what the good people at http://corpus.quran.com/ are doing just that, so start your verification. I was not happy about the use of Ibn Kathir's tafsir as one of the resource but a closer look points to a more likely scenario that will expose some of the blunders in the tafsir. The most famous one is atributed to Ibn Mas'ud "We keep the words, but change the meaning'' The words were supposed to explain the alien notion of abrogation.
I would recommend the corpus quran to both Arabic speakers and other Muslims as well as non Muslims. This particular resource should address a lot of your concerns. Needles to say it will resolve almost all issues related to the use of certain words and terms in the Quran. Out of the 80,000 or so (with repetition) word Quran you may have to research less than a 100 in order to resolve some of the contentious issues. That would just leave you with the topic of grammar. For now it should not pose a big problem, just make sure you consult at least three different translations and on very rare occasions you may have to enter into discussion with others to further clarify matters. Once again verification and validation.
By the way, part of the Quran itself is a translation. Research it.
May God help you secure your Heaven and ease your way getting there.
Interesting post, If I can offer on this from my side, here is an interesting lecture.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfflgF_H0kY&p=C4DE20569C54BD93&playnext=5
Salaam
Thanks for the link, I am aware of the arguments for and there is no denying that you can further your understanding of the Quran with knowing Arabic. But, yes there is always a but :)you can further your understanding of the Quran with knowing about any specialist knowledge for that matter. This is not an issue which we can solve with intellect alone. The instructions to understand Quran are in the Quran and they are not hidden under layers of linguistic riddles. Quran 3:07 in fact makes it clear as to how to go about it and Quran 8:22, 7:179, 25:44, 12:108, 2:111, 17:36, 10:100, 25:73, 4:82, 47:24 emphasis using your brains.
ReplyDeleteGod never once mentions learning Arabic is a must, not once. But mentions dozens of times to use your senses and use your brains. God encourages you to "think" and not just to think in Arabic.
The difficulty arises when those among us who understand Arabic to become mesmerized by the linguistic eloquence to such an extent that we forget the real objective of this gift of gifts from God. Quran is a life guide first. It does not need to be translated with an exact corresponding terms in other languages. You are allowed to use more than one word to describe a single Arabic word or concept. There is no compulsion to match the Arabic words for word. I will repeat my posted argument, if you know Arabic and another language equally well you should not have any difficulty explaining it in the other language. After all we find that you need to use other Arabic words to explain the Arabic words of the Quran. And if you go the way of 'Hadith explains Quran" and you need "scholars" to explain the Hadith then knowing or not knowing Quran becomes irrelevant anyway :)
The issue is of understanding and not language. The translator already knows the Arabic. To assume that if you knew Arabic you will do a much better job is not very logical. Not only that but if we were to fixate on the language then the next logical question should be, what level of proficiency is needed. Is ten years of Arabic schooling enough or we should not let anybody near the Quran unless they have completed twenty years first. Anybody over the age of fifty need not bother converting then :)
Yes you need to research the translators and the translations but you do that for any other domain, you research the experts of that particular domain. The trick is to have the process open to not only your peers but everybody to verify and validate. The dozens of innovations among the Muslims are not as a result of not knowing the Arabic language but in spite of it.
This particular post was to point towards the fact that yes it is possible to understand the message of the Quran with equal certainty without actually mastering the language of the Quran.