target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#fb3_img_img_81641b1f-9dbb-5b50-ad5c-de0e5b121610.jpg" alt=""/> author cites to prove that Allh exists above the heaven (67:16–17), he clarifies that while a precise translation of the verses would place Allh in the heaven (fi’l-sam’), we know that the verses really mean “above,” because of course Allh cannot be surrounded by his creation.7
If Salafs wanted to interrogate the legitimacy of translation by their own methods, the answer would be to look for precedents among the earliest Muslims. It does not appear that a mass influx of non-Arabic-speaking converts who could have made the Qur’n’s translation an issue was desirable or even thinkable in the first generations: The earliest Muslims saw Islam primarily as an “Arab thing,” since the Qur’n was addressed to Arabs in their own language. Contrary to the myth of Islam spreading “by the sword,” it doesn’t seem that the desire to expand Muslim territory had anything to do with a desire to convert people, whether forcibly or otherwise. I am confronted by the Qur’n’s own words, which can be translated to say, “We have sent no messenger except with the tongue of his people, that he might make all clear to them” (5:44–48). Repeatedly identifying itself as an Arabic Qur’n, the Qur’n seems to relate its Arabic language to clarity and accessibility (12:2, 16:103, 26:195, 39:28, 41:3, 43:3, 46:12), which could suggest that translation only obscures the content and makes it less clear—and perhaps that the Qur’n did not originally express the claim of universalism that later readers would make on its behalf.
There is nonetheless a narrative, though not found in the major adth sources, that depicts Muammad as authorizing the translation of the Qur’n’s opening sra for Persian-speaking believers. This sra happens to be crucial to the performance of required prayers, and there are reports of Muslims from the first three centuries praying in Persian prior to learning sufficient Arabic. If the account of Muammad allowing translation of this particular sra into Persian is a fabrication, it might have been created to answer a controversy regarding Muslim ritual. In the second century of Islam, the seminal jurist Abanfa allowed recitation of the sra in Persian, a permission that he first granted unconditionally and then narrowed to those Muslims who did not yet have knowledge of Arabic.8
I wanted to submerge myself within the Qur’n and read it purely on its own terms, but the Qur’n does not have “its own terms.” As literature scholar David Bellos has remarked, “No sentence contains all the information you need to translate it.”9 When the Qur’n mentions trees, the heavens and earth, men, women, orphans, angels, prophets, greed, mercy, and Allh, it requires me to apply knowledge that does not exist within the Qur’n. As the Qur’n constructs its meaning through words whose meanings are determined outside its covers, I cannot explain any word in the Qur’n without using other words. Perhaps this should have been self-evident when I leaned on a stack of dictionaries, lexicons, and concordances for my “Qur’
