Muhammad Asad, The Message of the Qur’ān; Translated and Explained by Muhammad Asad (1980)

into “physical” and “spiritual” compartments makes it difficult for people brought up in the orbit of other religions, with their accent on the “supernatural” element allegedly inherent in every true religious experience, to appreciate the predominantly rational approach of the Qurʾān to all religious questions. Consequently, its constant interweaving of spiritual teachings with practical legislation perplexes the Western reader, who has become accustomed to identifying “religious experience” with a thrill of numinous awe before things hidden and beyond all intellectual comprehension, and is suddenly confronted with the claim of the Qurʾān to being a guidance not only towards the spiritual good of the hereafter but also towards the good life – spiritual, physical and social – attainable in this world. In short, the Westerner cannot readily accept the Qurʾanic thesis that all life, being God-given, is a unity, and that problems of the flesh and of the mind, of sex and economics, of individual righteousness and social equity are intimately connected with the hopes which man may legitimately entertain with regard to his life after death. This, in my opinion, is one of the reasons for the negative, uncomprehending attitude of most Westerners towards the Qurʾān and its teachings. But still another – and perhaps even more decisive – reason may be found in the fact that the Qurʾān itself has never yet been presented in any European language in a manner which would make it truly comprehensible.

When we look at the long list of translations – beginning with the Latin works of the high Middle Ages and continuing up to the present in almost every European tongue – we find one common denominator between their authors, whether Muslims or non­ Muslims: all of them were – or are – people who acquired their knowledge of Arabic through academic study alone: that is, from books. None of them, however great his scholarship, has ever been familiar with the Arabic language as a person is familiar with his own, having absorbed the nuances of its idiom and its phraseology with an active, associative response within himself, and hearing it with an ear spontaneously attuned to the intent underlying the acoustic symbolism of its words and sentences. For, the words and sentences of a language – any language – are but symbols for meanings conventionally, and subconsciously, agreed upon by those who express their perception of reality by means of that particular tongue. Unless the translator is able to reproduce within himself the conceptual symbolism of the language in question – that is, unless he hears it “sing” in his ear in all its naturalness and immediacy – his translation will convey no more than the outer shell of the literary matter to which his work is devoted, and will miss, to a higher or lesser degree, the inner meaning of the original: and the greater the depth of the original, the farther must such a translation deviate from its spirit.

No doubt, some of the translators of the Qurʾān whose works are accessible to the Western public can be described as outstanding scholars in the sense of having mastered the Arabic grammar and achieved a considerable knowledge of Arabic literature, but this mastery of grammar and this acquaintance with literature cannot by itself, in the case of a translation from Arabic (and especially the Arabic of the Qurʾān), render the translator independent of that intangible communion with the spirit of the language which can be achieved only by living with and in it.

Arabic is a Semitic tongue: in fact, it is the only Semitic tongue which has remained uninterruptedly alive for thousands of years; and it is the only living language which has remained entirely unchanged for the last fourteen centuries. These two factors are extremely relevant to the problem which we are considering. Since every language is a framework of symbols expressing its people’s particular sense of life-values and their particular way of conveying their perception of reality, it is obvious that the language of the Arabs – a Semitic language which has remained unchanged for so many centuries – must differ widely from anything to which the Western mind is accustomed. The