Muhammad Asad, The Message of the Qur’ān; Translated and Explained by Muhammad Asad (1980)
Arabia – in addition, of course, to academic knowledge of classical Arabic – is the only way for a non-Arab of our time to achieve an intimate understanding of the diction of the Qurʾān. And because none of the scholars who have previously translated the Qurʾān into European languages has ever fulfilled this prerequisite, their translations have remained but distant, and faulty, echoes of its meaning and spirit.
The Work which I am now placing before the public is based on a lifetime of study and of many years spent in Arabia. It is an attempt – perhaps the first attempt – at a really idiomatic, explanatory rendition of the Qurʾanic message into a European language.
None the less, I do not claim to have “translated” the Qurʾān in the sense in which, say, Plato or Shakespeare can be translated. Unlike any other book, its meaning and its linguistic presentation form one unbreakable whole. The position of individual words in a sentence, the rhythm and sound of its phrases and their syntactic construction, the manner in which a metaphor flows almost imperceptibly into a pragmatic statement, the use of acoustic stress not merely in the service of rhetoric but as a means of alluding to unspoken but clearly implied ideas: all this makes the Qurʾān, in the last resort, unique and untranslatable – a fact that has been pointed out by many earlier translators and by all Arab scholars. But although it is impossible to “reproduce” the Qurʾān as such in any other language, it is none the less possible to render its message comprehensible to people who, like most Westerners, do not know Arabic at all or – as is the case with most of the educated non-Arab Muslims – not well enough to find their way through it unaided.
To this end, the translator must be guided throughout by the linguistic usage prevalent at the time of the revelation of the Qurʾān, and must always bear in mind that some of its expressions – especially such as relate to abstract concepts – have in the course of time undergone a subtle change in the popular mind and should not, therefore, be translated in accordance with the sense given to them by post-classical usage. As has been pointed out by that great Islamic scholar, Muḥammad ʿAbduh,4 even some of the renowned, otherwise linguistically reliable Qurʾān-commentators have occasionally erred in this respect; and their errors, magnified by the inadequacy of modern translators, have led to many a distortion, and sometimes to a total incomprehensibility, of individual Qurʾanic passages in their European renditions.
Another (and no less important) point which the translator must take fully into account is the ījāz of the Qurʾān: that inimitable ellipticism which often deliberately omits intermediate thought-clauses in order to express the final stage of an idea as pithily and concisely as is possible within the limitations of a human language. This method of
radically changed the time-honoured way of life of the bedouin and brought them, by means of school education and the radio, into direct contact with the Levantine culture of the cities, the purity of their language is rapidly disappearing and may soon cease to be a living guide to students of the Arabic tongue.
4 The reader will find in my explanatory notes frequent references to views held by Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905). His importance in the context of the modern world of Islam can never be sufficiently stressed. It may be stated without exaggeration that every single trend in contemporary Islamic thoughts can be traced back to the influence, direct or indirect, of this most outstanding of all modern Islamic thinkers. The Qurʾān-commentary planned and begun by him was interrupted by his death in 1905; it was continued (but unfortunately also left incomplete) by his pupil Rashīd Riḍāʾ under the title Tafsīr al-Manār, and has been extensively used by me. Se also Rashīd Riḍāʾ, Taʾrīkh al-Ustādh al-Imām ash-Shaykh Muḥammad ʿAbduh (Cairo 1350-1367 h.), the most authoritative biography of ‘Abduh hitherto published, as well as C. C. Adams, Islam and Modernism in Egypt (London 1933).
