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

ījāz is, as I have explained, a peculiar, integral aspect of the Arabic language, and has reached its utmost perfection in the Qurʾān. In order to render its meaning into a language which does not function in a similarly elliptical manner, the thought-links which are missing – that is, deliberately omitted – in the original must be supplied by the translator in the form of frequent interpolations between brackets; for, unless this is done, the Arabic phrase concerned loses all its life in the translation and often becomes a meaningless jumble.

Furthermore, one must beware of rendering, in each and every case, the religious terms used in the Qurʾān in the sense which they have acquired after Islam had become “institutionalized” into a definite set of laws, tenets and practices. However legitimate this “institutionalization” may be in the context of Islamic religious history, it is obvious that the Qurʾān cannot be correctly understood if we read it merely in the light of later ideological developments, losing sight of its original purport and the meaning which it had – and was intended to have – for the people who first heard it from the lips of the Prophet himself. For instance, when his contemporaries heard the words islām and muslim, they understood them as denoting man’s “self-surrender to God” and “one who surrenders himself to God”, without limiting these terms to any specific community or denomination – e.g., in 3:67, where Abraham is spoken of as having “surrendered himself unto God” (kāna musliman), or in 3:52, where the disciples of Jesus say, “Bear thou witness that we have surrendered ourselves unto God (bi-annā muslimūn)”. In Arabic, this original meaning has remained unimpaired, and no Arab scholar has ever become oblivious of the wide connotation of these terms. Not so, however, the non-Arab of our day, believer and non-believer alike: to him, islām and muslim usually bear a restricted, historically circumscribed significance, and apply exclusively to the followers of the Prophet Muḥammad. Similarly, the terms kufr (“denial of the truth”) and kāfir (“one who denies the truth”) have become, in the conventional translations of the Qurʾān, unwarrantably simplified into “unbelief” and “unbeliever” or “infidel", respectively, and have thus been deprived of the wide spiritual meaning which the Qurʾān gives to these terms. Another example is to be found in the conventional rendering of the word kitāb, when applied to the Qurʾān, as “book”: for, when the Qurʾān was being revealed (and we must not forget that this process took twenty-three years), those who listened to its recitation did not conceive of it as a “book” – since it was compiled into one only some decades after the Prophet’s death – but rather, in view of the derivation of the noun kitāb from the verb kataba (“he wrote" or, tropically, “he ordained”), as a “divine writ” or a “revelation”. The same holds true with regard to the Qurʾanic use of this term in its connotation of earlier revealed scriptures: for the Qurʾān often stresses the fact that those earlier instances of divine writ have largely been corrupted in the course of time, and that the extant holy “books” do not really represent the original revelations. Consequently, the translation of ahl al-kitāb as “people of the book” is not very meaningful; in my opinion, the term should be rendered as “followers of earlier revelation”.

In short, if it is to be truly comprehensible in another language, the message of the Qurʾān must be rendered in such a way as to reproduce, as closely as possible, the sense which it had for the people who were as yet unburdened by the conceptual images of later Islamic developments: and this has been the overriding principle which has guided me throughout my work.

With the exception of two terms, I have endeavoured to circumscribe every Qurʾanic concept in appropriate English expressions – an endeavour which has sometimes necessitated the use of whole sentences to convey the meaning of a single Arabic word. The two exceptions from this rule are the terms al-qurʾān and sūrah, since neither of the two