T. B. Irving, The Qur’an: The First American Version; Translated and Commentary (1985)

Many expressions are given an ironic cast in some translations like “grand vizier” for the Turkish prime minister, when a simpler term like ‘prime minister’ or ‘premier’ would take it out of the Arabian Nights and make it sound more appropriate and fitting for statecraft. “No burdened [soul] shall bear another’s burden” (6:xx etc.) shows what a cabinet minister carries in his portfolio. Other Turkish or Anglo-Indian forms are “muezzin” and “kismet”. Crusading terms like “infidel” for the non-believer or misbeliever, one who flashes “scimitars” instead of waving swords. Spellings of this sort are “Kaaba” and Port “Said” as if this latter were the past participle of our verb to “say”; they should read instead: “Kaʿba” and “Saʿīd”.

The etymology of the word “worship” in English should be borne in mind, as an exercise giving ‘value’ or ‘worth’ to superior beings, what we might call reverence, and thus linking it to ʿibāda in Arabic. The true worshipper or ʿabd (96:i) we meet in many Islamic names (and which is reduced to the ironic “Abdul” or ‘servant of the…’ in Orientalist jargon exactly like “admiral” who is literally ‘prince of the…’, we must presume “of the sea”).

There is also much prejudice in many of the Orientalist weasel words such as the term “Moorish” in connection with Spanish Islam or the French Foreign Legion. Jinete meaning ‘horseman’ or ‘rider’ and zanahoria for ‘carrot’ are the only truly Moorish or Berber words in the common Spanish lexicon, while true Arabic ones occur there frequently; yet they are all called “Moorish”. What does the term Moorish mean? Who invented the name “Mauretania" in this century to describe the region south of Morocco which really should be Shinqit, as its inhabitants call it. Mauretania lay north of the Atlas Mountains in Roman times, and is probably derived from a Phoenician cognate with the modern Maghrib or ‘place where the sun sets’ or “West”.

Spelling and Phonetics

Throughout this translation I have consistently used the Library of Congress system of transliteration. This is essentially the same as that employed by the Royal Asiatic Society of London and the Board of Geographic Names in Washington, which ran into much incongruity during its survey of the Middle East and North Africa.

A standardization of Arabic nomenclature is needed for the countries which were under different colonial rule. Shaṭṭ al-ʿArab formed by the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates upstream from Baṣra in southern Iraq becomes Chott al-Jarīd in Tunisia and Chott ach-Charqui in Algeria. The word for ‘mountain’ jabal, has half a dozen spellings as it crosses the map of the Arab world. Besides the colonial styles used by the European occupiers in their former colonies, we run into Egyptian and Pakistani spellings of Arabic words, neither of which are standard Arabic. The Spanish-style “Tétuan” in the former Spanish zone of northern Morocco has recently become “Tetouan” because King Ḥasan or “Hassan” speaks French. This is pure verbal baroque, as French Orientalism too often is.