Month: Aug 2021

How studying the vernacularisation of the Qur’an could undermine assumptions that the Qur’an is untranslatable

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Travis Zadeh’s ambitious study of Persian exegesis and translations of the Qur’an appeared in 2012. It is an ambitious work that traces the “socio-linguistic process of vernacularisation as it relates particularly to the Qur’an” (Zadeh 2012, xviii). A more robust description would be something like that: a socio-linguistic study of the intellectual, institutional, and codicological movement behind the vernacularisation of the Qur’an in Persia.

Mapping Frontiers examines the early Abbasid’s translation movement and the many viewpoints on translation prevalent at the time, particularly as it related to the feasibility of translating the Qur’an. It studies a famous passage from Ibn Kurradadhbih’s Kitab al-Maslik wa-l-mamalik (Book of Routes and Realms), and its reception and use over time (albeit it cannot be used as a guide to the mediaeval Muslim world). The goal is to comprehend the cultural formation of the ‘Abbasid society,’ viewing Arab civilisation as an adhesive medium, rather than a political and cultural power, that enabled other cultures to thrive. This point is significant for it forces us to revaluate Persian culture’s role in the development of Arab civilisation and beyond.

How the Western concept of religion infiltrated colonial India to ensure the domination, power and superiority of the colonisers

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During colonial India, translation played a key role in changing the practices of Indians, their society and languages. Colonisers assumed that meanings are comparable and that identities are fixed, not fluid. Their goal was to standardise India’s languages, laws, and customs with all their hybridity and complexity in the image of the colonised themselves—the spectre of the West. Fear of heterogeneity, along with a desire for mastery, drove this reductionist behaviour, which was carried out through “an imagined common platform or grid” and “a particular mode of social relation” to impose and sustain hierarchies between colonisers and colonised (Mandair 2009, 91). This mindset, according to Mandair, still exists today, making recognition of difference impossible and confining theoretical knowledge to a replication of itself as well as of its Western origins.