Category: Academic Books

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.

How translation enriches our understanding of culture and depicts the problematics of representation

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Tejaswini Niranjana’s Siting Translation, though indebted to deconstructivist revisions of language and subjectivity, aims to have the idea of translation redeemed only by a particular postcolonial project. It poses translation as a mode of representation that embodies the critique of hegemonic approaches, offering alternative solutions to the study of culture. The idea is to demonstrate how the poststructuralist critique of representation seize colonized subjects just like an illness, develop gradually, and eventually takes hold of them––it becomes the basis for the articulation of a postcolonial position, though unintentionally and almost unexpectedly.

How the Modern European Identity is perpetuated through the discourse of World Religions

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The idea of “world religion” expresses a commitment to multiculturalism (i.e. it evinces the multicultural, empathetic spirit of contemporary scholars), presupposing that there are many world religions, and Buddhism and Islam are amongst them. This concept embodies a pluralist ideology, a logic of classification, which has shaped the academic study of religion and, consequently, infiltrated ordinary language. In the past, European scholars of religious studies categorised people of the world into four, well-marked and unevenly portioned, domains: Christians, Jews, Mohammedans, and the rest (heathens, pagans, idolaters, or polytheists). This fourfold schema, which long held sway in early modern compendia and dictionaries, began to crumble in the first half of the nineteenth century, and in the early decades of the twentieth, scholars expanded their understanding of great world religions to eleven: Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shinto, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, and Sikhism. This list became the new unchallenged and taken-for-granted schema. It ran along by force of habit, by force of conventional opinion. With the lapse of time, it became stronger and stronger––must eventually be a fact, a reality not easily destroyed.