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Sir James
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The Game:
The Quran can only be fully understood in Arabic. One cannot criticize Islam without knowing Arabic.
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The Truth:
Although Muslims often tell critics of Islam to "read the Quran," they are usually unprepared for what happens when their advice is heeded. An honest translation of Islam's most sacred book generally reinforces negative opinion. The fallback is to then claim that the Quran can only be understood in Arabic.
Of all the efforts to artificially insulate Islam from intellectual critique, this is probably the most transparent. The cheap tactic of arbitrarily dismissing whatever embarassing passages one disagrees with comes with a price. Islam cannot be protected in this way without sacrificing its claim to be a universal religion.
In the first place, it is fundamentally impossible for anyone to learn a language that cannot be translated into the only one they do know, which means the apologists who insist that one "must learn Arabic” in order to understand the Quran are committing a logical fallacy. Either the Arabic of the Quran is translatable (in which case there is no need to learn Arabic) or it is not (in which case it can never be learned by the non-native speaker).
Enter the skeptic. While every language has its nuances, how is that Arabic is the only one with words and phrases that are literally untranslatable? More importantly, why in the world would Allah choose to communicate his one true religion for all people in the only language that cannot be understood by all people? Even the vast majority of Muslims and their imams do not speak Arabic.
Even more suspicious is that this amazing linguistic "discovery" was only recently made – and that it corresponds quite remarkably with the contemporary rejection of Islamic practices that were considered acceptable up until the religion’s recent collision with Western liberalism. In fact, the argument that hidden and alternate meanings exist to unflattering Quranic passages (justifying slavery, the inferior status of women, sexual gluttony, holy warfare, wife-beating, and religious discrimination) perfectly corresponds with the level of embarrassment that modern scholars have about the presence of such verses in the Quran!
No other world religion claims that it can only be fully understood in one language. Neither is the same level of effort required to massage primary messages into palatability. While the Bible is distributed pretty much as is by various Christian groups, for example, it is rare to find a Quran that does not include voluminous and highly subjective footnoted commentary deemed necessary to explain away the straightforward interpretation of politically-incorrect passages.
An additional problem for the apologists is that they want to have it both ways. On the one hand they declare that (for some strange reason) the "perfect book" can't be translated and that Allah's perfect religion thus cannot be understood by most of humanity without a battery of intercessors and interpreters. Then they turn around and blame the reality of Islamic terrorism on this same "necessary" chain of intermediaries by claiming that the Osama bin Ladens of the world have simply gotten bad clerical advice, causing them to “misunderstand” the true meaning of the Religion of Peace (in the most catastrophic and tragic way imaginable).
Of course, another irony here is that, as a Saudi, the Quran-toting Osama bin Laden was a native Arabic speaker – as are most of the leaders and foot soldiers in his al-Qaeda brotherhood of devout Muslims. In fact, many critics of Islam are Arabic speakers as well - a fact that is often ignored by the apologists, who only find Arabic linguistic skills relevant when they are lacking (not that the same pundits have ever been known to care about whether a critic of the Bible speaks Hebrew or Greek).
At this point there is only one avenue of escape for the beleaguered apologist - the weak claim that the Quran can only be understood in Classical Arabic, an obscure Quraish dialect which has not been commonly used in over a thousand years and is only known by a few hundred people alive today (generally Wahabbi scholars, who are - ironically enough - accused of taking the Quran 'too literally').
It is hardly plausible that the differences between classical and modern Arabic are of such significance that peace and tolerance can be confused with terrorism, but even if this were true, it merely begs the question all the more. Why would such a “perfect book” be virtually impossible for the rest of us to learn - and susceptible to such horrible "misinterpretation" on an on-going basis?
Really, it isn't hard to see through this childish game, particularly since the rules are applied only to detractors and not to advocates. Apologists never claim that Arabic is a barrier to understanding Islam when it comes to lauding the religion, no matter how less knowledgeable those offering praise are than the critics. Neither do they qualify the claim that "Islam is the fastest growing religion" with the caveat that new converts (or the vast majority of existing Muslims) don't understand Islam since they can't read the Quran in Arabic.
Obviously, the real reason for this illogical myth is that the information age is now making the full history and texts of the Islamic religion available to a broader audience, and the contents are highly embarrassing to both Muslim scholars and their faithful flock. Pretending that different meanings exist in Arabic is means of self-assurance and saving face with others.
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The Game:The Quran can onlybe understood in Arabic (Read 845 times)
