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Translating God

Muslims like to pride themselves with the idea that their children are brought up in a cultural environment with an intimate relationship with the original writing of the Quran. Part of the Quran's mystique is that, according to most Muslims, it can only be properly read and understood in the classical Arabic language, which necessitates the instruction of Arabic among youth being brought up in Islam. It's not true at all, despite what is say, that all young Muslims are Arabic speakers; their dominance of the language is typically limited being able to read Arabic script in a highly accented fashion, hinted by whatever their family's language might be, be it Urdu, Indonesian, Bengali, Bosnian or what have you. Most Muslims only speak Arabic in the same way a fratboy who can pronounce his fraternity's name speaks Greek.

Now modern society may be chipping away at the learning of Arabic, but the intention is noble at least. If the Quran is assumed to be divine, the most rational way of maintaining the integrity of its interpretation is encouraging that it be read only in its original form. Of course this is not a way that escapes all possible confounding variables. Languages, even dead ones, do change, sometimes slowly, and those slow changes are potentially dangerous as they often go unnoticed.

The same problem exists in interpretation of the Greek Bible. As an example, the word πορνεία (porneia) in moden Greek means prostitution, but is typically translated differently for an apparently different usage in the Bible. In modern English Bibles, the word is typically read as fornication, a far more general term whose forbidding disallows a wider range of sexual behavior. In fact Paul's writing against πορνεία is the rationale for Christians to stray from performing premarital or unrestrained sex; thus using the modern word seems to allow Bible-readers to be far more libertine in their sexual habits.

Now modern Arabic is so fragmented and distinct in different areas that it's not unusual for it to be classified as several different languages for surveying purposes. Its dialectical variety is far more colorful than that of English, and universities often have trouble deciding what variety to teach students seeing that even "Modern Standard Arabic" doesn't seem to conquer and explain the divergence. Of course classical Quranic Arabic is another issue all together, with case-based nouns and doubtlessly numerous differences in the lexicon that would vex even fluent speakers of generic Arabic of today. The problem of Quran translation and interpretation, even into modern Arabic is always that the translator is biased by modern usages of the words and contemporary idiom, those many faux amis that have arisen even between the language Arabic itself.

Of course in the west, there is little pretension for perfection in translation; we now live in the sad day when "Family Groups" and political organizations charter purposefully ideological translations of the Bible without so much as a blink of guilt. Thankfully, Christians, even fundamentalists scarcely open a Bible to read more that one or two isolated verses, so even the most crass of mistranslations will probably not damage popular religious discourse any further (as if it could disimprove any more).

May modern tendencies hamper not Biblical translations as a whole; there was a time when translators gave lip-service and sometimes more to the loyalty toward the original texts. Nonetheless, there was rarely any talk of mandating that Greek and Hebrew be taught to all Christians that they might read the original texts, often because it was thought that the interpretation of priests was a necessary intermediary between the Word of God and the impressionable and emotional minds of the masses.

Perhaps it's the comparative cultural diversity of Christianity that has allowed a looseness in the language used in reading Biblical writings. The liturgical language most closely associated with the Christian religion in the west is Latin, a strange historical fluke considering that none of the text of the Bible was actually written in the language. Still the Catholic Church has been able to exalt the Vulgate to a level of spiritual authority that seems to overshadow the texts from which it was translated, as if they weren't even in the running for public attention.

Of course with the translation of the Bible into every new language, there arises ecclesiastical favorites and even mythology surrounding the inspiration of the text. The Septuagint, a pre-Christian translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek bears the legend that its seventy-two translators were ordered to do their own individual work in closed rooms without any collaboration, yet upon finishing, they realized that all seventy-two versions were completely identical, assuredly because divine intervention ghost-wrote each one. In the English speaking world, one may be familiar with some movements pushing for the exclusive usage of the King James Version. What's surprising is that a fair number of those straightly hold the KJV to be re-inspired and superior than the original texts.

To hold these kinds of beliefs exclusive to the original texts requires what a Islamic scholar might call tahrif, that being the idea that the original writings have become spoiled by copyists and editors. It's quite convenient for a read of the King James Version to pleasantly ignore the possibility that the precise arguments they make in English are baseless in languages with slightly variant definitions.

And at the last mistranslations are often never reevaluated and can integrate themselves well into even the basis of religious doctrine, one of the most prominent being the requirement of the Virgin Birth of Jesus. The writer of the gospel of Matthew famously builds off the flawed Septuagint translation of the Book of Isaiah in which עלמה (almah, meaning young woman) is translated into παρθένος (parthenos) a word roughly equivalent to virgin in modern English. Early Christians went through much pain to prove that Jesus was born of a virgin, when in fact the original text never requires that such a miracle be true of the messiah. The mistranslation is now an integral part of Matthew and Luke's gospels and thus Christian theology.