They cannot help but bring new ideas or sensibilities to the original terms imn, nab, and taqwa. A prime example would be wal, a term of special significance in f traditions to refer to the “friends” of God. When Orientalist scholars rewrote wal with the English word saint, and Muslim intellectuals in turn adopted this translation, a historical tension within Muslim traditions now related to a point of controversy between Protestants and Catholics. Muslim thinkers concerned with the revival of original Islam and/or proving Islam’s rationality, operating within the global hegemony of Protestant empires, expressed anti-f prejudice with the vocabulary of Protestant anti-Catholic prejudice.
This is why I do not consistently translate the Arabic Allh into the English God. When I converted, I changed my own name to its Arabic version (Mik’l) and did the same to God, attempting to reinvent both of us in a language that I did not speak. I needed a theatrically alterior word like Allh to erase my previous script with God (in the constraints of my own lived experience, it was irrelevant that Arabic-speaking Christians also call upon God as Allh). Even if God and Allh are perfectly interchangeable, my decision to translate or not translate the name adds significations to both terms, because God’s Arabic name is so widely referenced in English that it functions as an English word. English-speaking non-Muslims refer to “Allh” in debates over Islam’s perceived foreignness to America and incompatibility with Jews and Christians, alleging that Allh cannot be the god of the Bible; these people obviously haven’t read the New Testament in Arabic. While the appearance of Allh in an Arabic text can refer to the god of Muslims, Christians, Jews, or any monotheist, uses of the word in English conversation exclusively point to the religion of Muslims: The word’s meaning becomes “God as conceptualized by Muslims.” Likewise, if I am asked to imagine Jesus or ‘s, two different characters appear, though these names refer to the same prophet.
Even if a word in one language can be exactly matched by a word in another, translation still makes an effect. Look at this extraction from 5:3, which is widely regarded as the final verse of the Qur’n to have been revealed:
Today I have perfected your religion for you, completed my favor upon you, and have named for you Islam as a religion.
This is a popular translation, but we could raise some questions. First, “religion” as a category isn’t any more stable or consistent than things like “race,” “gender,” “nation,” or “science”—or, for that matter, the “sun” or “moon” as produced in our culturally specific knowledges—and so we shouldn’t assume that the word expresses a universal concept that exists with the same meanings throughout all of history. The modern sense of religion as a belief system or closed set of doctrines does not exist in the Qur’n, which speaks only of communities: The Qur’n discusses “Christians” and their beliefs but has no word for Christianity. In the Qur’n’s typology of communities, there are people who have scriptures from the Creator, and those who don’t; there are communities that follow their prophets, and others that deviate from what they were given; but there is not a multiplicity of “religions.” When translators decide that 5:3’s mention of dn (which translators read elsewhere in the Qur’n as “judgment” or “duty”) signifies “religion,” they force their own concepts onto the seventh century.
Second, to leave islm untranslated only performs an alternative translation: It turns the Arabic islm into Islam, an English word found in English dictionaries. The Arabic verbal noun islm (signifying “submission” or “surrender”) appears only eight times in the Qur’n and never clearly as a proper name; after all, if there are no proper names for Christianity, Judaism, or Zoroastrianism in the Qur’n, the Qur’n doesn’t have to name its own system. Within the Qur’n and even among the works of classical theologians such as al-Ghazl, as scholar Carl Ernst points out, islm is less prominent as an identity marker than imn
They cannot help but bring new ideas or sensibilities to the original terms imn, nab, and taqwa. A prime example would be wal, a term of special significance in 