(“submitter”) than mu’min (“believer”).33 In the modern era of named religions, however, islm is not only left untranslated in English Qur’ns, but finds itself capitalized as a proper name, Islam, to work within the Protestantized category of “religion” that has just been imposed upon the verse. We make the Qur’n report our own world back to us: The Qur’n now tells us that we have a perfect religion and that our perfect religion has a name. We could read the proclamation another way and potentially alter the verse’s consequences:
Today I have perfected your judgment for you, completed my favor upon you, and have named for you surrender as a duty.
Besides the projection of new meanings onto the words, translation also erases meanings: When we decide upon a meaning, we suppress the alternatives. Qur’nic translation threatens to conflate the translator’s mind with the mind of the Qur’n’s author. We tend to make a big deal of the claim that not so much as a single letter has been added to the Qur’n or removed from it since the time of Muammad, but when I think about what we actually do when we read—let alone translate—I find myself asking a “So, what?” that cannot be answered.
The original meaning isn’t always the most useful. Today, the Qur’n’s 109th sra is popularly interpreted as a statement of interfaith tolerance through its verses that have been translated thus: “Nor will I be a worshiper of what you worship, nor will you be worshipers of what I worship; for you is your religion and for me is a religion.” But if your method of interpretation places a premium on historical context (and you believe that we have access to this context), reading the sra as a message that came first to specific people at a specific moment in their lives, it becomes more difficult to project our modern values onto the words. Mecca’s polytheists had reportedly offered a wager to Muammad: that Muammad worship their gods for one year, after which the polytheists would devote one year to worship of Allh alone, and whoever ended up better off would adopt the other side’s mode of worship permanently. Sra 109 came as a rejection of this proposal, making its own wager: Muammad will never leave his superior, true dn, and this particular group of unbelievers will never abandon their inferior, false dn. Premodern commentators who situated the sra in its historical setting did not see the verses as suggesting that all “religions” were equal roads to the same truth, contrary to the hopes of modern readers with interest in interfaith dialogue. Rather, it was a prediction that came true, as the unbelievers to whom it referred never accepted Muammad’s prophethood. If we choose to uphold the occasion of the sra’s revelation and its original audience as the keys to its message, we lose our reading of the 109th sra as a statement of liberal religious pluralism, and what strikes us as the clear “literal” meaning is complicated by history.34
Verse 20:102 describes the criminals who will be gathered on the Day as “blue-eyed.” In Mediterranean antiquity’s medical theories of the body, external bodily traits were regarded as clues to a person’s inner character, and even the great Imm Shfi’ followed Hellenic physiognomy in his confidence that people with blue eyes were idiots.35 For their racialized understandings of the Qur’n, however, Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan are popularly imagined as heretical deviants whose theodicy of blue-eyed “white devils” distorts the Qur’n’s true message of racial egalitarianism. The irony is that in the case of 20:102, these “heretics” find themselves closer to a plain-sense reading, which pits them against “orthodox” scholars who would rather explain the verse away. When it comes to 20:102, Nation of Islam exegetes appear to be the only scriptural literalists in town.
(“submitter”) than mu’min (“believer”).33 In the modern era of named religions, however, islm is not only left untranslated in English Qur’