Nouman Ali Khan – Arabic Sciences & English Tafsirs – Ep. 9 – The Quran Library
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By the way, for any of my students,
this is, I'm gonna call this a must
have.
They should definitely get this one. So this
is a a biography of Abdul Isofali. This
is a biography of what his picture is
there. That's Marmaduke Pichl. That's what Marmaduke Pichl
looks like. Yeah. Handsome fella. Right?
Who's gonna try this, Scott's reading?
No, maesters.
Whence to pass in pilgrimage
after a bunny weave through the I think
it's probably best if I Okay. If I
close that now. I just Yeah. But the
point is What did I just say?
So this one, whenever someone says to me,
stay in your lane. I say, I
am.
Okay. So waiting for that for so many
years.
So this session, we're gonna talk about a
lot of things.
Looks like it. So let's start with
Arabic language resources.
Now, obviously, somewhere in my archives, I've got
stuff that I learned Arabic gram Arabic from,
including grammar. Right.
Nahusaruf, balaga,
adab. I don't have all of these things,
out and handy, but I have some things
which I feel like I can use,
sometimes as, like, handy
kind of summaries of,
Naho concepts and definitions.
I got that. And things which I think
can be useful for for teaching Arabic. This
is an unusual one.
Oftentimes, when you're teaching
Arabic, not so much in your style, but
English grammar. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. It's not Arabic
Arabic grammar for English students. It's English grammar
for students of Arabic. That's actually really beneficial.
Right.
I actually had this idea,
well, because I saw the French one, actually.
And I thought, I should write an Arabic
one. That would be so good. And then
I found it was already done. So
Saved you time.
So, basically, the idea is
introducing you to how your own language works
and some of the structures of it so
you can start to compare
how it's going to be in Arabic as
you Right. As you progress to learn.
It's a nice,
textbook. I don't know if you know. Haywood
and Ahmed Yep. Use this one.
And a really nice one in Arabic, which
is called in English, a dictionary of Arabic
grammar from the holy Quran,
Quran.
What I love about this is each page
has got
one
rule in it, and then it just gives
you,
you know, purely Koranic examples and,
you know, it's it's it's got some nice
diagrams, and
it's a really good kind of revision tool,
I think. Really great. Yeah.
Can I see that?
Of
course. While you're taking a look, I will
mention that a lot of people study a
book called the.
Of course.
I have a I don't know if I
should share share the secret with you. I
never studied
the. Actually, most of the things that people
studied, they didn't study,
but somehow well, I share your secret, my
friend. I I the only you know when
I shared studied
the? 8 years ago when I decided to
teach the.
And How did that go? It was passive
aggressive.
It went really well. Okay. But,
then I was I really appreciated our curriculum
after having studied Ajiromia. I mean, this is
a translation
of the Ajir Mir. I've thought about using
it,
you know, because the translation can help people
to access it. Even if there are things
that might disagree within the translation, you can
also point those things out as you go.
Right. This is quite dear to me because
my Arabic teacher gave it was his copy,
and he gave me that. Oh, that's really
sweet. Doctor Abdul Mohammed
on the Aja Romeo
called a Dafat Usaniyah.
This is his edition
of the Sharjah ibn Aqil. This we actually
studied in Al Azhar
to some
extent. It's a commentary on,
in the Alfiya of Ibn Malik.
So this is one of the, you know,
detailed
text that is studied. And this is quite
cool.
I saw this recently in,
in a bookshop here in the UK,
Hashia of Al Alusi
on
Sharhav Qadr Nada
of Ibn Hisham. So
what intrigued me about the possibility of studying
this is look. Here's the mafasir that I
use a lot. And, obviously, in the tafsir,
you've got all the grammar discussions taking place.
But this is him directly
presenting the grammar. So through this, I can
understand his
concept and way of doing things.
So,
you know, if Allah gives us life and
students,
we can teach this stuff. And then in
in Balaga,
I know that you happen to love this
particular work
of I do.
What's the name again? Asayid Ahmed al Hashmi?
Sayid Ahmed al Hashmi. Jawah al Malaga. Hashmi.
Yep. Is your copy as pretty as mine?
I have 4 copies. None of them are
this purple and yellow.
I'll take that.
So this is this is a nice, sort
of reasonably introductory text. I studied before that
something called the probably.
Yeah. I did like that one. I really
like this one. And this is a book
by a friend of mine, which is done
in English. So it's good sometimes to have
English I didn't know there was another one.
I I remember Arabic rhetoric
of pragmatic approach by Abdul Raouf.
Very convoluted. That's one of the very difficult
questions. Yeah. Yeah. I think hopefully this would
be a bit better than that.
But,
it's good to see how terms are translated
and and and cross over
into other languages.
And I have a few things that are
kind of literally
I'll I'll bring them over. We'll start with
this one. This looks really good.
There you go.
Norman Elisha just recommended your book.
I did. There you go.
But I'll go students. Go through this.
So this is pretty cool. This is so
that you can learn.
It's a classical book. You can learn
Proper composition?
Yeah. And how like, different ways of saying
the same thing. Right. That's wonderful.
I'll grab something from here.
This is really good.
The author died of 3 20 of the
Hijra, so
it's early. Wow.
So you would speak like a An ancient.
Yeah. Don't say don't just say boring things
like what do they have for example?
I mean, I saw a couple of
You wanna talk about someone being honorable and
lofty.
So you're
gonna
say
Okay.
Okay. He's the egg of his tongue. He's
the
Okay. Alright. Alright. Easy. Easy there.
So, yeah, I've I've heard some, some teachers
recommending that book.
I think this is one that doctor Akram
teaches as part of his Arabic course. I
I just bought this
in bilingual edition.
Uh-huh.
So it's like it's compared to Aesop's fables.
I see.
But it's a it's an old text that
sort of circulated amongst,
different cultures, you know, Persian and so on.
But then, you know, Ibn al Muqaffar rendered
it into Arabic, and this has been translated
by a couple of, you know, leading Arabic
literature translators.
So I thought the bilingual thing would be
pretty good to study.
And speaking of
Arabic literature translators,
this is Maqamaatul Hariri.
I haven't had the opportunity to study this,
but I thought, you know, it'll be interesting.
As a piece of literature, which is very
much about wordplay, which I Yeah. Get a
lot of pleasure from,
we've got this translation called impostures.
So it's not it's not part of Quranic
library, let's say. But it's literature and In
order to, you know, appreciate the language of
the Quran, it really is important to have
a sense of
language more broadly Yeah. And,
and and get some delight from, eloquent Arabic
speech.
So then you can see,
the way the Quran works is a cut
above
all of these things. Yeah. But you can
see the tools that are in operation and
language It gives you a taste for what's
happening with the Quran too because it's building
on an existing taste palette. Mhmm. Right? So
it's not just, oh, it's a cut above
because somebody could hear that and say, well,
now I'll just go to the thing that's
cut above. I don't have to go cut
below. It's actually,
you know, if you have a taste for
the English language and then you hear beautiful
English, then you're it's because you know
you you have an appreciation for something
is why you can see something else. Another
another way to think about it is, like,
if you don't watch any basketball,
right, then you don't know a lot about
the sport.
So if somebody's playing spectacularly,
you can't really appreciate what's so spectacular about
that because that's not your that's not your
sport. Or the same with me with me
and football, at least football is the rest
of the world uses it. I I can't
tell if someone did something incredible at a
certain play. But people that are in the
sport and are kind of familiar with plays
and
setups and, you know, when they see somebody
do something out of the ordinary, they're like,
wow, that was incredible. Right? So it's the
same with language,
that you have to have a a minimal
lens, and that's what language and literature, not
just grammar, but language and literature does. And
then above that, when you see what the
Quran is doing, now you can see, okay,
that's that's pretty insane. That's that's pretty incredible.
That that's, you know, that what Allah is
what Allah does in this case or that
case. Yeah. And then you got a book
like the Muqamat,
of Hariri or others other Muqamats as well,
which are so tightly packed with wordplay.
And it becomes an end in itself.
The meaning and the message isn't really there.
It's not doing something lofty,
like a It's just a I just want
to get the pun in.
That's it. So that's the fun of it.
But then when you find just small,
you know, flavors of that in the Quran,
certain terms of phrase Pick it up quickly.
And you've, you know, you've got the sense
of it. Yeah. You don't want too much
of that. Obviously, it would take away from,
from the purposes of the Quran. But this
translation,
itself here we are. Right?
Scott Free. Haqal
al Harafubnu Hamam.
So this translates to Michael Cooper's, and he
did something very crazy. And every single Maqama,
every chapter, he's translating a different style of
English.
And he did that because the the themselves,
you know,
some people consider it to be, like, untranslatable
and just, you know, the language is just,
out of this world almost.
So he's saying, let me do something,
you know,
equally crazy. Yeah. Who's gonna try this, Scott's
reading?
No Maesters.
I had gained our 2 I was gonna
I was going to do it, but okay,
you just I would really
then to pass in pilgrimage
after a bunny weeks were gone,
and coming to look like a right clarities
stook o' dirt.
Stook o' dirt.
Had I tamed
the bath,
and I was glaggering
for a bit moose than,
heavy throesals. I think it's probably best to
put it Okay. If I close that now.
I just Yeah. But the point is What
did I just say?
But as people who, you know, we we
engage in translation as well, I think it's
useful to study translations as a genre. You
know, not just Quran translations, but translations.
Yeah. I won't forget trusal. That was a
trusal.
Being willing to do something, you know, out
there and really push the boundaries, I think
is Did you understand that?
I was reading the Arabic at the same
time. Okay.
Alright. So,
next chunk of this is Quranic dictionaries. Okay.
Or not entirely just Quranic dictionaries.
This is Lane's lexicon Lane's lexicon. Of that
lexicon. Which draws from,
some of the main
Arabic lexicons.
Arabic dictionaries
like and,
you know, the the source text as well,
Tajil. Tajil Oros. Yeah. Mentioned at the back
here as well.
So
this one, whenever someone says to me, stay
in your lane, I say, I am.
K. So waiting for that for so many
years.
Most of these things start off in Twitter,
and then now I have the chance to
do it live.
So this one, I mean, we find very
useful,
usually in terms of, you know, using it
to search online.
But that's because,
in terms of Quran dictionaries that are specifically
about Quranic language, one of the important ones
is
Arabic.
Of course. And Mufradar.
Yeah. And then there's a kind of follow-up
to that by Asimin al Halabi whose work
at Dulul Masoon we talked to yesterday, the
student.
Yeah. He's got.
And then,
in the modern times, this is one that
is That you and I love so much.
Which is by Mohammed Hassan Jabal. Yeah.
And this has a very special approach to
looking at
how
the meanings within one three letter root or
even within the sort of two letter pair,
how they kind of revolve around a core
sense.
Yeah.
So
in a quite remarkable way, he manages, for
the most part in quite convincing ways,
to show how the different words that are
under one root can be traced back to
something that connects them. That can be quite
difficult, can be quite challenging, because at the
end of the day, language is not mathematics.
Right.
It doesn't have to follow that way. But
it seems that in the Arabic language,
it really does follow that way to a
very considerable extent.
And he's able to capture a lot of
that. And he's able to capture a lot
of that. Yeah. So this this book,
is a very important
important work. And we're we're doing our best
to
extract that and that that reflects it. A
lot of his notes make it their way
into our Durus. So when I do deeper
look series, a lot of the word analysis
comes from his work because it's so well
juiced from
the other sources,
like Lisan Al Arab, like Lane, like,
you know,
you know, other other dictionaries. And it's this
has become kind of a go to because
it's he's already done so much of the
work, and he synthesized it, and that's important.
So Lane also then, helps us to understand
the the references that he's drawing from, you
know, when he's taking from the San Al
Arab and Swan.
Then this is, one which has
been around for a while, and then it's
this is a sort of revised edition of
it by Penrice.
Incidentally, about Lane, when I get stuck in
the sun and autumn on some phrase that
I just don't know what he's getting at,
I go to Lane, and then that helps
out because he's done quite a bit of
digging into So this what those figures do.
This
this scholar, I mean,
he,
is just incredible, really, the amount of work
that he must have put in
and, and also the precision with which he
actually gets across. I mean, this is just
a hugely invaluable resource. Yeah. And then my
own teacher, professor Abdul Halim, is one of
the translators
or the the authors and editors of this
Arabic English Dictionary of Quranic Usage.
So,
again, this takes us into specifically Quranic words,
and then it's,
you know, with the English discussion.
So you could see it as almost,
a supplement to
This trans yeah. The Hellenistic translation.
It's not exactly that, but,
because they have to adjust things a little
bit for for various purposes. Right. But that
is you know, that helps you to understand
the source of of their,
linguistic opinions. So that takes us ever so
neatly and smoothly
onto the subject of Quran translations. Oh, I've
not done what are translations.
Now, obviously, there's only so much that we
can say in
Definitely. Quick journey, and we will talk about
Quran translations more,
as we
as we work through our work through our
translation. Yeah. But naturally, we, you know, acknowledge
and respect the fact that many people have
gone before
Muslims, even non Muslims. This is the oldest
translation that I have a copy of,
which is, you know, by George Sale.
So this copy was falling apart. I've tried
to just hold it together with some tape.
But, you know, these some of these early
translations
were,
you know, quite openly hostile towards
Islam and the prophet of Islam.
We learned that there are a lot of
Russian translations. The the most popular Russian translation
was actually done by an orientalist
who thought of Muslims as barbarians
and,
was actually public, like, proliferated among Russian Muslims
for a long time. And some of the
later translations that were done by Muslims
were heavily influenced by his translation.
So,
finding translations that are hostile to Islam is
not uncommon.
Yeah. So, you know, in the early 20th
century, you start to see quite a lot
of translations which even,
remain
popular today.
So an example of that is a translation
of Mohammed Marmadjik Piqthal.
The copy I've got,
I mean, I've got a few different copies,
but this one also has the Urdu in
it. So what's interesting is a lot of
that happened
in the, subcontinent. So Pyqthaul was in Hyderabad.
Mhmm.
And,
Abdullah Yousef Ali
was also
in, in Lahore for the for a good
part, and these things were printed in Lahore.
So there was there's a very strong association
of Quran translation
with
the Indian subcontinent.
Even Muhammad Assad later on,
he he's got the message of the Quran.
He was also based there for a certain
time and was was connected to,
even to the founding of Pakistan. And
it's it's I think it's underrated sometimes,
just how much
the subcontinent plays a role here. Yusuf Ali
was between here, you know, between,
England
and
Pakistan. And we've got here Abdul Majid Dariabadi.
What's interesting about his, why I thought to
highlight it is
Not very well known. It's not very well
known. And, you know, the edition, I don't
think
any
edition of his work has come out recently
that is full.
The copy I've got here is in 4
volumes,
and it's got quite considerable
footnotes and commentary. And he actually calls it
Tassir al Quran. Tassir al Quran. So when
we ask the question, you know, why aren't
there tassirs written in English?
Well, when you think about it, there are,
but they are typically just
on the level of translation and some notes.
But when you have translation with enough notes,
doesn't it sort of cross over into the
genre of tafsir? Right. What really would be
the difference?
If you were to write a tafsir in
English, the first thing you need to do
is provide some basic account of the text,
which which is done by translation.
And then what isn't covered by translation, you
cover by further comments.
So what really is the difference between that
and?
Rhetorical question.
So here's just a few more that we
picked out, you know, from from numerous that
I happen to have copies of.
This doesn't seem like a bad translation at
all. Therabody is is well regarded,
but just
hasn't been popularized. And, again,
you know, it depends on what happened to
be digitized and then what happened to go
on the websites and then what happened to
go on to the apps.
That's what determines if someone
is worth reading or not, but it shouldn't
be that way.
You know? And some of the translations like
Muhammad Assad,
you know, you don't get the full benefit
of Assad or even Yusuf Ali
without the footnotes. Right.
But then again, there's some things in the
footnotes, especially in the early editions of Yusuf
Ali, which, you know, people might object to.
Mohammed Assad, there's things that people object to
as well.
You know, it it all depends on your
aptitude in reading and your ability to sift
between things.
It's also challenging because then there's a huge
population that's who only has exposure to the
study of the Quran from a second language.
Right? Mhmm. So when they're reading commentary and
interpretation,
there's a degree of separation from the source
material and
the ability to research
word analysis,
phrasings, meanings, things like that. Yeah. So while
this is a contribution,
well, sometimes when someone says, okay, I have
a Quran.
And they actually have a translation of the
Quran there. Yes.
You you don't, you have a work on
the Quran and
there may be more to it than what
you assume. And so a lot of times,
out of necessity, maybe even out of a
sense of,
you know, the the desire to live in
the black and the white and not
not not confront the fact that maybe there's
things that I don't know or there's more
to learn. I really wanna hold on to
this.
You're getting comfort from the dictionary of Arabic.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm really liking this one.
By the way, for any of my students,
this is, I'm gonna I'm gonna call this
a must have.
They should definitely get this one.
I think applied grammar,
I think.
Yeah. Stuff.
So when it comes to, translations,
you know, we're not gonna get into commenting
on what is
the best or the great or good and
bad and whatever.
Yeah. We're we're not in the business of
criticizing other work.
We do so with a off camera,
to study What? What? Just say yes. To
say, hey, that's some that's not satisfactory or
that we wouldn't have translated it like that
and things like that, but we see no
benefit in
going through our work and saying, here's what's
what we think is wrong with this one
and what we think is wrong with that
one. It's not constructive. You know, if somebody's
got a copy, then they'd be well, so
what's the best? I said, well, what have
you got? Well, that's what they've got. And
then if they've got something which is reasonable,
I'd say that's fine. Yeah. You don't have
to swap it for something else. You know?
Because what is best for each person can
be a little bit subjective. Can I see
the Dariabadi again? Is it the entire Quran?
Yeah. Entire Quran. Yeah.
Just curious. There is, also one volume edition,
which is just the translation and just very,
very minimal notes. So Islamic Oh, this is
multivolume, is it? This is a 4 volume
one. Yeah. Okay.
So then you've got, you know, new translations
coming out every year. The latest one most
likely is this one by,
Noah Keller, the Quran Beheld. And he did
that in conjunction with,
someone I consider a teacher
of Maheshikh Ali Hani in Jordan.
And,
you know, the collaborative aspect of that is
exciting, you know, for people who are also
doing collaborative translation. The
tafsir based approach to it is also of
interest to see
the results that came out of that. And
maybe someone can do one day a comparison
between the results that come out of our
collaboration and their collaboration. I'm sure it'd be
interesting. Yep. I mean, it clearly is going
to be very different that much I can
see. That we can definitely see.
Did you know that Ustad Noammar and I
have translated Surat Yousef together?
You can find the PDF online, and you
can also see a special video that we
made together in Jakarta in which I'm reciting
the Arabic, and Ustad is reciting our English
translation.
When Joseph said to his father, dad, I
have actually seen 11 stars and the sun
and the moon.
I watched them bow down before me.
You can bookmark this for later for now.
Let's get back to the books.
So, yeah, professor Abdel Halim's translation, of course,
you know, being, my teacher and my PhD
supervisor,
I always recommend it to people.
But it's just always the case that each
translation has got its own style and approach.
His translation
tends to not feel the need to stick
very closely to the wording
because it's more about being fluent in English.
I feel like he's trying to capture the
overall sense instead of the phrasing. Yeah. And
for many people, that's what they need. And
especially for someone's first translation,
you don't want them to be bogged down
with some of the specifics of Arabic phrases
Yeah. And so on.
So that's in terms of Quran translations
as they are.
You know, you can benefit from
Chime in a little bit. Mhmm.
He says, but virtue of is of him
who believes in Allah. So you know how
there's a He
did a good translation of that that we
love
the the tatheer of that phrase.
Yeah. That's one of the ways of
reading the way that they're Yeah. There's a
Nahi way. There's the Balahi way. Right? Sometimes
there's
a little bit of a divide.
In terms of what I've got in my
shelf life, because I was part of a
project,
at Freiburg University in Germany called the Global
Quran project. Okay. You know, I have an
interest in Quran translations and different things pertaining
to it. But one of the things that
we do is also look at the life
of the translator and, you know, so this
is a biography of Abdul Youssef Ali. This
is a biography of all his pictures there.
That's Marmaduke Pichtl. That's what Marmaduke Pichtl looks
like. Yeah. Handsome fella, right? Yeah. You would
never think if you're sitting on a train
with him. Yeah.
Yeah. The Quran. Scholar of the Quran. And
I and I did a presentation about
the, the experience he had going to Egypt
when he finished his translation
to try and get the support of the
the scholars of Egypt. Mhmm.
Yeah. It was a very eventful
trip where he,
you know, he received help from some scholars,
but others were like, okay. You should stop
this. You should not do this. You shouldn't
translate the Quran. It's a bad idea.
Because at that time, it was a controversial
thing as to whether the Quran can't should
be talking. Around what year is this?
That was in 1929 that he went to
Egypt. So the debate was still raging amongst
the scholars of Al Azhar.
And he you know, there were some condemnations
given against him by the senior scholars of
Al Azhar.
But others were like, yeah, yeah, I know.
They took him under his wing, Sheikh Mustafa
Marawi in particular.
But eventually that debate
was won by the side who Just got
flooded over by the proliferation of translation and
the need for it. Part of the concern
was, you know, that, the people are going
to distort the Quran and or people will
replace the original with the translation, things like
that.
Mostly,
people have dropped the idea that you cannot
translate the Quran, but there are still some.
Like, this book,
to me is
respectfully a bit like flat earthism. Like, you
can believe in a flat earth, but then
other people are building satellites. You know?
This is a a book which considers it
to be a to translate the Quran at
all. Oh, that's true. And I've tried to
read it. I haven't really given it its
its due, I would say.
You get sometimes I wouldn't be able to.
Books which, let's see that one.
Books which analyze
translations, and when they're written by Arabs,
Arab scholars even like this one from Al
Azhar,
it does sometimes
pick at things which,
we don't necessarily
agree with that criticism.
One of the funny things is,
so this author,
he complains
that Pickthal, for example, when he translates
He translates it. And let not thy hand
be chained to thy neck nor open it
with a complete opening,
lest thou sit and rebuked.
Right?
So
the complaint that the author makes here is
Told you about kafir. Yeah. And what you've
done then is you have made the English
reader think that this is about hand postures.
Whereas Pickthal actually
received this criticism in the newspaper in Egypt
back in 1930.
This exact exact same criticism was made,
and he responded to it back then. And
he said, well, in English,
it's understood that you got expressions like tight
*, open handed.
Yeah. So English too has some My job.
Metaphor. Yeah. You can work with that.
If there are some expressions that cannot be
understood, then you have to use an idiomatic
translation. But here he said that the idiom
is similar between, English and Arabic.
And then, this is from our friends at
Marcus Tafsir.
Translation of the meanings of the Quran is
often, you know, unnecessary. You just say translation
of the Quran. It means the same.
So it's talking about different Arabs and how,
they affect translations. So I haven't actually read
this one yet, but it's the kind of
thing that
So is are they looking at
or
No but
like different Arabs of a particular ayah Okay.
And how that would impact the translations. Yeah.
So I think it might take a few
translations as a kind of case study. I
can see this as mentioned some names here
like Pickthall,
along with others here. Pickthall, Palmer, Rodewell, Arbury,
Shuck,
Sale,
and Sahay International.
So that is kind of the translation section.
And one more for now
is translations of tafsir.
So when we're looking at tafsir, we saw,
mostly Arabic works. And
in amongst that, there were a few translations
as well, like,
I mean,
Tasir, for example. I got it in English,
although it's not completed. The translation is not
complete.
Well, translation of tafsir is,
is something which we don't have a great
deal of actually in
in English,
but there is some growth in the field.
So I picked out a few things
to point out.
First of all, let me say there is
this book which I came across recently called
by
Khaled Blankenship,
and this is supposed to
include
all
works in the field of the Quran and
the study of the Quran that are in
English,
including translations of the Quran and translations of
tafsir
all the way up until, you know, 2021
or so. Wow.
But it doesn't
because It probably includes his life. It well,
it doesn't mention this. It doesn't mention this,
most importantly, my translation.
It doesn't it doesn't mention this.
So, yeah, it's certainly not complete, but,
you know, it may still be a useful
book. Let's see.
But personal grudges aside,
we've got some translations from, Tafsir of Tabari.
This one is,
just some sections and selections,
comes in 2 volumes.
And
then we have got,
let's say, Tafsir Jalalain.
And just recently, I met Faraz Hamza, who
is the the translator of this volume.
And I asked him actually,
like,
what did you think about being asked to
translate Tafsir Jelalain? So, you know, understandably, he
he confirmed for me the same thing that
I would say, which is that a tafsir
like jalayin is very terse and, you know,
very
focused on this or the the meaning of
a word, something like that. So So it
doesn't lend itself to translation, really.
But, you know, he explained how he did
his best job, despite this inherent challenge of
of the work,
and,
and that some people benefit from it in
different parts of the world. So,
you know, that's available. And there's actually 2
translations of Jalalayn. The other one is done
by Aisha Buly. Aisha Buly, who's also the
translator of,
Al Khortobi. That's an ongoing project. There's a
few volumes of that.
Not only these things lend themselves to translation.
That's kind of what I'm pointing at.
And I know that Bewley has,
abridged it to some extent, removed some things
that she didn't feel can be translated.
But,
also she has translated
the fasir of Ibn Juzay. She doesn't has
done the draft translation, and the reviser of
that translation
is yours truly. So, inshallah, it's gonna come
out before
too long, in a year or so,
in which case, you know, it will be
an accurate and smooth translation.
I was going to mention also before we
get to Razi,
the tafsir of al Badawi. So I mentioned
the importance of Badawi
in,
the curriculum
of Islamic seminaries. Right. But, likewise, it's also,
captured the attention of oriental scholars,
and translators of the Quran. So the likes
of,
Sale, for example,
George Sale here. He
tells us that he was using and,
Badawi.
He said he's used used a manuscript of
Badawi.
So here in Glasgow,
where we're recording this,
there was a book published
of a translation
of Surat Youssef from Tafsir Baldawi.
It is
awful, truly awful.
I actually went through this whole thing, and
I've, I've annotated the, the translation errors. I
don't know why I felt,
you know, somehow
obliged to do that. And then I found
that there's another translation of Surat Youssef from
Tafsir Baidawi
by another or interest called Beeston.
And this is actually a very good translation
with some with some issues, but mostly very,
very good.
DS Margoliath
has a translation
of Surat Ali Imran from Tasil Bedi,
which I haven't really
assessed, but I should think will be good.
And now we have a Muslim
translator of Tasil Bedi, GF Haddad.
He so far released this one volume, but
I understand that he is close to completing
and publishing the film of Tasir.
So that should also be a good addition
to the library
of Tasir translations.
And then
last but not least,
the great exegesis.
So
my work on, Ar Razi's Tafsir obviously,
has been very laborious.
It's very good for me personally.
People seem to have responded well to it.
But it's something which you know, the idea
of translating the entire Tafsir
al Razi, you know, as we saw on
my shelf, is 16 volumes in the copy
I've got.
I've translated one half of one of those
volumes,
and then I've translated another volume which isn't
published yet.
Yeah. So this is just a just a
commentary on.
So I think the translation is useful,
but at the same time,
the idea of,
translating
the entire work is just
too too much.
And,
there's better ways to expend that the Siri
energy,
and that is to write original works in
English,
and to work also I agree. Some more
modern things.
I agree.
Any questions?
All of this
and now we're embarking on our own translation
project.
So we have to
really
visit and revisit and revisit
the goals that we have before us for
our own project.
Mhmm. And,
obviously, take advantage of the work that's been
done before us, but also
acknowledge
the gaps that need to be filled.
So The thing is, especially with Quran translations,
so many keep coming out in the English
language, particularly Yeah.
That people need to ask the question,
what is it that I'm adding with this?
What is it that's missing that I need
to do this? Right.
And fair enough, if people have an answer
to that question, they should go ahead. With
us, we need to ask that question as
well. But I think having started it,
we've got a sense of what it is
that we
maybe
maybe knew was missing, but it becomes clearer
to us what's missing. It becomes clearer. Yeah.
Once we've started doing it. That's right. So,
you know, without saying much more about that,
we'll let people be the judges.
All they give us stuff here to do
a good job. Thank you so much for
sharing all of the service.
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