Islamic English .. Paths to meet religion in international languages

Imran Abdullah

Muslims have in the past been reluctant to use English as a means of communication and religious practice, mainly because they are linked in the minds of Muslims in East and Central Asia and the Middle East to British colonialism that dominates many Muslim countries.

But this perception changed in the "postcolonial world". Muslims and other religious and ethnic communities shunned English as a colonial language. Hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world now use English as their first or second language, and English, spoken by nearly 1.5 billion people, has become an official language. In Islamic countries, the language of education and even literature and knowledge of many Muslims, despite the loss of some connotations corresponding to Islamic terms.

To protect Arabic-Islamic terminology from distortion when translating, the late Palestinian-American thinker Ismail al-Faruqi suggested introducing Islamic terms as they are to English, offering what he called "Islamic English" to preserve the terminology without semantic distortion, to continue to enrich the contemporary international language and English dictionaries. With the prevailing tendency to maintain cultural and linguistic discrimination of non-Western traditions in English.

Distortion of significance
English seems unable to adequately express the connotations of Islamic religious belief. Qur'anic terms such as "faith" and "jihad" may be translated in English as "belief" or "believing" and "religious warfare", which in the Islamic context does not give the same meaning. English does not contain precise and parallel significance fields for these terms in the language that was once associated with Jewish and Christian cultures, and recently associated with Western values ​​and contemporary knowledge.

The experience of "Islamic English" is lagging compared to "Islamic" languages, such as Persian, Amazigh and Malay, which were enriched early with the religious linguistic structures of the Islamic religion. The Persians had to separate the concepts of ancient religious beliefs from Islamic concepts, in order to acquire the word "Kheda" in Persian, for example. The significance of the word Majesty Allah, when Muslims.

The semantic map of religious terms took considerable time and effort, which is currently taking place in the context of "Islamic English," according to Muzaffar Iqbal, head of the Center for Islam and Science in Canada.

The leading Islamic thinker and philosopher Ismail al-Faruqi (1921-1986) felt that there was a serious anomaly in the translation of Islamic names and terms into English, because the prevailing practice did not show sufficient loyalty to the meaning and favored the criteria of the target language (English) and not the source language (Arabic), This approach leads to the loss of these names and terms for their religious and belief significance.

To correct this imbalance, Faruqi suggested using what he called "Islamic English," according to Mahmudul Hassan, an assistant professor at the Department of English Language and Literature at the Islamic University of Malaysia, who told Al Jazeera Net that "English has more scientific material on Islam than any other language." In Arabic. "

English - Islamic
"English is not the language of the Bible, but the English translation of the Bible, which was written in Aramaic, Hebrew and Ancient Greek, and it took thousands of years for it to be translated (in the real sense) into English," says Malaysian academic Mahmudul Hasan. "Islam in English and Ismail Farouki's Concept of Islamic English".

In the past - in the context of anti-colonialism - many Muslims and others avoided the use of English in education or communication, and this situation can be understood in India, for example, where English was a colonial behavior explicitly by the British occupier who sought to build a class of "English taste, opinions and thought" ".

Being linked to conquest and colonialism, English was seen as inherently not open to Islam and as structurally and rhetorically different from any of the major Islamic languages, such as Arabic, Persian, Malay, Hausa, and others.

But the 19th-century Indian philosopher and reformist pioneer, Ahmed Khan, launched a powerful movement to make English-language education for Indian Muslims, sensing the dilemma of incompetence for those who did not know English to gain jobs, both materially and intellectually.

Hassan considers that English has become an indispensable global language for Muslims, citing prophetic sayings of the Prophet (PBUH) to Zayd ibn Thabit to learn Hebrew and Syriac, adding that "Islam is the religion of all prophets. They must use Arabic in the Qur'an and Hadith. They can use other international languages ​​to communicate between cultures and produce literary and scientific works. "

Post-colonial reading
Names and languages ​​are closely linked because the main function of language is to provide names that the world knows. In contemporary reality, the rise of Western nomenclature and names shows one aspect of the linguistic colonial dominance, thus distorting names by translating them into dangerous cultural relics, according to Faruqi, who seeks to retain Islamic terms and designations. Without losing its significance by literal translation.

Al-Faruqi refers to this issue of religious and cultural significance, saying that cultural loss occurs "when words move from one language to another and are subject to pre-existing concepts or restrictions prevailing in the new language, they lose some of their original meanings."

On the other hand, the names in their native language reflect a complete history and culture and an integrated spiritual world. Al-Faruqi rejects the dominance of foreign language explicitly or implicitly over Islamic nomenclature. He argues that "every label must be respected with the correct spelling and pronunciation, this is one of the fundamental human rights of a Muslim." .

English - Islamic
In contrast, Faruqi believes that Islamic terms can enter English in the same way that entered the Islamic languages ​​such as Persian, Turkish, Amazigh and Swahili as well as Albanian, Kurdish, Uzbek and others, so that it meets the semantic needs of their original meanings.

Al-Farooqi draws attention to the fact that the rate of borrowing Islamic terminology from Arabic is very low.Moreover, most of the Islamic terminology in English dictionaries is spelled incorrectly to fit the Western language.This approach distorts the original words and puts them out of context, making their meaning completely different, Al-Faruqi opposes this multilingual trend and proposes to correct it through "fine craftsmanship".

"Many of the Arabic words are not translatable, and when Islamic meanings are changed, translated and transmitted through translation, it is an irreplaceable loss for Islam, Muslims and the human spirit," he says.

He adds that although Orientalists used "such translations without account, Muslims follow them in their mistakes and misinterpretations is unacceptable."

English has already quoted many words from ancient Latin and Greek and from European languages ​​such as French and Spanish. Today, foreign words overlap with the original and enrich and enrich contemporary English. The Oxford Dictionary adds hundreds of words annually to English.

Researchers in postcolonial studies believe that there is a "set of English languages" - such as Indian and New Zealand English - each with its own history and characteristics.

Thus, Malaysian academic Mahmudul Hasan, following Al-Faruqi, sees no problem in an additional English language that takes Arabic and Islamic terms and is linked to the common cultural and religious traditions of Muslims, although Islam is not a specific geographic entity.