The original papers of Heisenberg and Schrödinger versus the Koran

[Boojatta]

If those papers can be faithfully translated from German to English, but the Koran is so sophisticated that it can't be faithfully translated from Arabic to English, then why should people who speak English but not Arabic bother to try to read the Koran?

To become a Muslim, is it mandatory to attempt to read the Koran?

[PDJane]

1. Yes. But to be Jewish or Christian

means that you have to read the bible and understand it too. That hasn't been the case with most of the followers of the God of Abraham.

[Dr.Phool]

2. I think with the bible, you just have to believe it.

Not read it or understand it.

[midnight]

3. Yes. And if your a Catholic they read a section of it every

Sunday, and within a year the church has made sure the whole Bible has been read to you.

[TexasProgresive]

4. Only a portion of the total over 3 years-

Not only Catholics but Lutherans, United Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and others who use the Lectionary. By no means does it encompass the whole of the Bible.

[Warpy]

9. Really?

They sure as hell never read the Song of Solomon in church when I was being dragged up in the Irish Catholic church.

I might have paid a little attention to the sermon if they had.

[Realityhack]

10. I seriously doubt that. n/t

[onager]

5. Even illiterates are expected to "read" the Koran

By rote memorization. In the past, you paid a literate person to read the Koran to you. Nowadays you can just buy a handy little *.mp3 player. Many different models are sold all over the Middle East and are very popular here.

I'm in Egypt, where nearly 50% of the population is, in fact, illiterate. I also spent 2 years working in Saudi Arabia, where I heard an interesting story.

The head of Saudi Intelligence, Prince Turki bin Sultan IIRC, wondered about the makeup of the Saudi matowa--the Religious Police. Those are the government-paid busybodies who go around beating men into the mosques with sticks, and harassing women who look too un-Islamic. Their official name is the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice. Every neighborhood in Saudi Arabia has a branch, and they are in the phone book.

The prince had a survey done, and found that a huge percentage of the matowa had recently done time in jail or prison. In Saudi Arabia, you can get your prison sentence reduced if you memorize the Koran while serving your time.

[Azooz]

6. Mandatory?

Most Muslims do not know Arabic and have no need to learn it. The five daily prayers require that one read it from memory but that can be limited to just seven lines or a page of the Quran - and some read from a book during prayers if they do not know it.

Knowing the Quran is how we chose our Imams, when you have 10 people at prayer time the Imam will be the one who has memorized more than the other nine. If his memory is weak and he makes mistakes someone will correct him during the prayer, and replace him if the mistakes are too many. I am never to be an Imam because my memory is much too weak, and I chose not to memorize the Quran when young - wrong choice but it was my own choice to make.

Mandatory is not the word, a number of people find it addictive and a rare few have a talent for the wording of it - but for most it is not required and just that one page will do. The English Quran says much the same as the Arabic Quran but the Arabic wording is much more exact and Arabic knowledge is needed if you want to know for yourself into "what does that mean" rather than have someone tell you what he thinks it means.

The Quran gives religious authority - I can stop any Imam who makes a mistake in the prononciation of a word, those better at Arabic than me can also notice faulty phrases or wrong letters emphasized and the accented letters ignored, the stops, tones and letter extensions and hundreds of other details that no one can pretend to know even half of. Muslims do not need to know any of that but there Imams should have the basics at least to lead prayers.

The English Quran displays all that Muslims believe same as the Arabic Quran, but to dig deeper and fine tune that knowledge then Arabic is needed - the easy way is to get just enough Arabic to listen the scholars of the Quran and at that point you'll never need the English Quran at all, but till then you do if you want to know what it says.

[edhopper]

7. Molloy

by Samuel Beckett

I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of
sucking-stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones. Yes, on
this occasion I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them
equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn
about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following
way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these
being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my
greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and
putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my
greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I
replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I
replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I
replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had
finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my
four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to
suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my
greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time.
And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I
have just described. And so on. But this solution did not satisfy me
fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the
four stones circulating thus might always be the same four. In which
case, far from sucking the sixteen stones turn and turn about, I was
really only sucking four, always the same, turn and turn about. But
I shuffled them well in my pockets, before I began to suck, and
again, while I sucked, before transferring them, in the hope of
obtaining a more general circulation of the stones from pocket to
pocket. But this was only a makeshift that could not long content a
man like me. So I began to look for something else ...

[Azooz]

12. So I began to look for something else ...

There is a limit each writer or poet in every language has to hit, where words can no longer express what he or she wants to say, the Quran starts at that level and then just keeps on going. It is the ultimate work of art, simple words used to draw amazing clear images, emotions and renditions that from page one leave no doubt at all that no one will ever write anything like it or even come close.

In English you will have to find me a page that no English writer in 1,000 years could even hope to equal, by a writer with enough self confidence to claim that no one will Ever be able to equal his or her writing ability in even one single page - and the skill to back up that claim and it'll have to convince all bi-lingual writers to.

The Quran does all that, makes those incredible claims with total confidence. On a language level I have to accept that because I have never seen it proven wrong. Learning Arabic will not prove me wrong, it'll just just make it an interesting fact that you can simply ignore like most Muslims do with no problem.

The question you should be asking is why this book can not be translated into any other languages. It really should be very easy as it uses no sophistry or overly flowery language skill or advanced poetry, yet not even one single page can be translated.

[Boojatta]

15. It occurs to me that someone who wants to learn the Arabic language...

won't make much progress if all Arabic language in the study materials is removed and replaced with, for example, a good Spanish translation of the Arabic.

The question you should be asking is why this book cannot be translated into any other languages. It really should be very easy as it uses no sophistry or overly flowery language skill or advanced poetry, yet not even one single page can be translated.

[Azooz]

16. no such translation

That is just it, there is no Spanish translation either, good or bad - it's just as far from the original as the English Quran is - all the translators on Earth can not translate it, what they do is translate the individual Arabic words as best they can and you have to figure out how they fit. There is no other way but it gets easier with time, the meaning comes through and the English words are good but not near good enough.

In English you can read the Quran but you will always know that there is more, even in Arabic that is true - but in Arabic you get to know more.

Let me add that the Quran can not be translated into any other form of Arabic either - the Egyptian communists of the 50s wanted it in their dialect, this made most Egyptian Muslims very angry but the scholars just told them to try, they failed to.

[Silent3]

8. I suppose there's a kind of Uncertainty Principle that applies to religious texts.

The more you know what they say, the less you know about what they're supposed to mean.

[Azooz]

13. not only a religious text, just normal text

A typical 7th century desert goat herder could correct the very best scholar of the Quran if he made a small mistake - like a too smart kid pointing out all the magician's tricks. It's written that way, language is all you need to understand what it means, theology really is second to language - this makes clergy much less important. If typical 7th century desert goat herder differs on a word from the scholar the goat Herder would probably be right.

I should mention that a typical 7th century desert goat herder would have over 100,000 lines of poetry memorized, a desert moadib will have over a million - desert people need poetry for survival, knowledge and entertainment and it also gives them well over 10 times the typical Arab's vocabulary to.

Example - Steven Hawkings explaining a book about black holes, and the 7th century desert goat herder says he is wrong about a certain aspect that he could not even begin to understand - the goat herder would probably be right. A Pope, or grand Ayatollah, all explaining what this or that means and the goat herder will know if they make a mistake,

>>The more you know what they say, the less you know about what they're supposed to mean.
That is theology but the Quran makes that second to language - the more language you learn the more theology you know, not the other way around. If you have more language than a scholar of the Quran or great Imam and I'll trust you more than them to explain to me what it means. It is called the "science of language" "Fiqh al-logha" (Logha is the origin of the word "language"), where grammar beats theology for the very first time, for "what does that mean?" simply ask that goat herder. Arabic had no written rules of grammar before the Quran, the great Persian scholar (Sebawayh) stayed with the goat herders for ten years in the desert just to write the grammar rules for the very first time about 100 years after the Quran.

[and-justice-for-all]

11. I knew it was bullshit, but this confirms it.

What would someone scribe a book, which is so unreadable? that is just stupid. Yet, people claim it a holy sacrament.:eyes:

Religion is so utterly absurd.

[SidneyCarton]

14. Has anyone yet tried to define ethics or justify war based on Heisenberg and Schrodinger?

I understand that these are incredibly complex and nuanced works, far beyond my ken as a historian. That said, I assume the common layman would not merely pickup either of these gentleman's works for guidance in their day to day lives (perhaps this is a pity, I'm not sure) Has there been any attempts to make these writings available to the man on the street?

[Boojatta]

25. I don't know answers to your questions.

However, I note that you used the words "define ethics or justify war." It occurs to me that someone might develop axioms and reasoning to justify not direct conflict between armies, but assassination of novelists and translators of novels. Perhaps the world would be a safer place if all Persian language translations of the Koran were stored in secure underground vaults around the world.

[Igel]

17. The Qur'an is just text.

Old text, written with words that you need to read scholars to understand--and they were largely guessing by the time exegesis came to be written down. Borrowings from a trader's koine, probably. Often poetry.

With poetry comes difficulty, as allusions are implicated. You have to start asking if what the writer meant and what the reader understands are of equal worth, and opinions differ. Then you have to ask if all the possible implications that a reader can draw are implicit in the text, and if they have to be translated. That leads to asking if only the implications that can be construed as present in the text are allowed to be present in the translation. Add post-modernism and deconstruction to the idea of translating the text, with the idea that what's important is what's "in the interstices" and the entire enterprise unravels. And then the truly snarly problem: What about things that are culturally constrained, and where differences in cultural, how you view a past event or a cultural artefact, how social relations are construed and evaluated? Do you go for equivalence, and if so, how? Add postmodernist *cultural* level criticism to it and you're left with a total melt-down, and scholars nod fervently when it's said that the Qur'aan can't be translated. It's vacuous agreement, on entirely different grounds from Qur'aan advocates, but nobody seems to care that the agreement is accidental.

Or that you have the same problems with Cervantes, the Qur'aan, the Book of Psalms, and Russian poets like Pushkin and Ivanov, or even a cleverly written op-ed piece. Same problems, and quirky solutions that vary by translator and reader.

But in addition, the Qur'aan is so encrusted with reverance and layers of deeply believed theology, with every possible meaning of every possible word taken to have deep meaning, that it's become untranslatable, made untranslatable by dicta of the believers. The Qur'aan itself is supposedly very simple text (separated from modern speakers by some shifts in grammatical categories). Having the context for some utterances be unknown or ignored doesn't help, because decontextualized language is often harder to translate than language in situ (hence at least part of the problem with poetry). And when you add all the metaphorical crap that wasn't necessarily intended (except after theologizing everything the adored prophet could have possibly meant or said), there's even an added a layer of difficulty to translation. With some answers to the above questions required: You may omit nothing, and you may add nothing (unless its countenanced by tradition and beliefs, and those vary a bit).

I've seen people do the same with Biblical Hebrew and koine Greek: They focus so much on aspectual differences or other grammatical properties that they claim the language is untranslatable. When it's just issuing orders or providing narrative, it's pretty much translatable. It's when there's extraneous crap added to the text, or when you try torturing the text to get hideously fine-grained subtleties and nuances out of every word and morpheme, that the translations necessarily fail, and you get monstrosities like the paraphrased "Living" Bible. Thing is, the paraphrase--like many scholars' interpretations of the Qur'aan--reflect not so much the original text as the biases and inadequacies and distortions the scholars wanted, needed, or fell into. They usually disregard the fact that the meaning of the text isn't in words, but in sentences and larger structural units. For that you need naive readers, and most of them, with the Qur'aan as the object of their fetishism, turn out to be rather nasty pieces of work.

I once had a translation class in which the instructor--so wedded to modern literature that he couldn't conceive of any other use for language--say that no text was remotely capable of being translated. I pushed him, and he cited others saying that texts, as cultural artefacts, simply were non-translatable--at best you could approximate some aspect of the text's meaning. I asked him a hypothetical. He's in Spain on sabbatical with his wife, who speaks no Spanish. They get a notice that the electricity in their apartment will be cut off at 5 pm the next day unless they pay their bill by noon. Can he translate it not just 'remotely' correctly, but precisely? He said 'of course'. The denotative meaning of the text, the social context, the actions and emotions it evoked, the structure and form corresponded remarkably well between English and Spanish. "So isn't that a case where you can translate not just remotely correctly, but precisely?" "Well, if you want to call that a a 'text', sure, but what's the point?" Ah. "So when you say 'no text is remotely translatable', the first requirement to make the statement true is to rule out all texts that can be precisely translated, and then to choose sample texts that are so complex, decontextualized, metaphorical, and so innovative in their use of language that they trivially prove your point." He stared at me. I was auditing, and didn't go back. I have little use for blithering idiots, even when tenured; had he actually been important in his field, maybe I'd have continued (then he'd be a potentially useful blithering idiot).

So, no, the Qur'aan isn't translatable, at least on the terms set by those form whom it's used as a pedestal to put their faith on. After all, experts who invest decades in understanding it--and teach their followers that it can't be understood by outsiders--are too heavily invested in making it untranslatable. And there are difficulties because it's "holy" and "sacred". To make it translatable would disenfranchise the only primary claim to fame a culture has, wreck an entire industry, and somehow make the mystery that gives millions of lives meaning rather mundane. It happened when the Bible's components were translated into Western vernaculars and given credence; oddly, the Reformation followed not long after. Whether that's significant, can't say.

What's sad is when you see dissertations at western universities where prominent scholars are cowed by iterant preachers masquerading as students. Then you get "linguistics" dissertations asking why the Qur'aan has the best style and form of all texts in all languges, and seek to use modern linguistics to "prove" it, showing that having such and such a preposition used X% of the time is the definition of perfection. And you read claims that it was only by accident that the Qur'aan, which as always existed in its precise linguistic form, just happened to coincide perfectly with the Bedouin-tinged Arabic spoken by the compilers of the Qur'aan in the 7th century. The great men in the field are afraid to say, "You know, that's a pile of partially fermented horse shit, at best, and you really should find a new dissertation topic that doesn't make you seem like a moron." That would be culturally insensitive.

But such dissertating also comports with Arabic linguistic ideology, in which the most conservative sections of society are considered the purist. The dialects most similar to Qur'aanic Arabic are Sa3udi Bedouin, which are among the most socially retrograde (by Western standards), and have been raided for grammatical norms and vocabulary and poetic forms for a thousand years. This confers a kind of sanctity to their social traditions, and accounts for a sad part of Sa3udi thought. That Bedouin dialects are often conservative isn't surprising: There's enough isolation in rural Arabic dialects to preserve some rather striking archaisms, but enough social intercourse between dialects to prevent the kinds of phonological bizarreness that you get in things like Bergun Romansch. Some Bedouin dialects are highly innovating, but since they don't reinforce (and aren't reinforced by) the Qur'aan, they're simply ignored. Well described in the literature, but ignored.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

18. The interesting bits of Heisenberg and Schrodinger are written in Maths, not in German.

You can translate the German bits those papers very easily indeed to English, because they're not so important.

You can't translate the maths to any other language, though.

[Boojatta]

19. Math vocabulary is so restricted that mathematical formulation systems

are unlike any all-purpose spoken language (such as German, Arabic, or English) that is learned by human infants/babies who are making progress towards going beyond linguistic and cognitive infancy/babyhood.

[Boojatta]

20. How easy is it for people who don't speak a word of German to

translate those papers?

Note: I exaggerated a bit, but I doubt that the sneeze acknowledgement word will help in translating those papers.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

21. I'm afraid I don't know. I've read maths papers in French with virtually no French, though.

I don't know how hard it would have been if "virtually no" had been "no", and I don't know if it's different for theoretical physics.

I reckon that if I understood the subject area I could probably make a good stab at it with just a dictionary, though.

[Boojatta]

22. Thank you.

Believe it or not, that information gave me an idea that may be very helpful.

[HamdenRice]

23. I don't think the allegation is that it can't be understood in English, but that it doesn't rhyme

or some such. Muslims don't claim that you can only understand the Koran in English. They say that it has a particular sound that you cannot get in any language other than Arabic.

It's supposed to be poetic. It's like Shakespeare. It can be translated, but it won't sound like shakespeare unless the reader reads English.

[Jim__]

24. The Quran in Arabic is considered the word of God. Translations are not.

I've found a number of web sites that indicate this. For instance:

Translations of The Qur'an are regarded as interpretations in languages other than Arabic. Eventhough translating The Qur'an has been a difficult concept, both theologically and linguistically, The Qur'an has been translated into most languages. In Islam, The Qur'an is a revelation specifically in Arabic, and so it should only be recited in the Arabic language. Translations into other languages are the work of humans and so no longer possess the uniquely sacred character of the Arabic original. Since these translations subtly change the meaning, they are often called "interpretations." For instance, Pickthall called his translation The Meaning of the Glorious Koran rather than simply The Koran.