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ABSTRACT
Despite the fact that Islamic feminism is still a contested area, many studies have been conducted under its name. The Qur’an and Prophetic traditions being at the core of feminists’ work discussing gender inequalities from a faith-oriented position entails an inevitable process of translation, between Arabic and other languages, of works dealing with gender injustices. The article draws on the Habermasian concept of the “translation proviso” addressing the interaction in the public sphere between those who invoke religion and those who do not; and on Jakobson’s concepts of interlingual and intralingual translation. By examining works in English by Islamic feminists, such concepts are employed to show that language, meaning and translation must be considered in discussing their debates on establishing gender equity. Thus, language could indeed be an important starting point for dismantling misconceptions about feminism and the potential mutual learning process achieved when feminism is practiced from a faith-based perspective.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 For a comprehensive survey of the field, see Abud (Citation2013).
2 For a comparison between the exegetic approach of Wadud and an important scholar of women’s issues based on Islam, Aisha Abdul Rahman, aka Bint el-Shati’, see Abud (Citation2014); for a translation of an excerpt from chapter six, “Qur’an, Gender, and Interpretive Possibilities”, of Wadud’s Inside Gender Jihad, see translation by Randa Abu Bakr (Citation2012, 255–268).
3 This section in Chapter 6 of Wadud’s book (Citation2006) was translated into Arabic within an anthology published by WMF under the title An-Nisswiyah wa Dirasat ad Diniyah (Feminism and Faith-Based Studies) (2012). Randa Abu Bakr commented on Wadud’s feminist maneuver of disrupting the normative grammatical masculine used in reference to God/Allah: as a translator, she decided to keep the feminine reference in Arabic – as awkward and shocking as it could sound to the reader. She deems this use as an attempt by Wadud to tell her readers that the masculine reference to the divine is but a random, historically circulating linguistic attribution, reflecting unjustifiably masculine superiority and feminine inferiority. She was hoping that as a translator she would be able to shake fixed beliefs among the readers not only concerning gender categories inherited over time but also gender categories produced by the very same language that they use (50).
4 This liberty with the use of pronouns is indeed found “shocking” by speakers of Arabic. The situation was alluded to by Randa Abu Bakr (Citation2012), for instance, in her translation of this section of Wadud’s book as part of an anthology on feminism and faith-based studies. Abu Bakr aligns herself with Wadud’s position that Allah cannot be confined within the limitations of language and that Allah transcends biological attribution to the feminine or the masculine. She also adds that Arabic grammar does not have gender neutral reference. Thus, she decided in her translation of this extract to keep the use of the feminine pronoun as used by Wadud. She made this conscious decision as a translator to force rethinking and rereading of gender categorizations unquestioningly inherited by generations of Arab readers (50).
5 The author translated this quotation from the Arabic.
6 For a discussion of the geographic and hence linguistic diversity of Islamic feminists, see Marcotte (Citation2010).
7 See for example the volume edited by Makdisi, Bayoumi and Sidawi (Citation2014), emerging from the conference titled “Arab Feminisms: A Critical Perspective”, held at the American University in Beirut on 4–7 October 2009. The editors state in the introduction that due to the diversity of the field and the presenters, the conference was conducted in both Arabic and English and translation was the linking thread. This decision of linguistic/intellectual exchange was informed by the desire to “make a useful addition to the global debate on feminism, and thus to reach a wide audience in the Arab world and outside it” (xiii).
8 Habermas maintains that within a post-secular world, coexistence of religious with non-religious groups of people is possible when the religious groups are willing to undertake self-reflection of their beliefs and the fact that their beliefs exist in a secular pluralist society. They are considered to be reasonable when they “come to terms with the cognitive dissonance of encountering other denominations and religions … adapt to the authority of the sciences which hold societal monopoly of knowledge … [and] last, agree to the premises of a constitutional state grounded in a profane morality” (Citation2003, 104). He also argues that this attitude must be reciprocated by other groups if society is to preserve its coherence and peacefulness. However, it is outside the scope of this article to engage with these three perquisites for the admission of faith-based arguments within the realm of politics and legislation.
9 For a brief view on what Habermas means by post-secular society, see Bernstein (Citation2010).
10 This is true despite the fact that at times scholars whose mother tongue is not Arabic could confuse some verses and build their argument accordingly: for example, Wadud (Citation1999) makes a mistake in one of the verses she quotes by giving it an erroneous beginning. She quotes the first verse from Chapter 4 as such: “wa min ayatihi an” (“And min His ayat (is this)”). However, this part does not exist in the verse. Granted that Wadud made such an error inadvertently, it is still problematic because the Qur’an for Muslims is the verbatim word of God. Moreover, Wadud builds her argument in part on this beginning she attributes to this part of the verse – in her interpretation of ayat (signs), which could compromise her credibility as an interpreter.
11 This is Yusuf Ali’s translation: http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=4&verse=34.
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Doaa Embabi
Doaa Embabi is a lecturer in the Faculty of Arts, Ain Shams University in Egypt. Her MA focused on the politics of representation in the works of Edward Said; her PhD studied the rise of the concept of literary criticism in the traditional Arabic and British cultures. She has published a number of articles addressing translation in the context of Islamic feminism; most recently the chapter titled “Negotiating Meaning in Translating Islamic Feminist Texts into Arabic: Mapping the Terrain” (Embabi Citation2020). She is currently working on a second MA titled Analysis of the Translation into Arabic of Selected Islamic Feminist Texts.