‘Extraordinary translations’ and ‘loathsome commentaries’: Quranic translation and the politics of the Tamil language, c. 1880–1950

ABSTRACT

The practice of translating the Quran in Muslim societies is often understood by reference to the Reformation and Protestant Bible translations. The non-translatability of the Quran is counterposed to the radical translatability of the Bible. Furthermore, instances of Quranic translation in Muslim societies are often explained with reference to ‘reform movements’. The article’s aim is to demonstrate the problems that arise from abstracting the experience of post-Reformation Europe into a general theory of the impact of scriptural translation. For this purpose, I will interrogate the case of Tamil translations of the Quran, where Quran translations from the 1920s onwards eclipsed an older history of Quranic translation in the language.

KEYWORDS:

• Quranic translation
• Islamic reformism
• Islam in South Asia
• Tamil

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Torsten Tschacher is currently Junior-Professor of Muslim Culture and Society in South Asia at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. His research focuses on the history, society and discursive traditions of Tamil-speaking Muslims around the Bay of Bengal. He has published widely on questions of identity and community formation in Tamil Muslim societies as well as Muslim literature in Tamil. A research monograph entitled Race, Religion, and the ‘Indian Muslim’ Predicament in Singapore was published in 2018 with Routledge.

Notes

1 All translations in this article are my own. Tamil is transliterated according to the system of the Tamil Lexicon, Arabic and Persian in accordance with the system of the International Journal of Middle East Studies. As no system exists for transliterating Tamil in Arabic script, I have adopted the following method: Arabic words retained in the Tamil text are given in bold and transliterated according to Arabic transliteration, while Tamil is written in accordance with the Tamil Lexicon. Arabic-Tamil spelling is silently emended to represent standard Tamil orthography.

2 Cf. e.g. al-Amri (2010, 84); Sanneh (1994).

3 Travis Zadeh’s (2012, 1–50) study of Persian exegesis and translation of the Quran provides a detailed introduction to many of the misconceptions concerning Quranic translation raised in this introduction. I have to thank one of the anonymous reviewers of this article for pointing me to Zadeh’s work.

4 Other scholars, such as Sanneh (1994), have retained a more ‘contrastive’ interpretation of Muslim and Christian reform movements.

5 I am well aware that there exists a tremendous diversity in ideas and doctrines both among Muslims and Protestants. If I am referring to these two as unified entities, it is only to demonstrate the problem with identifying different attitudes to scriptural translation with these entities in the first place. For the relationship between juridical arguments, liturgical use and the doctrine of inimitability in the early centuries of Islam, cf. Zadeh (2012, Section 1).

6 I am not quite certain as to how many volumes were published by Daud Shah in the 1960s. Khan (2001, 454) mentions three volumes published between 1962–64. I had access to a fourth volume, which covers surah 16, verse 14 to surah 23, verse 118 (Tāvūtṣā and Aptul Jappār 1965).

7 Regarding the Bāqiyyāt al-Ṣāliḥāt, cf. Tschacher (2006, 204–207).

8 The year 1296 ah is found on the title page, 1300 ah on the final page of the edition (Ḥabīb Muḥammad 1296 ah, 626). It is striking that the two presses in Bombay that published the first Tamil translations of the Quran, the Ḥasanī and Karīmī Presses, also seem to have spearheaded the printing of the earliest Sindhi translations; cf. Khan (2001, 184–185); Schimmel (1963, 230–231).

9 Jalāltīṉ (1999, 114) reports that the introduction of the work gives the 30th of Muḥarram 1290 ah (30 March 1873) as the date of publication, while other authors identify 1291 ah as the year of printing. These reports can perhaps be reconciled by assuming that the printing began in Muḥarram 1290 ah, but that it was not complete before 1291 ah, much as in the case of Futūḥāt al-Raḥmāniyya. I was unfortunately unable to consult a copy of Fatḥ al-Raḥmān for this article.

10 There is some confusion regarding the date of publication of the first edition, which I have not been able to consult. Kokan (1982, 136; following him Khan 2001, 205) claims that the work was originally written in 1299 ah (1881/82) and first printed in 1308 ah (1890/91). According to Shu‘ayb (1993, 277), the work was actually printed in 1299 ah. Cīṉivācaṉ (2007, 27) gives the date as 1899 (1316/17 ah). The first part of the second edition (which is equivalent to the first volume of the first edition) carries a note, according to which it was completed in 1298 ah (Nūḥ 1329 ah, part 1, 508).

11 I was able to inspect a damaged copy of this work lacking the first pages at the library of the Moulana Jamali Matriculation School at Inamkulathur in August 2018. I am indebted to Hazrath Moulana Shahul Hameed Jamaali for granting me access to the library.

12 There are many problems in this dating; cf. Paṣīr (2006, 14–15). For our purposes, it is sufficient to note that there is no reason to assume that the translation of al-Fātiḥa found in Ñāṉappukaḻcci is younger than about 1800.

13 Such ‘poetic commentaries’ bear some resemblance to works of Quranic exegesis produced in Sindhi in the eighteenth century, as well as some early Persian examples; cf. Schimmel (1963, 225–230); Zadeh (2012, 268–279).

14 Regarding the early Urdu translations of the Quran and their connection to reformism, cf. Farooqi (2010); Pearson (2008, 107–126); regarding Bengali translations, cf. Dey (2012); Uddin (2006, chapter 3).

15 Muhammattāhir Cāyapu (1915) seems to be the first Tamil translation of a part of the Quran which had an explicitly reformist background.

16 Apart from questions of language and style, these aspects have largely been disregarded in secondary literature concerning Quranic translation into South Asian languages, with the exception of Uddin’s (2006, chapter 3) discussion of early Bengali translations.

17 The first translation using Tamil script (Kātirumuhyitīṉ 1331 ah), which included the Arabic text, was a rather lavishly produced volume utilising illustration, multi-coloured title pages, and other decorative elements.

18 The term moḻipeyarttu occurs in the earliest Tamil grammar, the Tolkāppiyam (Poruḷatikāram 646 [27.99], see Subrahmanya Sastri 2002, 227), dating to the first millennium ce, yet it is far from clear whether it referred to ‘translation’ in the modern sense. In any case, its occurrence actually confirms that there was no conceptual distinction between ‘translation’ and ‘commentary’, for moḻipeyarttu is identified in that passage as a kind of commentary or vaḻinūl.

19 The first use of the root moḻipeyar- in relation to translating the Quran seems to occur in Sulaymān (1315 ah, 3).

20 A detailed discussion of the history of ‘Arabic-Tamil’ and its ‘othering’ from the 1920s onwards is found in Tschacher (2018). Similar discussions over the use of ‘colloquial’ versus ‘learned’ or ‘grammatical’ registers of Tamil occurred among Protestants with regard to the translation of the Bible; see Israel (2011, chapter 3).

21 For more detailed accounts of this, see Bate (2010); Ebeling (2010); Venkatachalapathy (2012).

22 The translation distributed by the King Fahd Complex identifies al-Shaykh Muḥammad Iqbāl Madanī as the person who ‘formulated’ (qama bi-ṣiyāgha/vaṭivamamaittu), ‘scrutinised’ (taṣḥīḥ/paricīlittu), and ‘corrected’ (murājaayna/cīrpaṭutti) the translation, but refrains from calling him the ‘translator’ (cf. Majmaayn Khādim al-Ḥaramayn 1414 ah, iii (Arabic), v (Tamil). A comparison between this version and Abdul Hamid’s translation shows numerous close correspondences.