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So, what are you reading?
I've finished Al-Ghazali's Prophetic Ethics, the rather slim 20th volume of his Revival of the Religious Sciences. Most of it is a recounting of Hadith, and somewhat threadbare, since the previous 9 books had apparently dealt with the issues presented in detail. The best parts are all when Al-Ghazali speaks in his own voice, which happens rarely near the end. I suspect I'll be pouring over this one occasionally neverthless, looking for lessons to be drawn from its structure and focus.
What particular lessons do you take from al-Ghazali? Are there any highlights worth sharing?
Al-Ghazali was the first time that I actually felt like I understood some of the appeal of Islam.
One of the reasons for that has nothing to do with the books: I actually never knew about hadith (ie. recordings of what people have seen or heard from their Prophet), and it never occured to me that the often harsh tone taken in the Quran (which is narrated from the words of the angel Gabriel) might not necessarily reflect on Muhammad's actual disposition. One wonders if the reason why Muhammad preached at all was because he was terrified of the visions of the fire that he was shown, and he couldn't stand by and do nothing while others quietly walked towards such horrors. A large portion of Al-Ghazali's texts is just hadith and commentary on that, which gave me a very different view of Islam.
Beyond that, there is a clearer sense of the whole picture that can be gleamed. The example that comes to mind is in Principles of the Creed (book 2), where the theological differences between Islam and, say, Christianity become apparent very quickly. At least the Islam of his time taught that everything that happens is God's will, ie. that free will is not a thing, and the justification for punishing those who can do nothing otherwise is that God can do what he wills with his own possessions. Even if God chose to be completely unjust to all human beings, that would be his right. But the mercy of God can be seen in the way that he does not do this. We can see here the meaning of the saying of Muhammad "Surely, of the excellence of a person's Islam is that he leaves what does not concern him." When another person wrongs you, the origin of the wrong is actually God, and the purpose of the wrong is to test you, to see what you will do. Everything thereby becomes subsumed in a dialectical relationship with God:
It helps a lot that Al-Ghazali clearly possessed a highly intelligent mind. I find that the Quran is not as eloquent or sophisticated as other well-known religious texts, though perhaps it comes off better in Arabic. But it becomes clear through Al-Ghazali's treatment that the meaning of that scripture really is something that has intellectual substance. I have not read these books with a systematic intent to study them, so I've only learned through a kind of osmosis the habits and ways of thinking that are either implicit or explicit in the Islamic tradition. There is an idea of seeing what is plain, of moderation. And it is full of gems. Some of the quotes from Al-Ghazali himself (not hadith) that I bothered to copy down are:
There are also deeper issues of Al-Ghazali's thought which I do not yet understand, like his connection to the Sufis and his emphasis on the heart, or his thoughts on what occupations are a communal duty, which fascinate me, but I'm not yet qualified to speak on. I, at least, have found it worth my time.
I always suspected that grand foundational religious (and other) texts bend what is even considered good and beautiful around themselves to a nontrivial degree. If that is true, it would make sense that the Quran, which is hardly used in translation, would not be well-received in English.
As a relevant datum, perhaps, the Russian Bible translations, which I grew up with, do evoke in me qualia of beauty and eloquence, while any English and German ones just seem lame and stilted. I doubt Russian Bible translators were particularly more skilled (though some argument could be made for the Russian language being far better equipped to preserve rhetorical choices in Greek source texts - as a fairly well-known example, Russian gets to punt on the decision of how to deal with the Greek epiousion of "daily bread" fame entirely by simply calquing the Greek morpheme for morpheme), so the relevant difference probably comes down to whether you were bombarded with the assertion that this is what prose with gravitas looks like at a formative age.
(On the other hand, while my Arabic is pretty minimal, having perhaps peaked at what Europeans would call A1 level long ago, I did get the sense that the Quran in the Arabic original is at least very lyrical, in the sense of using the grammatical affordances of the language in a clever way, and more simply sounding beautiful when read out loud.)
I find the Qur'an is often more attractive when sung or recited in the manner of a poem. Certainly as far as religious texts go, it reads almost uniquely badly. However, famously there is a whole small genre of recitation of the Qur'an among devout Muslims, and even as a non-speaker of Arabic, I recognise the beauty of this. I don't know how much it's unique to the specific text of the Qur'an - Christian hymns in Arabic sound beautiful to me as well - but I can at least entertain the possibility that Arabic speakers are right when they tell me that the language of the Qur'an is beautiful, in its original language, and when proclaimed properly.
I am more experienced with the Bible, of course, and I'd say it varies. There are passages that, in Hebrew or Greek, stand out to me as particularly beautiful, or even individual phrases that, for me, have the character of a refreshing wind across my soul. Often they do not have this quality in translation in English - though that may simply be because of over-exposure to the translations. But there are also undoubtedly better or worse translations into other languages as well. I'll never forget once knowing someone who grew up with the equivalent of those excitable, contemporary Bible translations aimed at teenagers, who bounced off the Bible and found it tawdry, and then seeing their reaction upon first reading a more mature translation. The way the light came into their eyes as suddenly the words of Jesus lost that cheap feeling, and instead struck home, was a privilege to witness.
My sense is that the Quran verses are optimised for a certain hypnotic quality, which synergises with the default mode of delivery, and I don't sense that much of it in the Christian Arabic examples you link (though incidentally I remember getting some of it from some Coptic ones I heard before). One good example of this is al-Ahzab 35, which not only is very persistent in repeating the gender parallelism that just can't be made to sound smooth in English (the truth-tellers and the truth-telleresses... the endurers and the endureresses...) but also has some obvious structure around how it orders the words for the qualities it lists (similar words next to each other, structural deviations around ones that break the pattern by being longer).
Which English Bible translations do you like? I found that I'm neither a fan of the "plain language" ones like the NIV, nor the KJV which strikes me as choosing pomp over clarity with such determination that some sentences become borderline nonsensical.
Yes, translations of 33:35 don't convey the rhythm that well. Consider:
None of it flows that well, whereas Arabic fortunately expresses all this with suffixes - -in for men and -at for women, so transliterated from Arabic you get:
And this is just one example. There is a lot, both in terms of aural quality and in terms of meaning, that works well in Arabic, or in other Semitic languages, but does not come across well in English. One that comes up a lot is comparatives and superlatives. Arabic expresses degree by modifying the vowels that connect the root elements, rather than by adding a new word. English translations have to come up with awkward phrases like, to use the example of 1:1, "the most compassionate, the most merciful", or "the all compassionate, the everlastingly merciful", or "the supremely beneficent, the greatest in mercy", and it loses the elegance of the original.
This is not to say that I think that Arabic is uniquely well-suited to expressing God's word or anything - I am not a Muslim and I do not subscribe to the doctrine of i'jaz. This is a problem with all translation, and there are things that can be expressed very beautifully in English but which are very difficult to translate into Arabic. Nonetheless, for me as a non-Arabic-speaking observer, it is still useful to learn just enough to be able to see what it is that people have in mind when they talk about how the Qur'an is so much more attractive in the original language.
UBS Greek New Testament. Git gud. :P
Nah, to be serious, I go back and forth a bit. The translation I use the most as a default is the NRSV, which generally strikes a good balance between readability and formality or dignity, but there are certainly places where I think the NRSV mistranslates, or just has a bad style. In places I think the Jerusalem Bible or NJB have quite nice turns of phrase as well.
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