Huzaima stopped when she heard a donkey call. To her there was sadness in the sound. I had heard it often without wondering what the animal might be trying to say. We could not know from that call whether it was hungry, seeking company or suffering under a load. However, her response sent us back to a familiar rendering of the holy Qur’an: ‘the ugliest of all voices is the voice of the donkey’. How had a counsel about the way people speak become a judgment about an animal?

The trouble begins whenever we imagine that a great literary work can be carried into another language word for word. Its rhythm, associations and changes of register do not submit to a dictionary. The Qur’an poses a formidable challenge of this kind. It invites its doubters to produce a surah comparable to it. That challenge concerns a whole act of expression, not the replacement of each Arabic word with an English one. Translation is indispensable for millions of readers. It is also an interpretation, never a second original.

In Surah Luqman, 31:19, a father advises his son to be measured in his walk and to restrain his voice. The last clause reads: inna ankara al-aswati la-sawtu al-hamir. The word ankara has the root n-k-r, associated with the unrecognised, the strange and what one finds objectionable.  Classical commentators also understood it here as an unpleasant or ugly sound. It would therefore be too easy to say that ‘ugliest’ is a dictionary error. A root offers possibilities; the sentence and its neighbours determine what work a word is doing.

Look at the translators’ choices. Muhammad Asad writes ‘ugliest’, but places ‘(loud)’ before the voice of asses. M A S Abdel Haleem also uses ‘ugliest’. A J Arberry chooses ‘most hideous’. Marmaduke Pickthall and Abdullah Yusuf Ali choose ‘harshest’. Saheeh International says ‘most disagreeable of sounds’; Muhammad........

© The Friday Times