Or do Turks use a Turkish translation, the Indonesians etc…?
IANAM, but as I understand it, the Koran is considered to be only in Arabic. A translation of the Koran into some other language might be a useful study guide, but it’s not the Koran. I’m sure that there are a good many Muslims who can’t read Arabic, but they’re supposed to.
I have some serious doubts that Arabic literacy in the Islamic world is 100%. So, if you define Muslim as someone who reads the Koran in Arabic, you have a much smaller population of Muslims.
Tris
By some estimates, only about 20% of Muslims are Arabs, so my assumption is that the overwhelming majority of Muslims do not have Arabic as their first language.
Muslims memorize and recite Arabic, as only Arabic is suitable for the required prayers (my ignorant assumption is that the same holds true of Judaism and Hebrew). Most Muslims I know study the Qur’an in their most-comfortable language (English and/or Urdu, for example). These volumes have titles that are similar to “An Interpretation of the Qur’an”, rather than simply “Al-Qur’an”.
As with any translation, they are somewhat-subjective interpretations, and different English translations, for example, will choose significantly different words or phrasing (literal translation vs. overall meaning, perhaps).
There are also transliterations, which use English letters to spell Arabic words. These are useful for memorizing for those that cannot read Arabic.
Not a Muslim, but Raza and Chronos have it about right. Muslims are encouraged to learn Arabic in order to be able to study and learn the Koran, as opposed to the translations of the Koran which are not considered the actual holy book.
AFAIK w/o being a Muslim, as long as one makes an honest effort to learn Arabic and follow Islamic beliefs, they are considered muslim. \
The issue is no more or less complicated than “what is a Christian” in practice. Generally, however, if someone has recited the shahadah in front of witnesses, they are considered (for a time, anyway) to be a Muslim. One would also need to acknowledge belief in the articles of faith
Isn’t it also that case that even native Arabic speakers have trouble with the Arabic of the Quran? Maybe someone (oh, I don’t know, Johanna, maybe?) could explain just how different the Arabic of the Quran is from modern colloquial Arabic.
Comparable to the difference between Latin and the various Romance languages.
So I wondered how Arabs are able to read the Qur’an without a translation.As far as I can tell, two things contribute to the answer:
- For one thing, all books are published in Classical or Standard Arabic. All elementary education in Arab countries is done in the medium of Modern Standard Arabic (which is the same as Classical, updated). Because they’re taught in the classical language, they can follow the meaning. It would be like if all classes in France, Italy, Spain, etc. were taught in Latin. By the time they finished elementary school, they’d be able to just pick up the Vulgate and read it for comprehension, more or less. This is the main reason.
- If an Arab reader gets stuck on the meaning of a particular phrase, they often turn to a brief classical commentary titled Tafsir al-Jalalayn which provides glosses of words and phrases in simple language.
As for Arabs who don’t get any further education than ABCs, I think they could understand enough of the general drift of the Qur’an to read it with imperfect comprehension, but I wonder about that too.
There are stories of Arabs during the lifetime of Muhammad who would ask what certain unfamiliar words in the Qur’an meant. So this is not a new question.
The Hebrew Torah is in Hebrew and wasn’t the Bible originally in Latin.
Oooooh, if only this weren’t GQ…!
ouryL New Testament was Greek.
The Hebrew Bible (the entire Old Testament, not just the Torah) was originally written in Hebrew with smatterings of Aramaic. The New Testament was written entirely in Greek. In the 5th century, St. Jerome translated everything into Latin, and that version of the Bible (called the Vulgate) became the standard for the Catholic Church (and for Christianity in general until the reformation).
Looking up at my shelf, I have translations of the Qur’an into English, French, Spanish, Serbo-Croatian, Hausa, Indonesian, Turkish, Tamil, and Telugu. There are lots, lots more in existence. I looked at a Hungarian translation in the Library of Congress once.
Translations into the vernacular for study of the meaning are widely used by Muslims the world over. The Saudi government press prints them up in dozens of languages and sends crates of them around the world for free. It’s only the liturgical use of the Qur’an that’s required to be in Arabic. I don’t know why this is so often misunderstood. I think we’ve had other threads asking the same question. So to answer the OP: It’s both. They read it for comprehension in the vernacular and in Arabic for worship.
The most recent translation I acquired is The Sublime Quran by Laleh Bakhtiar - the first by an American Muslim woman, just published this year. Dr. Bakhtiar is of secular Iranian-American origin and converted to Islam as an adult. She studied Classical Arabic and learned that the verb translated as ‘beat them’ in verse 4:34 does not mean ‘beat’ in that context, i.e. the Qur’an does not sanction wife-beating. She translated it ‘go away from them’ – yes, literally ‘hit the road’ or ‘beat it’. The same idiom in Arabic as in English.
As a former long-term resident of Indonesia, now living in Egypt, I’ll weigh in on this one…
It is true that a translation of the Koran is not considered to be the Koran itself. However, in Indonesia at least, a very common way of producing copies of the Koran that people can actually read is to put side-by-side translations within one book: say, the Indonesian on the left-hand page, and Arabic on the right.
Now, as to understanding the Arabic, yeah, you have to study extra hard for that. In Indonesia they have special schools for religious Moslems (pesantren).
OTH, if you just want to say your prayers well, you can learn to “read” Arabic out loud without learning the language itself. Such courses (“Learn to read the Koran out loud in just 6 one-hour classes!”) were around a lot in Indonesia. These courses taught people the letters and how to pronounce them, so, just as you could pronounce “sek” by looking at it without having any particularly knowledge of a meaning, you could speak the Arabic (and of course, as a good Moslem you would probably have some idea of what the meaning was).