Coverage of East Africa in the Omani Media (Oman Observer)
Showing posts with label imperialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label imperialism. Show all posts
February 3, 2013
November 4, 2009
September 29, 2009
Secularism, hegemony, and fullness (Talal Asad)
I've posted some stuff from Talal Asad before, from his book Geneaologies of Religion. The link below will take you to a link where he critiques secularism in a very trenchant and incisive way.
Secularism, hegemony, and fullness
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September 22, 2009
Political and Cultural Aspects of Qu'ranic Translation in East Africa Part 4: Conclusion
The final part in our special series on the translation of The Holy Qu'ran into Kiswahili
Part 4: Qurani Takatifu and the work of Sheikh Abdullah Farsy
Following the publication of Kurani Tukufu, Sheikh Abdullah Farsy of Zanzibar had published a tract, "Upotufu was Tafsiri ya Makadiani", which denounced the Ahmadiyya translation. This was followed by his own effort to translate the Qu'ran into Swahili, called Qurani Takatifu. Painstakingly, Farsy built on the work of his teacher Sheikh Mazrui and published his translation in installments in the Zanzibar weekly newspaper Mwongozi (The Guide). Finally, he published the complete translation in 1967. The work was sponsored in part by the Islamic Foundation of Nairobi, a group sympathetic to the anti-Ahmadiyya stance of the Jamaat-e-Islaami in Pakistan; in fact the introduction to the second edition (1974) of Qurani Takatifu is a Kiswahili translation of Maulana Abul Ala Maududi’s introduction to his Urdu commentary on the Qu’ran. Maududi at that time was the head of Jamaat-e-Islaami.
Farsy took aim at what he believed to be the Ahmadiyya’s deliberate mistranslation of Quran 33:41 (In Farsy’s version it is actually verse 40). We have already discussed how Kurani Tukufu rendered "Khataman Nabiyyin" (seal of the prophets) as “Muhuri wa Manabii.” But Farsy is more explicit; he translates the phrase “Khataman Nabiyyin” as “Mwisho wa Mitume,” adding, “The inversion of these words is a lie of the Ahmadiyya who claim for themselves ‘Muhuri wa Manabii.’ And they mention piles of names of university students and their books and SLANDER [this is in all capital letters in the original Swahili] the matter in the way they translate it.” Farsy then devotes four and a half pages to discussing this issue, finally concluding on a somewhat humorous note: “We rest our pen a little that we may entertain those thoughts another time. This thing is exhausting and we don’t want you to be bored.”
Sheikh Farsy was in a unique position to do a Kiswahili translation. On the one hand, his education by scholars like Sheikh Ahmed Muhammed el-Mlomry, Abdullah Bakathir, and Sheikh Mazrui prepared him to relate the Islamic message to a new generation of believers. On the other hand, his position first as chief qadi of Zanzibar (until 1964) and then chief qadi of Kenya, gave him the prominence and connections to ensure his translation would be read by a wide audience.
We saw earlier how the Ahmadiyya made a direct challenge to the dominance of Islamic discourse by a coastal elite with strong ties to the Arab world. Many members of this elite had well-ingrained notions of their own superiority vis-à-vis other Africans. Sheikh al-Amin bin Aly, another Qur’anic translator and teacher of Sheikh Abdullah Farsy, warned against two dangers: European cultural imperialism, and the “khatari nyeusi” (black danger) of non-Muslim African migration to the coast, and his warning was indicative of the breakdown of the earlier discussed older mode of Swahili acculturation via ustaarabu. This dynamic was upended in the colonial era, partly as a result of the banning of slavery and the slave trade which undermined the economic basis of the coastal elite. The inability of the elite to control the cultural and demographic terms of this migration led to a great deal of social dislocation and the emergence of new sets of leaders who challenged the prerogatives of this elite; Sheikh Ramiya of Bagamoyo and Habib Saleh of Lamu are two prominent examples of this challenge. These challenges were not only predicated on breaking down barriers to the kinds of knowledge those of slave descent could have access to, but also on reforming corrupt practices within Islam. The origins of Habib Saleh, and his successful attempt to implant a renaissance of Alawiyya scholars in Lamu, show that the social impulse of Arabism had a progressive side as well, in which “a bond of ‘common Islamness’” transcended sectarian and racial differences.
Despite the cultural chauvinism of one of his teachers, Sheikh Farsy framed his translation in terms of Islamic universalism. “Uislamu hautaki istiimari (Ukoloni) wa dini. Si lazima lugha ya Kiarabu.” said Farsy,” His view was part of a changing attitude on the part of a generation of Islamic reformers who viewed the Qu’ran not merely as a devotional text, but as a practical guide to life possessing many of the solutions for the cultural humiliation and degeneracy Muslims had endured under imperialism. Bang explains, “The shift may attributed to a generally changed outlook among Islamic scholars, starting towards the end of the nineteenth century and spearheaded by such figures as Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī, Muhammad ‘Abduh and Rashid Rida.” Al-Mazrui, Farsy’s teacher, agreed that learning the Qu’ran without its meaning was not meritorious, but he like other Islamic reformers of the Salafi bent, advocated learning Arabic as early as possible. This shift can be mapped in attitudes toward the Quranic translation; it became of paramount importance to be able to read and understand the meaning of the text in order that the believers might apply it to their daily condition.
Framing was all important, and especially framing in light of the experience of Muslims recently coming out from underneath colonial rule. Kiswahili was the language of coastal religion and culture, but it was also, to the leaders of the nationalist movement in Tanzania, an ‘African’ language with the potential to unite the country. Islamic reformers like Farsy recognized that in light of these new circumstances, it was more imperative than ever to relate the Arabic meanings in the Qu’ran through a language relevant to the masses. The task was made easier in that Kiswahili, like Persian and Urdu, had a wealth of words of Arabic origin to begin with.
Overall “the popularity of Qurani Takatifu as a work of Swahili religious literature and the number of reprints it has undergone reflect how favorably it has been received by Kiswahili-speaking people.” Nevertheless, for Farsy and other Salafi reformers relating Islam as a total system to the changing conditions of modern life demanded wide dissemination of Islamic ideas. Translations such as Qur’ani Takatifu were meant to present Islam in a culturally relevant way, and were therefore only a first step towards preparing hearts and minds for the real obligation of every Muslim: to learn Arabic.
Farsy’s translation should also be seen in light of the tremendous transformation in access to education all over Africa. Mass literacy and mass education had placed new opportunities for the dissemination of Islamic education, and the tracts, books, and pamphlets of Islamic Africa until now are being presented in a variety of African languages, Swahili included.
Through the process of translation from Arabic to Swahili, the Qur’anic message took on a special cultural relevance as a point of contention for the Muslims of East Africa. The processes of Christian missionizing, British reform in Islamic education in Zanzibar, and the language policy of the British in East Africa spurred a reaction which created new opportunities for reform. The first Swahili translation was a hostile attempt by a Christian missionary with very negative views of Islam, as well as racist views of African capabilities and culture. In response to Godfrey Dale’s missionary translation, the Ahmadiyya saw an opening for spreading their unique vision of Islam. They saw it as their obligation to counter the Christian missionary presence, which they viewed as a cultural onslaught against Islam. But because of their insistence on several unique doctrinal points, their translation was also not widely accepted. In turn, the Ahmadiyyas provoked a response rooted in the same sort of motivation: to counter what was deemed as their assault on the true Islam. Qurani Takatifu gained wider acceptance, but generated its own dynamic of opposition as well as support, generating new debates about the nature and basis for establishing authority and legitimacy within the East African Islamic community.
This process of linguistic translation and religious dissemination through Kiswahili and other African languages will continue, and even accelerate as Africa increasingly enters the digital age. As long as there are believers, there will be efforts to bridge the gap between Islam as an ‘Arabic revelation’ and Islam as a ‘universal religion.’
September 20, 2009
Political and Cultural Aspects of Qur'anic translation in East Africa Part Three: Ahmadiyya in East Africa
Part 3 in a special series on Kiswahili Qu'ranic translation for The Azanian Sea
Part 3: Ahmadiyya in East Africa and Kurani Tukufu
In a lecture in Dakar, Senegal in 1996, Tigiti Cengo expressed the questions of Islam’s cultural relevance to African culture and religion in a discussion about the Arabic origins of Swahili: “How many realize the direct descendance of the Swahili language, spoken all over East and Central Africa, from the Arabic. (Ebrahim Doda), a question which nobody can answer because it is baseless, unfounded, and even unnecessary. The same is true with the fundamental mistake of dating the birth of Islam as 7th century. How can one justify the non-existence of Allah(SW) and all His Creation which submitted to him before the 7th Century? Muslim scholars should consult deeper sources than those from the exploitative, oppressive, and sentimental generalizations that “Africa has had no culture, language, civilization, nothing; that “Islam is nothing but Arabism,” and the like from euro-western schools.”
Cengo’s assertion is extremely interesting; on the one hand, like the Ahmadiyya missionary Mubarak Ahmad Ahmadi in the introduction to the Ahmadiyya translation Kurani Tukufu, he seeks to give Africa its place in the world history of religion, inverting the argument used by Arabism to subtly argue that Africans possessed concepts of Allah well before Arabs or any other civilization. On the other hand, he posits that most of the negative ideas about Africa and the conflation of Islam with being Arab and speaking Arabic are western ideologies.
The latter statement is partly true, but not completely. British educational policy in Zanzibar was predicated on an absolute separation of races, with each “race” to be taught according to their perceived abilities. Africans figured at the bottom of his hierarchy, and the British went so far as to refuse requests by Arab parents to have the Africans join their children in the classroom. The British believed they were upholding the “natural” social order; in reality they were freezing their conception of “lower races.” Nowhere is this more starkly revealed than in the overall European view of the Waswahili as some kind of morally and racially degenerate mixture between Arab and African, chained to Islam and incapable of renewal, change, or innovation.
Yet this view of African degeneracy was shared by many members of the 'Arab' elite during the early twentieth century, but not for the same reasons. Their concept of civilization was not scientific racialism but cultural chauvinism. In Al-Falaq, one of a group of Arabic newspapers published in Zanzibar, one writer warned that stripping Arabic from the educational curriculum would result in Arabs becoming like the “zanji” in their manners and cultural. This Arab variety of racism relied on the threat of cultural degeneracy through loss of linguistic and religious identity. Without Arabic, Arabs in Africa would become like the heathen Africans, the washenzi.
A new Muslim group calling themselves Ahmadiyya would seek to transform the Arab cultural paradigm through which coastal Islam had traditionally been viewed, seeking to retain the importance of Arabic, while freely translating the Qu’ran into other African languages and employing a discourse of African contributions to Islam.
Founded in the town of Qadian, India (hence its alternate name of Qadianiyat) in 1889 by Hazraut Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908), Ahmadiyyism was a prophetic movement that proclaimed Mirza Ahmad as mujadid, mahdi, and Messiah of Islam. Ahmad came from a family whose forbears fought in the British army in India. Educated in the Qur’an (he knew Arabic, Persian, and Urdu), Ahmad came of age as the subcontinent was wracked by competing ideas of religious legitimacy from all sides. Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, and Christians debated each other and themselves in their attempts to win converts. This policy was partly spurred by the British colonial policy of awarding political representation based on communal religious confession, but it was also a result of the rich texture of religious discourse, a climate that encouraged people to take theological matters seriously.
From 1872, Ahmad emerged as spokesperson for Islam against Christians and various Hindu sects like Arya Samaj. Yet he also proved quite ready to define his vision of Islamic legitimacy; in the early years of his ministry he debated Maulvi Muhammed Husain about the differences between the Hanafi madhab and the ahl al-Hadith Ahmad established a degree of fame before his claims to prophethood by his flamboyant debating tactics: in one instance offering money to the person who would refute his book on Islamic apologetics, in another instance, before a debate with a Christian missionary, issuing an invitation for a mubahala. According to the Ahmadiyya histories, Ahmad received a type of divine illumination through fasting; soon after he proclaimed himself the mahdi. His assertion led even close friends to disassociate themselves from him.
Most authors working on Ahmadiyya focus on the person of Ahmad, the theological debates his claims of prophethood raised, and the religious context of the Indian subcontinent. More work along the lines of Humphrey Fisher’s work is needed to understand the role of Ahmadiyya in the development of Islam in East Africa. It is known that the movement began its work with Mubarak Ahmad’s arrival in Mombasa in 1934. Branches of the organization soon sprang up in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, while the headquarters were initially located in Tabora.
Much of the controversy between Ahmadiyya and other Muslims had to do with Ahmad’s view of the death and resurrection of Jesus and the finality of Muhammad’s prophethood. In an 1899 book, Jesus in India, Ahmad claimed Jesus had not died on the cross at all, but had sent a proxy, and had instead migrated to Kashmir and died in Srinagar at the age of 120. The controversy about Muhammad’s prophethood hinged on Ahmad’s unique explanation of the Qur’an 33:41. In Kurani Tukufu, the Arabic Khatataman Nabiyyina is translated as “Muhuri wa Manabii” According to Ahmad, the seal was not a literal finality. To counter the established wisdom, Ahmad related a hadith from Ayesha, “Say by all means that is the Seal of the Prophets, but do not say that there will be no Prophet after him.”
All of these theological issues in turn related to Ahmad’s overarching goal: countering Christian missionizing in its imperial aspect through a reform of key doctrinal vulnerabilities within Islam. One of those “vulnerabilities” was the relationship of Jesus and Muslim belief in his resurrection. The crux of much of this debate was Qur’an 4:157 “The Women” (which, you will recall, was one of the verses Godfrey singled out for criticism in his Qur'anic commentary) :
“That they said (in boast), "We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah";- but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them [or it appeared so unto them], and those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no (certain) knowledge, but only conjecture to follow, for of a surety they killed him not: Nay, Allah raised him up unto Himself; and Allah is Exalted in Power, Wise.”
The verse itself, because of the ambiguity and indirectness of its phrasing, invited multiple interpretations. The “orthodox” view prevalent in Ahmad’s time was either that God had rescued Jesus from the cross and raised his physical body to heaven, or that it was not really Jesus on the cross to begin with. Christian missionaries like Godfrey seized on this fact to prove the power of Jesus and Christianity over the power of Muhammed and Islam in debates. Ahmad’s mission has arisen because “Islam was in a situation of one who is encircled by bitter enemies and is assaulted continuously from every direction.”
A Kiswahili translation of the Qur’an was thus entirely consistent with Ahmad’s vigorous defense against those who attack Islam; the battle with Christianity became the context for justifying what many scholars viewed as “bida” or unlawful innovation. Sheikh Mubarak Ahmad prepared a new translation, beginning in 1936, as a counter to the “Upinzani unaoletwa na wasiokuwa Waislamu, hasa Wakristo.” (The opposition which has been brought to Islam by non-Muslims, especially Christians). The work was also an explicit response to Dale’s work:
“Zamani Padre Godfrey Dale aliandika tafsiri ya Kurani. Lakini kwa sababu yeye hakuwa na maarifa ya Kiarabu alishindwa mahali pengi kuandika tafsiri iliyo sawa. Mara nyingi hakufahamu neno la Kiarabu, na alichukua toka tafsiri ya Kiingereza baadhi ya maneno na kuyageuza Kiswahili bili kupeleza maneno ya asili. Hivyo tafsiri ya Padre Dale ina uharibifu mwingi unaokutana na kutojua kwake, na kadhalika unaotokana na uadui wake uliopitiliza mpaka. Kadhalika katika tafsiri yake, Padre Dale, hakuandika maneno ya asili ya Kiarabu ili watu wangepata kujua amekosa wapi, na amekosa nini, au amezidisha nini na kupunguza nini."
The work was begun on the first day of Ramadan in the month of November by Sheikh Mubarak Ahmad Ahmadi, the head of the Ahmadiyya mission in East Africa. With the publication of Kurani Tukufu in 1953, the Ahmadiyya made a significant contribution to Islamic renaissance on the East African coast. Copies of the new translation were sent to Mau Mau detainees in Kenya and plans were made for further translations into East African languages like Kikuyu. Whatever their theological differences with other Muslims, the Ahmadiyya, through their translation, addressed themselves to Dale’s denigrations of Islam in Tafsiri ya Kurani ya Kiarabu and also contributed to a debate evolving about the origins of Islamic legitimacy on the East African coast. The Kurani Tukufu linked many Muslims in East Africa with a different part of the Islamic world, Pakistan. Furthermore, the Ahmadiyya were very explicit about the egalitarian and non-racial nature of Islam, mainly in an attempt to contrast it with Christianity. Perhaps this message may have also been effective against chauvinism and nepotism of certain members of the Arab elite, who blocked access to the highest levels of the ‘ulama for African Muslims.
By framing the introduction to Kurani Tukufu in terms of African contributions to Islamic history, the Ahmadi drew on rising nationalist sentiments and offered an alternative to the Arab civilizational motif prevalent in much of the Arab elite resistance to colonial rule. The introduction to Kurani Tukufu can be read as a subtle parable on the arrogance with which the Ahmadiyya itself was treated by the established Islamic authorities, an arrogance equivalent to the early messengers from Mecca who underestimated the Ethiopian king. The Meccan messengers who persecuted the early Muslims are of the same type who persecuted the Ahmadis. In fact now, the Qur’an itself is oppressed, and the Ahmadi translation would help to liberate it:
“To the people of Africa and especially the Eastern part, having studied the language placed before you with this translation, I am proud and happy because in the first days of this book you all’s continent protected those who hoped in this book and completely rejected oppression, injustice. Moreover, you were strengthened to erect justice and ethics. Today the teaching of your Qur’an is in a condition of oppression like those believers who were oppressed.”
Notwithstanding their unique theology, the Ahmadiyya are quite conservative on the issue of ijtihad, and their actual practice of Islam is quite orthodox. Yet they were attacked and heavily criticized both inside and outside of Pakistan. One frequent point of contention was Ghulam Ahmad’s collaboration with the British, which extended to frequent praise for the British role in cultural advancement on the Indian subcontinent. Such statements were used as evidence by anti-Ahmadi groups that the Ahmadiyya were little more than an imperialist front group seeking to undermine Islam. Out of this critique came the impetus for a third translation. Read more...
September 19, 2009
Political and Cultural Aspects of Qu'ranic Translation in East Africa Part Two: Tafsiri ya Kurani ya Kiarabu
Part 2 in a special series for The Azanian Sea on Kiswahili Qu'ranic translation
Dale Godfrey’s Tafsiri ya Kurani ya Kiarabu
In the early 1900s, when the British colonial administrators in Zanzibar embarked on a project of educational reform, they targeted those schools who taught their students to be huffāz. Canon Godfrey Dale, a UMCA Missionary and the earliest translator of the Qur’an into Swahili, wrote derisively of such a practice, comparing it to a long and wearisome journey in the Arabian desert, and emphasized what in his view was the “frequent, wearisome, and monotonous repetition of the same idea, the same moral truths.” In another instance Canon Dale, relates a visit he made to a Zanzibar madrassa in which students were learning the Qur’an, yet were unable to relate to him its meaning.
On the Swahili coast in the early twentieth century, young Muslim students still embarked on a course of Qur’an memorization, in order to become huffāz (sing. hafiz, an Arabic word which literally means guardian/caretaker), but only a few students, either from the elite or exceptionally gifted, received further instruction in methods of tafsir, fiqh, and other Islamic sciences.
Islam in the history of the Swahili coast was a social marker for the coastal elite, the dynamic that separated them from the “washenzi”. Yet despite their sense of controlling the set of mores and manners known as ustaarabu, most members of coastal society spoke only Kiswahili. Even prominent ‘ulama rarely used Arabic in their daily conversation. For the lower classes, knowledge of the Qur’an was limited to being able to recite its words, and this was important because the importance lay in the recitation as much as in the explained meaning.
The British colonial administration, as well as some members of the ‘ulama, called these methods of memorization “parrot talk,” and spurred Ibn Sumayt in 1925 to formulate a new set of texts for teaching Qur’anic verses, which reduced dramatically the amount of required suras and included explanations of key concepts in Kiswahili. However, in Zanzibar, education in Arabic was a political issue, linked with access to power and the ability to determine one’s cultural destiny. Thus the educational reform threatened the most sacred elements of the elite’s identity: language and religion. Amal Ghazal writes, “Arabs believed, the British (and their collaborators) were not only trying to damage their identity and that of the island, but also trying to sever Zanzibar’s relationship with the broader Arab-Muslim world.”
As long as cultural and linguistic links to the Arab world survived, a potential for social ferment and upheaval in Zanzibar and the Swahili Coast existed; a point echoed by many European writers about East Africa. This is not to say that resistance could only originate from an Arab source. But the colonial administrators as well as the missionaries recognized the potential of Islam to serve as a base for overturning the terms of European order. This belief led Godfrey Dale to allude to a global conspiracy by Muslims to enslave all of mankind: “Before we allow lower races to drift into Muhammadanism let us remember to whom these words, “which your right hand possess” might apply if there were a Jehad (sic) proclaimed in Europe, Africa, and Asia tomorrow…unless there is some Christian power at hand to take advantage of and enforce these mitigations, slavery will continue unchecked with all its horrible cruelties.”
Dale’s translation—the Tafsiri ya Kurani ya Kiarabu —was received with much hostility. It represents how important the issue of a frame is in conceptualizing Islamic legitimacy. In fact the debate over Dale’s translation was a debate over who had the “right” to translate the Qur’an, as well as the right of Muslims to reject hostile interpreters. Godfrey Dale was an outsider who had learned Kiswahili (and for that matter Arabic) only to communicate Christianity through it. Furthermore, his translation of the Qur’an did not contain the original Arabic text. (Even now, translations of the Qur’an into English are typically presented with the Arabic text, and if they are not then they are titled “a translation of the Qur’an or “the message of the Qur’an.” )
Secondly, Dale used the Kiswahili word Mungu to mean God, which is unacceptable for many East African Muslim scholars as a translation for Allah, because Mungu can be pluralized as miungu. Later translators prefer Mwenyezi Mungu, (lit. Almighty God) for its inability to be pluralized.
Finally, Dale wrote in the newly standardized Roman script for Kiswahili. Carl Meinhof, the German who first suggested that Kiswahili be written in this manner, though that it might be useful in training African civil servants if it could be stripped of its Islamic character. Thus the transformation of Kiswahili orthography was directly related to anti-Islamic sentiment as well as pragmatic administrative concerns. Sheikh Al-Amin bin Mazrui, a prominent East African scholar who had also translated large portions of the Qur’an into Kiswahili, complained that the new orthography distorted the Kiswahili sound system. Most Zanzibari intellectuals—whose relationship to Kiswahili as a language of Islamic communication was already ambiguous—looked askance at written Kiswahili which had been deliberately stripped of its visual relationship to Arabic.
For Canon Dale, the translation was a way of training missionaries to counter Muslims on their own linguistic terms, a sort of religious guerilla warfare with the text as weapon. His goal remained to show uncivilized “Muhammadans” the true way: “It seems to me a mere matter of loyalty and common honesty not only to contend ourselves for the Faith once and for all delivered to the saints [Christianity], but to do all that in us lies to bring the same Faith within the reach of the most backward races of mankind.”
Nowhere is Dale’s disdain for Islam and its theology more apparent than in his commentary on the Swahili translation, where he constantly seeks to demonstrate its logical inconsistency. For example, in his commentary on Sura An-Nisa, verse 157 (Qu’ran 4:157), Dale writes, “We have already explained the Muslim idea of a crucificixtion in place of our Lord. But it is very useful to know this aya and to know it together with those of An-Nas and Aali-Imran. To him he ascended; meaning after death or before death like Elijah? They do not mutually agree.”
Lacunza-Balda concludes, “Dale’s translation has been greatly disliked and, historically speaking, it well be that it has accentuated both the Muslim-Christian controversy and the emergence of a collective Muslim front to answer the challenge coming from a non-Muslim.” But if this was the initial point of debate out of which conceptual repertoires were built, the next set of debates around a Swahili translation of the Qur’an translations framed a complex set of ideas at the intersection of race, African identity, and Islamic legitimacy, thus contributing to a a process by which slaves and lower-class people re-appropriated concepts of Arab exceptionalism (ustaarabu) in light of Islamic ideals of universalism and equality, a process, that as we have seen, played an important role in the social integration of East African coastal society. New ideas of African nationalism and the intensified migration of upcountry people to the coast opened up the field for socio-religious reinterpretation of those who the coastal elite had previously referred to as washenzi.
September 18, 2009
Political and Cultural Aspects of Qur’anic Translation in East Africa, Part One
Part One: Introduction
The Qur’an, much like the person of Jesus in Christianity, has proven to be the most important foundation of Islam and thus subject to intense debate over its meaning and true nature. As an “Arabic revelation” the Qur’an belies a complete understanding without knowledge of Arabic. Thus the issue of Qur’anic translation is a prism through which the relative mutability of linguistic, cultural, and theological concepts (such as the person of Jesus and the nature of Muhammed’s prophethood) can be compared. This paper will compare three different Swahili translations of the Qu’ran by placing them in the context of East African history. I argue that each new translation generated a series of debates about legitimacy in East African Islam; the translations reveal histories of East African Muslims’ responses to imperialism, doctrinal legitimacy, cultural chauvinism, and modern education.
There are three well-known published translations of the Qur’an in Kiswahili: Tafsiri ya Kurani ya Kiarabu in 1923, translated by Canon Godfrey Dale, Kurani Tukufu translated by Sheikh Mubarak Ahmad Ahmadi in 1953, and Qurani Takatifu, translated by Sheikh Abdullah Farsy, and first published in 1969.
In a multi-part series for the Azanian Sea, I will examine all three of them in light of the various “movements” they represent, the frames they employed to make claims for legitimacy, and the claims and counterclaims they either made or refuted. Each of the translations was controversial, but this controversy was rarely over the nature of the translated text itself. The discourse of translation and the holy nature of the Qur’an were a convenient frame for debates over orthodoxy, legitimacy and self-definition in response to Christianity and imperialism. Translations were not threats to the sanctity of meaning literally conceived, but threats to the legitimacy of Islam’s unique identity, the ruling ideology of ustaarabu, and the “cultural wealth” of Arab/Islamic civilization.
Languages are deep and complex fields of meanings, with words that have no direct counterpart in a given target language. This problem is made even more difficult by the “texture” of the Qur’an itself, which contain numerous irreducible rhetorical elements. Yet translations of the Holy Qur’an have been a part of Islamic history; the first complete translation of the Qu’ran being undertaken by Shah Waliallah into Persian. As of now, the Qu’ran has been translated into over sixty-five languages around the world. So although debates about the translatability of the Qur’an have existed since the expansion of Islam beyond the Arabic-speaking world, there are now whole communities of Islamic discourse outside the realm of Arabic.
From the early Islamic conquests and the subsequent spread of the faith, there has always been tension between the global and universal aspirations of the Islamic umma and the local and particularist dimensions of the Qur’anic revelation in Arabic. Pan-Islamism was a reaction against colonial rule, particularly the project of modernity, with its universal ambition of remaking the self and institutions of the “other”. This encounter forced out into the open certain contradictions in Islamic society and one response was to proclaim the universalism of the umma in the face of European divide-and-conquer tactics. But since being a good Muslim inevitably meant mastering the Arabic language, Islamic preachers and evangelists were faced with the quandary of adapting and spreading their vision of Islam while using local languages: thus opening the question: could one really be an ideal Muslim without knowing Arabic? And if one couldn’t, then didn’t it mean that pan-Islamism was really just a dimension of pan-Arabism? Was being a good Muslim related to your spirit or your “ilm”? In practice, most Muslims found the importance of learning Arabic a non-negotiable point, yet this was not always because of the cultural chauvinism of the Arabs. Tellingly, those who most opposed one of the most recent Swahili Qu’ranic translations, Qur’ani Takatifu, were Sufis who believed strongly in the mystical power of recitation. In their view, it was the pronunciation of the words themselves, not their meaning, that incarnated a blessing for the believer.
One way Islam establishes itself as a spiritual authority is its use by spiritual authorities as a discourse of “essence” often posited in opposition to a set of practices deemed to contradict that “essence.” In the modern period, defined here as 1870-1950, reform once again became a clarion call by Muslim leaders; they attempted to address the miseducation, oppression, and moral degradation of their societies by addressing some of the contradictions brought into the open by modernity, but also by linking their discourse to the world condition of Muslims and their overall position vis-à-vis European colonialism.
The debates about Islam in this period were also debates about the effects of colonialism, and so imperialism became an additional “standard” by which legitimacy in an Islamic sense could be judged. Especially pertinent in this discussion is the impact of Christian missionaries across the Muslim world. The “clash of civilizations” debate ignited by Samuel Huntington has much deeper roots in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century “battle for souls” between Islam and Christianity. In fact its echoes can be seen in early attempts to translate the Qur’an for European audiences; the early translations into Latin, Italian, and French were devoted to refuting Islam and establishing Muhammed as a false prophet.
It is highly significant, as Lacunza-Balda emphasizes, that “the bridge between the act of “translating” the Qur’an and the purpose of “slandering” Islam had apparently been built by a Christian translation of the Qur’anic text.” So we can perceive initially two impulses for translation: one to reveal and refute, and one to simplify and explain in order to convert; in fact in the Christian missionary project, the need to communicate and the intent to control were “inseperable motives.”
September 17, 2009
Book Review: A Fury for God (A Critique of Millenarian Ideology)
Although its now a bit out of date (it was written on the eve of America's invasion of Iraq), Malise Ruthven's A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America is well worth picking up for those interested in the rapproachment (or lack thereof) between the now commonly reified entities of "Islam" and the "West." This is a good reading companion to more famous books like Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, and Benjamin Barber's Jihad vs. McWorld.
Despite its ominous sounding title, A Fury For God is far from a scurrilous screed against Islam. Ruthven demonstrates how similar ideologically are the Islamism of al-Qaeda and the neo-conservative foreign policy outlook which characterized the Bush years. Ruthven uncovers their common ideological roots and shows how both al-Qaeda and the US response to its actions as an organization are characterized by their millenarian and Manichean content. His insights into the US-Saudi relationship are particularly incisive. Ruthven argues that despite its virulently anti-Western ideology, al-Qaeda has in fact been profoundly shaped by a Western understanding of millenarian revivalism.
Al-Qaeda is both organization and ideology. Bin Laden’s participation, along with other Arabs in the Afghan resistance to Soviet invasion laid the foundation for the modern al-Qaeda, a point Ruthven makes, along with emphasizing how crucial American funding was to their victory over the Soviets. As the Soviet threat diminished, the American-funded fighters—the so-called “Afghan Arabs” who made up the mujahhidin, dispersed, but many followed bin Laden to Sudan, where they participated in his various construction projects, such as building a road from Port Sudan to Khartoum. Here bin Laden was able to help finance the bombing of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. It was through these actions that he first came to the attention of US leadership.
Post-9/11, al-Qaeda’s popularity led to a rapid export of its message and tactics; local versions of the organization sprang up in Iraq, for example. Although the core of al-Qaeda was damaged by the 9/11 attacks, its message proved resonant for a variety of these “copycat” organizations. Thus al-Qaeda as an ideology was much more exportable than al-Qaeda as an organization; this feature is what gives al-Qaeda a truly trans-national character. The primary architect of this ideology was Professor Abdullah Azzam, one of bin Laden’s primary influences, who used Salafi interpretations to argue for an activist form of “global jihad” against the enemies of Islam. Much like other millenarian revival movements, al-Qaeda promised eternal riches and glory in paradise, and asked its fighters to give up everything in the world for an eternal reward. This radical vision of a break with temporal and worldly reality was shared by other millenarian resistance movements like Maji Maji or Kimbanguism, as well as movements based more on purely spiritual revival. Ironically this idea of revitalization and millenarian redemption also share a great deal of ideological linkage with secularist projects like communism. They all believed in some ideal vision of the future, if only certain sacrifices could be endured in the present.
John Gray has an excellent passage on this idea in Al-Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern:
“In contemporary western societies, repressed religion returned in secular cults. When Saint-Simon and Comte founded the Religion of Humanity they devised the prototype of every subsequent political religion. The eschatological hopes that animated these intermittently sane nineteenth-century savants shaped Marxian ‘scientific socialism’ and neo-liberal ‘free-market economics’. In dilute and timorous form, they sustain liberal humanists today.”
The ideology of al-Qaeda is built on similar structural foundations. There are no demands for talks or release of prisoners as conditions of negotiation. Al-Qaeda speaks the language of people whose faith in the power of redemptive violence is unshaken. Adds Gray:
“Self-evidently, the belief that terror can remake the world is not a result of any kind of scientific inquiry. It is faith, pure and simple. No less incontrovertibly, the faith is uniquely western,”The planners of 9/11 were strategists first and foremost. They recognized both the power of symbolism and the roots of Western dominance. They struck in such a way that their blow would impact financially and symbolically. The Twin Towers, as one of the major “nerve-centers” of capitalism, represented the hegemony of international capital. Furthermore, their height, their physical dominance of the surrounding landscape, their iconic status in the New York skyline, ensured that their destruction would guarantee maximum media coverage. For al-Qaeda, whose earlier efforts did not attract near the amount of coverage, the attack on the World Trade Center was a media blitz, designed to thrust them into a direct confrontation with their enemy, a confrontation that would exacerbate the Manichean dimensions of the conflict. It was the “propaganda of the deed” that was important to them, not the loss of life itself.
Those who piloted the planes that hit the Twin Towers on September 11 were not alienated radicals. They were disciplined operatives, true believers, and obviously possessed the courage of their convictions, whatever the evil dimensions of their deed. Ruthven explains their motivations in terms of: “the perception of spiritual emptiness” in the West. “The emigrant becomes obsessed with the materialistic and hedonistic aspects of Western culture because he does not know how to gain access to its spiritual and aesthetic goods.”
Given al-Qaeda’s millenarian tendencies, it would seem that the US would present a vision that refuted the crude Manichean tendencies of its opponent. But this was not the case. Instead the appellation “war on terror”, which merely flipped the Manichean coin on which al-Qaeda’s ideology rested, was used by the Bush administration introduced to justify its occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. The sacrifices demanded by the Bush regime, its calls to patriotism and its framing of the conflict as “good” versus “evil” and its willingness to justify any and all of its actions based on that belief—these ideas all have a millenarian ring, albeit watered down by secular nationalism.
To be at battle with a known enemy, a physical group is one thing. To be at war with violence itself is a cultural presumption that, whatever their other differences, links Bin Laden and Bush. Their millenarian expectations of the cosmic dimensions of eternal judgment are the same, and remarkably they both saw (and see) themselves as representing the actualization of the good on earth, fighting to bring an eternal vision to reality, consequences be damned. The ends justify the means is an old adage, and remarkably, the antecedents of Bin Laden’s theology and Bush’s articulation of US policy are not only religious but secular. Nazism and Socialism had similar beliefs about the elimination of evil from the world.
In this respect, the attempted distinction of terrorism as comprising essentially non-state actors is a dangerous move, as it implicitly places states outside of the moral judgment implied by the word “terror.” States as well as organizations can be millenarian in their thinking. The ideology of the war on terror is the latest incarnation of the US myth of eternal progress, in which it exports its model of “democracy” to the entire world. Thus the war on terror is really the West at war with itself, at war with the groups it has helped bring into existence through its machinations to accomplish this.
It is worth noting that the strategy undertaken by the Bush administration to respond played into the Manichean designs of the al-Qaeda. For in designating not al-Qaeda but “Islamofascists” as the enemy, the US overplayed its hand and involved itself in the invasion of a sovereign country where a notion of “victory” seems increasingly unlikely with each passing day, Obama notwithstanding. If the last eight years of the Bush administration have taught the US government anything, it is that its own version of a universal millenarian ideology failed miserably by allowing it (and its allies) to justify nearly any action in the name of the “war on terror.” The danger of such millenarianism ought to be clear: it can start fires, but those fires can easily become uncontrollable conflagrations. Read more...
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