Why I Am a Salafi. Michael Muhammad Knight

, enhanced access to the Qur’n was precisely the reason to avoid translation: Opening the Qur’n to non-Arabic speakers only exposed it to misinterpretation by unqualified readers. Translation can have dangerous theological consequences, for which al-Ghazl warned against translating the verses that seemed to describe God in anthropomorphic terms: Since no translation could perfectly capture all the subtleties of the original Arabic, translation only heightened the threat of misreading difficult verses.⁵

      Despite the proliferation of Qur’n translations today, many Muslims maintain that the speech of Allh cannot be expressed in another language, and pious translators often give their work titles such as The Meanings of the Holy Qur’n rather than just The Qur’n. This doubt in the Qur’n’s translatability does not have to be a theologically invested claim: I want to reject the Qur’n’s translation for the same reason that scholarly study of Beowulf requires specialized training in Old English. The Qur’n rewritten in new words and another author’s voice cannot be the Qur’n. “Fundamentalist” scripturalism and critical theories of translation find themselves in agreement here.

      A language cannot be reduced to a glossary of words for which we should expect every other language to provide its own glossary that lines up perfectly, term for term. There’s always something speculative to translation, always a gap that must be filled with educated guesses. I would have to wonder, then, about the possibilities for a Salaf theory of translation. As long as Salaf scholars are willing to subject the Qur’n to their translation, they cannot be reduced to pure literalists. When Salafs translate Qur’nic verses into other languages for their polemical pamphlets, aren’t they subjecting the words to their own rationalist investigation and ultimately replacing the exact words of divine speech with their personal opinions about what Allh intends to say? For their arguments to rely on support from the Qur’n, which a significant majority of Muslims worldwide cannot read for comprehension in its original Arabic, Salafs must alter the words. For the Qur’n to be shoehorned into the shape that Salafs and other communities demand of it in an increasingly globalized world—a universal message that can be accepted and then obeyed by the entirety of the human race, all cultures and societies everywhere without distinction of time or place—the Qur’n must necessarily adapt and become other than its own self.

      Regardless of these challenges, Salaf networks have confidently flooded the world with presentations of the Qur’n in every language. The Hilali-Khan translation, presently favored by the Saudi government’s Qur’n-printing complexes and distribution channels, has become notorious for playing the “parentheses” game, in which the translated verses are supplemented with the translator’s own commentary, which appears within parentheses. The parenthesized comments, rather than clearly exposing themselves as the translator’s interpretation, are disguised as part of the verse: The translator implies that what’s inside the parentheses can also be found on the divinely revealed Arabic side of the page. One of the most troublesome cases could be found in the seventh verse of the Qur’n’s opening sra, which reads in the Hilali-Khan translation as “The Way of those on whom You have bestowed Your Grace, not (those) who earned Your Anger (such as the Jews), nor or those who went astray (such as the Christians).”⁶ When I read the verse in Arabic, I don’t see any words that specifically signify Jews or Christians.

      Even Salafs, despite their supposed literalism, sometimes feel compelled to explain their choices. In the case of two verses that a Salaf