Why I Am a Salafi. Michael Muhammad Knight

s, two different characters appear, though these names refer to the same prophet.

      Even if a word in one language can be exactly matched by a word in another, translation still makes an effect. Look at this extraction from 5:3, which is widely regarded as the final verse of the Qur’n to have been revealed:

      Today I have perfected your religion for you, completed my favor upon you, and have named for you Islam as a religion.

      This is a popular translation, but we could raise some questions. First, “religion” as a category isn’t any more stable or consistent than things like “race,” “gender,” “nation,” or “science”—or, for that matter, the “sun” or “moon” as produced in our culturally specific knowledges—and so we shouldn’t assume that the word expresses a universal concept that exists with the same meanings throughout all of history. The modern sense of religion as a belief system or closed set of doctrines does not exist in the Qur’n, which speaks only of communities: The Qur’n discusses “Christians” and their beliefs but has no word for Christianity. In the Qur’n’s typology of communities, there are people who have scriptures from the Creator, and those who don’t; there are communities that follow their prophets, and others that deviate from what they were given; but there is not a multiplicity of “religions.” When translators decide that 5:3’s mention of dn (which translators read elsewhere in the Qur’n as “judgment” or “duty”) signifies “religion,” they force their own concepts onto the seventh century.

      Second, to leave islm untranslated only performs an alternative translation: It turns the Arabic islm into Islam, an English word found in English dictionaries. The Arabic verbal noun islm (signifying “submission” or “surrender”) appears only eight times in the Qur’n and never clearly as a proper name; after all, if there are no proper names for Christianity, Judaism, or Zoroastrianism in the Qur’n, the Qur’n doesn’t have to name its own system. Within the Qur’n and even among the works of classical theologians such as al-Ghazl, as scholar Carl Ernst points out, islm is less prominent as an identity marker than imn (“faith” or “belief”) and the holder of privileged identity is less often called a muslim (“submitter”) than mu’min (“believer”).³³ In the modern era of named religions, however, islm is not only left untranslated in English Qur’ns, but finds itself capitalized as a proper name, Islam, to work within the Protestantized category of “religion” that has just been imposed upon the verse. We make the Qur’n report our own world back to us: The Qur’n now tells us that we have a perfect religion and that our perfect religion has a name. We could read the proclamation another way and potentially alter the verse’s consequences:

      Today I have perfected your judgment for you, completed my favor upon you, and have named for you surrender as a duty.

      Besides the projection of new meanings onto the words, translation also erases meanings: When we decide upon a meaning, we suppress the alternatives. Qur’nic translation threatens to conflate the translator’s mind with the mind of the Qur’n’s author. We tend to make a big deal of the claim that not so much as a single letter has been added to the Qur’n or removed from it since the time of Muammad, but when I think about what we actually do when we read—let alone translate—I find myself asking a “So, what?” that cannot be answered.

      The original meaning isn’t always the most useful. Today, the Qur’n’s 109th sra is popularly interpreted as a statement of interfaith tolerance through its verses that have been translated thus: “Nor will I be a worshiper of what you worship, nor will you be worshipers of what I worship; for you is your religion and for me is a religion.” But if your method of interpretation places a premium on historical context (and you believe that we have access to this context), reading the sra as a message that came first to specific people at a specific moment in their lives, it becomes more difficult to project our modern values onto the words. Mecca’s polytheists had reportedly offered a wager to Mu