to follow norms of Victorian-era English literature, the Qur’n’s Arabic names for Israelite prophets are Anglicized (‘s becomes Jesus, Ms becomes Moses), and the translators’ extensive notes often explain the Qur’n through references to the Bible or Christian tradition. In the mid-twentieth century, the Nation of Islam was purchasing these Qur’n translations in bulk from a Pakistani importer in New Jersey: South Asian Muslims’ experience of an English-speaking, Protestant colonial power thus produced the Qur’n that could resonate with an African American Muslim community led by the son of a Baptist preacher. In his commentary on the Qur’n, Elijah Muhammad also interpreted the subject headings that appeared in Maulana Muhammad Ali’s translation, as though he believed that these subject headings were part of the divinely revealed Arabic text.31 Even the “Qur’n” as Elijah conceptualized it reflects an act of translation. Perceiving the Qur’n through a Protestant background that taught him what scriptures were and how they worked, he expressed little interest in adth collections or Muslim interpretive traditions as conduits through which the Qur’n must be read. A “Muslim Bible” that he could read for himself, essentially a superior version of the Bible that he already knew, was exactly what he sought and found. When presented in translation to a mostly non-Muslim society, the Qur’n might inspire some readers to convert, but the Qur’n undergoes a conversion of its own. Perhaps this is what it means for religious scholars in sixteenth-century South Asia to have opposed Bengali translation of the Qur’n, on the grounds that such a project would constitute the “Hinduization of Islam.”32
Like soul or star, words like belief, prophet, and piety come loaded with culturally specific baggage: They cannot help but bring new ideas or sensibilities to the original terms imn, nab, and taqwa. A prime example would be wal, a term of special significance in f traditions to refer to the “friends” of God. When Orientalist scholars rewrote wal with the English word saint, and Muslim intellectuals in turn adopted this translation, a historical tension within Muslim traditions now related to a point of controversy between Protestants and Catholics. Muslim thinkers concerned with the revival of original Islam and/or proving Islam’s rationality, operating within the global hegemony of Protestant empires, expressed anti-f prejudice with the vocabulary of Protestant anti-Catholic prejudice.
This is why I do not consistently translate the Arabic Allh into the English God. When I converted, I changed my own name to its Arabic version (Mik’l) and did the same to God, attempting to reinvent both of us in a language that I did not speak. I needed a theatrically alterior word like Allh to erase my previous script with God (in the constraints of my own lived experience, it was irrelevant that Arabic-speaking Christians also call upon God as Allh). Even if God and Allh are perfectly interchangeable, my decision to translate or not translate the name adds significations to both terms, because God’s Arabic name is so widely referenced in English that it functions as an English word. English-speaking non-Muslims refer to “Allh” in debates over Islam’s perceived foreignness to America and incompatibility with Jews and Christians, alleging that Allh cannot be the god of the Bible; these people obviously haven’t read the New Testament in Arabic. While the appearance of Allh in an Arabic text can refer to the god of Muslims, Christians, Jews, or any monotheist, uses of the word in English conversation exclusively point to the
