The Qur’an between Arabicity and Euro-American Centrism – ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY

Translating Islam: The Qur’an between Arabicity and Euro-American Centrism

Between Mohammad Salama and Yasmeen Hanoosh

In our second “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Mohammad Salama discuss “how languages—and translations—shape the way we understand the Qur’an, Islam, and the broader cultural world they inhabit,” how translations can mean an “ epistemically violent displacement of the Qur’an from its own terms of meaning,” and what a real decolonization of Euro-American Qur’anic Studies would look like.

Yasmeen Hanoosh: In this series, I usually focus on my guests’ translation work. But in your case, we’re making an exception to explore your insights and painstaking research into an entire field of translation—one with far-reaching historical and contemporary implications: Euro-American Qur’anic studies. Before we dive into that theme, could you tell us a bit about your background as a writer, translator, and one of the most remarkable Arabic-English simultaneous interpreters I’ve had the privilege to witness in action?

Mohammad Salama: I grew up in Alexandria, Egypt, surrounded by sea, language, and story. From a very young age, I was captivated by the idea that language is not just a tool of expression but the very condition for thought itself. Without language, we might still survive—but we could not think, we could not dream, we could not remember. That conviction has followed me through every chapter of my life.

I was drawn early on to the way meaning moves across languages and histories. That’s what led me to study comparative literature, first in Cairo, then in the U.S., and to marvel at the great traditions of world literature: from Greece and Mesopotamia to the French New Wave, from pre-Islamic Arabic poetry to Taha Hussein and Naguib Mahfouz. These weren’t just literary canons to me—they were cultural codes, lifeworlds, philosophies in motion.

Translation, for me, was never about equivalence. It was about listening for the soul of a text and carrying it, faithfully, respectfully, into a new language. That’s also what drew me to the practice of simultaneous interpretation. There’s an intensity to it, a demand for total presence, of retention and expression happening at once. It’s an exhausting, exhilarating task, one that doesn’t aim for perfection, but for precision in service of communication. When it works, you feel the transfer of meaning between two systems of thought. You’re not just interpreting words, you’re negotiating worlds. In that moment, you become a conduit, a vessel, a bridge between minds. The political and the poetic collapse into one. And you realize how high the stakes truly are.

So, I guess the through-line in all of this is my belief that language carries the weight of being. That’s why I’ve devoted my scholarly life to interrogating how languages—and translations—shape the way we understand the Qur’an, Islam, and the broader cultural world they inhabit.

YH: That was an exhilarating opener! And you took us right to our discussion topic—What is the Euro-American cultural habitat of the Qur’an? How was the tradition of Qur’anic studies and Qur’an translation born in the west?

MS: The tradition of Qur’anic studies in the West began not as an academic or literary project, but as a theological and polemical one. It was forged in the intellectual climate of Christian heresiology, where Islam was viewed less as a distinct revelation and more as a deviation—a heretical echo of Christianity. The first Latin translation of the Qur’an by Robert of Ketton in 1143, commissioned by Peter the Venerable, was designed to equip Christian polemicists with a weapon against Islam, not a means of understanding it. From the outset, the Qur’an was read through the filter of suspicion, accusation, and theological containment.

This polemical tone hardened over time. By the late seventeenth century, with Ludovico Marracci’s monumental 1698 Latin edition of the Qur’an, we see a paradox: immense philological erudition yoked to a narrow theological aim. Marracci consulted Muslim commentaries, but only to expose the Qur’an’s alleged errors. His translation—produced in the wake of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation—was deeply shaped by the logic of Biblicism: the idea that the Bible is the normative template, and the Qur’an must either conform to it or be dismissed as distortion. In passages that mirrored biblical stories, such as those of Mary or Lot, Marracci accused the Qur’an of corruption and confusion. In narratives without biblical precedent—those of Hud, Salih, or the she-camel—he dismissed them outright as fantastical or heretical.

Even the Enlightenment, which is often praised for introducing a more secular or open-minded attitude, did not significantly disrupt this framework. George Sale’s English translation of the Qur’an in 1734 is often cited as more sympathetic, but it too reflected imperial ambitions and theological condescension. Sale admired Muhammad not as a prophet, but as a “legislator” and founder of an empire—precisely the kind of figure Enlightenment thinkers could appropriate for their own colonial fantasies. What persisted throughout was the assumption that the Qur’an should be judged in light of Christian scripture—and that any originality in the Qur’an must be explained away, not engaged.

YH: The notion of denying another tradition its originality reflects a strikingly dismissive stance. Did the field at any point of its development engage with other indigenous sources that were contemporary with or predating the Qur’an?

MS: Pre-Islamic poetry, tribal ethics, oral traditions—they were almost entirely ignored. These weren’t just overlooked; they were actively displaced by the desire to anchor the Qur’an in biblical and Syriac intertexts. The Qur’an’s own narrative texture, its recursive structure, its deep engagement with Arabian moral and linguistic worlds, were seen as extraneous or unreliable. In other words, the study of the Qur’an in the West did not emerge from a desire to understand the text within its own milieu. It emerged from an effort to discipline the text—to domesticate it within the epistemological authority of European Christianity.

Only recently have there been tentative steps toward recovering the Qur’an’s indigenous literary context. But the deeper problem is not access to sources; it is the epistemic posture that has long governed the field. So long as the Qur’an is studied primarily to confirm external genealogies or to satisfy the protocols of Biblicist comparison, its own claims to originality, moral coherence, and rhetorical force will continue to be marginalized.

YH: Scholars like you are offering a sharp critique and a significant rupture within this tradition. Your recent monograph, God’s Other Book: The Quran between History and Ideology, addresses the ways in which the field of Qur’anic studies remains shaped by hegemonic, colonial legacies. Could you briefly outline how you explore the relationship between colonialism and the study and translation of the Qur’an in the west?

MS: Certainly. At its core, Qur’anic studies in the West emerged within a colonial episteme that sought to manage and domesticate the Islamic intellectual tradition. From the earliest Latin translations, like Robert of Ketton’s in the 12th century, through Ludovico Marracci in the 17th, to the dominant textual-critical models of the 20th and 21st centuries, the impulse was rarely neutral. Instead, the Qur’an was often approached as a cultural puzzle to be decoded through European frameworks, whether philological, theological, or ideological. The colonial relationship lies not only in the historical timing of these interventions but in the very tools and assumptions brought to bear: a distrust of indigenous sources, a fetishization of external intertexts, and a persistent skepticism toward the Qur’an’s own claims to originality and rhetorical distinctiveness.

This colonial legacy is not only historical—it persists in how academic gatekeeping operates today. The dominant modes of knowledge production in Qur’anic studies still privilege Euro-American paradigms, often at the expense of the Qur’an’s internal coherence, its Arabicity, and its deep entwinement with pre-Islamic poetic traditions. In other words, the Qur’an is too often translated, studied, and theorized as a European object of analysis, rather than engaged as a living text grounded in a particular indigenous context. This is what I mean by colonization: a subtle, often well-meaning, but epistemically violent displacement of the Qur’an from its own terms of meaning.

YH: Speaking of the “fetishization of external intertexts,” what is the persistent Euro-centric paradigm in Qur’anic studies? Why has it persisted despite several revisionist attempts? 

MS: The Euro-centric paradigm in Qur’anic studies rests on the idea that the Qur’an must be interpreted primarily through the lens of the Judeo-Christian canon and Greco-Roman thought. It assumes that the Qur’an gains intelligibility or value only when tethered to external, predominantly Western, texts and methods. This paradigm consistently privileges Biblical intertextuality over indigenous Arabic sources—pre-Islamic poetry, tribal ethics, oral traditions—that shaped the Qur’an’s own cultural and rhetorical universe.

While some have tried to nuance this approach, most of these attempts remain within what I would call a post-revisionist framework—Angelika Neuwirth being a prominent example. Her work, though ambitious and philologically sophisticated, remains deeply rooted in the historical-critical method and arrives at the Qur’an by way of Biblicism. She rightly acknowledges the lack of engagement with the Qur’an’s Arabicity and poeticity, but her scholarship still seeks to frame the text within a shared “late antique” scriptural culture, positioning it as a bridge to Europe’s own religious heritage rather than as a unique expression of a distinct indigenous worldview.

This paradigm persists because it is more than a method—it is a disciplinary habit reinforced by institutions, funding bodies, and citation politics. It protects its own interpretive sovereignty by disqualifying indigenous readings as “faith-based” or “uncritical,” even as it imposes its own theological scaffolding under the guise of objectivity. Until we disentangle the field from this inherited apparatus of Euro-American authority, true epistemic pluralism will remain out of reach.

YH: What is missing from reading Islam solely through Hellenistic or Judeo-Christian paradigms? What set of problems does this “disciplinary habit,” as you call it, engender? 

MS: Before I answer directly, let me take a meaningful step back. I am not opposed to comparative theology. In fact, I find value in exploring the intersections, overlaps, and even the hybrid genealogies of the monotheistic idea. The Qur’an itself encourages this. It addresses Jews and Christians as أهل الكتاب—People of the Book—suggesting a form of kinship, even shared spiritual ancestry. And it calls itself كتاب, a book, not in isolation but in dialogue: one that confirms earlier scriptures, affirms their origins, yet also clarifies and corrects where it sees distortion. The Qur’an places itself within a lineage of revelation, but it does so without surrendering its voice. It is both in conversation and in contestation.

The problem arises when that conversation is replaced by a framework that renders the Qur’an legible only through Judeo-Christian or Hellenistic paradigms. This reduces the Qur’an’s epistemology to a derivative echo—either mimicking earlier revelations or falling short of their clarity. What gets erased is the Qur’an’s unique mode of engagement: its oral cadence, its moral grammar, its rhetorical structure, and its insistence on confronting, not simply continuing, previous traditions.

To reduce  توحيد to “monotheism,” or  دين to “religion,” or  رسول to “prophet” is not just a translation—it’s a misrecognition. These terms carry with them not only different theologies but different ways of knowing, of acting, of living. The Qur’an’s ethical intensity, its dialogic form, its rootedness in the linguistic and moral universe of Arabia—these are often lost when the text is filtered through Greek metaphysics or Christian eschatology.

That said, some scholars have tried to disrupt this frame. Angelika Neuwirth, for example, has gone further than most in recognizing the Qur’an as standing on equal footing with the Torah and the Bible—not as a supplement, but as a scripture in its own right. This is a significant departure from classical Orientalism, and it deserves to be acknowledged. But the practice of that recognition remains uneven. Even within her school, the gravitational pull of Eurocentric assumptions persists. The Qur’an is still often treated as a bridge toward Europe’s sacred past, rather than as an origin point with its own ethical and rhetorical sovereignty.

So, while comparative theology can be generative, it must proceed with care. The goal is not to collapse difference, nor to locate Islam as the last chapter in someone else’s narrative. The goal is to listen—to let the Qur’an speak from its own world, in its own tongue, with the full authority of a text that neither imitates nor apologizes.

YH: In your recent article “The Future of Qur’anic Studies: Reclaiming Indigeneity in the Academy”, you revisit the argument that Euro-American scholarship often relied on externalizing the text of the Qur’an, favoring foreign “intertexts” over indigenous Arabic sources. Could you share examples of how this intellectual trend of Judeo-Christian framing took shape and who helped advance it?  What kind of narrative did it construct about the Qur’an and Islam in the west?

MS: Yes, this trend—the externalization of the Qur’an—has defined much of Euro-American Qur’anic scholarship for over a century. Instead of taking the Qur’an’s internal logic, rhetorical structures, and indigenous cultural context as the starting point for interpretation, many scholars have prioritized external “intertexts”: Jewish apocrypha, Syriac Christian hymns, Second Temple literature, Gnostic texts. The implicit assumption is that the Qur’an cannot be read as a primary source of meaning—it must be decrypted through a genealogy of prior, mostly Judeo-Christian, traditions.

One striking example of this is Patricia Crone’s and Michael Cook’s Hagarism, in which they famously suggest that in order to understand the Qur’an, one must study not Arabic—but Syriac, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Middle Persian. Arabic, in their view, was already a translation, a surface distortion of a deeper Semitic theology buried underneath. This approach treats the Qur’an not as a text embedded in and emergent from a specific cultural-linguistic world, but as a belated artifact whose true meaning lies elsewhere. The Arabic Qur’an becomes a cipher—valuable only insofar as it points to something more “authentic” in other tongues. That is not just philological overreach; it is an erasure.

This externalizing habit is not limited to polemical or fringe scholarship—it appears across mainstream academic models. The “Late Antiquity” school, for instance, while producing valuable historical insights, often ends up reinterpreting the Qur’an as if it were a Syriac Christian document wearing Arabic clothes. Even within more cautious frameworks like those associated with Angelika Neuwirth, the Qur’an is often cast as a transitional text, a site of scriptural convergence pointing toward Europe’s own theological past, rather than a sovereign literary and ethical rupture on its own terms.

The consequence is a narrative in which the Qur’an is perpetually out of place: always secondary, always derivative, always explained through something else. Its originality is either denied or domesticated. Its Arabicity—its sonic architecture, moral urgency, and entanglement with pre-Islamic poetic and ethical forms—is treated as peripheral, if not entirely irrelevant.

But the Qur’an does not merely echo or borrow—it responds, reframes, and challenges. It speaks back to other traditions with rhetorical force and moral clarity. It enters into dialogue not to mimic, but to transform. To miss its indigenous literary matrix is to misunderstand the nature of its intervention. To bypass its Arabic is to bypass its worldview.

So, this externalizing trend is not just a scholarly method—it is an epistemic dislocation. It removes the Qur’an from the soil of its own imagination and recasts it in the image of others. And that, I would argue, has less to do with history and more to do with the anxiety of encountering a text that refuses to be explained away.

YH: Speaking of anxieties and dislocations, what should we know about the geopolitical contexts of the critiques of the Qur’an’s authenticity, be they Arab or Euro-American?

MS: To speak of the Qur’an’s “authenticity” is already to enter a discursive terrain shaped by theological presuppositions and geopolitical anxieties. But what does it even mean for a text to be authentic? The term itself, so often deployed as an index of truth or originality, is historically overdetermined. As Adorno warned, “authenticity” has become a kind of philosophical fetish—“a jargon”—used to confer moral weight and existential gravity upon ideas, even when their grounding is unstable or mystified. And in the case of the Qur’an, the question of authenticity is rarely neutral. It is often a coded way of interrogating whether the text is truly divine, original, or even worthy of belief, especially in Euro-American settings where such critiques serve broader ideological projects.

We should be clear: the theological claim to توحيد—divine unity—is central to the Qur’an, but the notion of monotheism itself is not Qur’anic in origin. The idea of a singular, all-encompassing deity predates Islam and can be traced back through Moses and even further to Akhenaten in ancient Egypt. So the claim of “authenticity” cannot rest on the novelty of monotheism. If anything, the Qur’an’s originality lies not in what it affirms—one God—but in how it frames that affirmation: linguistically, ethically, and rhetorically. The Qur’an doesn’t invent monotheism; it reformulates it as an existential, social, and moral imperative grounded in the Arabic language and the lived conditions of seventh-century Arabia.

Euro-American critiques of the Qur’an’s authenticity have often confused this distinction. They reduce the Qur’an’s claim to originality to a genealogical test: is it derivative of Jewish or Christian scripture? Is it authentic only if it appears self-contained, hermetically sealed from other traditions? And yet, when the Qur’an reflects familiar biblical themes, it is accused of plagiarism; when it departs from those themes, it is accused of incoherence. This double bind is not accidental—it is ideological. It reproduces a theological hierarchy in which biblical revelation is the norm, and the Qur’an is forever the latecomer, the pretender, the counterfeit.

And let us not forget: these debates have been fueled by global politics. From the colonial era to the post-9/11 world, questioning the Qur’an’s authenticity has served as a proxy for questioning the legitimacy of Muslim life, Muslim resistance, Muslim sovereignty. Orientalist scholars, policy advisors, and missionary translators have all participated in this epistemic management of the Qur’an. The text has been surveilled as much as it has been studied. Its translation has often functioned as domestication; its interpretation, as containment.

Even within the Arab world, critiques of the Qur’an’s authenticity—framed as reformist or liberal interventions—can become entangled in the geopolitics of recognition. Who gets funded, translated, celebrated? Whose critiques are amplified, and whose are dismissed as reactionary or naïve? These are not just academic questions; they are geopolitical mechanisms.

So, when we speak of “authenticity,” we must ask: authentic to whom? According to which criteria? And in whose interests? The real danger is not in asking these questions, but in pretending that they can be answered outside the structures of power that shape them. If we are to take the Qur’an seriously—as a literary, moral, and theological event—then we must also take seriously the systems that continue to police its legitimacy under the guise of critique.

YH: That’s a powerful deconstruction of the notion of authenticity. Now that you brought us to the devastations of the post-9/11 world, at what point in the colonial/orientalist discourse do we begin to see Islam and the Qur’an emerge as the supposed root source of sociopolitical problems? How and why did this idea originate and who were its pioneers? 

MS: This framing begins not at the moment of conquest, but at the moment of governance. When European powers moved from military engagement with Muslim societies to administrative control—especially in places like British India, Egypt, and French North Africa—the Qur’an ceased to be just a theological curiosity. It became a governing problem. Colonial administrators, missionaries, and scholars began to treat the Qur’an not merely as a text to be refuted, but as the source code for a civilization they deemed resistant to progress, secularism, and modern reason.

The idea took shape most forcefully in the nineteenth century, when the project of empire demanded not just the management of bodies and territories, but the management of belief. Islam—and by extension the Qur’an—was increasingly depicted as the reason for the supposed stagnation of Muslim societies. It was cast as anti-rational, anti-scientific, and fundamentally incompatible with Enlightenment values. Figures like Lord Cromer in Egypt wrote openly of Islam’s failure to produce philosophy, science, or modern governance—not because of historical contingencies, but because of the very nature of the Qur’an. This was a theological diagnosis dressed in administrative clothing.

At the same time, Orientalist scholarship—particularly in Germany, France, and Britain—began to reframe the Qur’an as a sociological obstacle. The goal was no longer just to understand what the Qur’an said, but to explain why Muslims believed it, and how that belief could be weakened, redirected, or reformed. The Qur’an was pathologized as a text that over-determined Muslim consciousness. It wasn’t just an object of faith; it was an impediment to civilization.

This shift—from doctrinal critique to civilizational diagnosis—marked a key moment in the colonial imaginary. It allowed empires to justify not only occupation, but reform: the introduction of secular schooling, legal codes, gender norms, and political institutions that were said to “liberate” Muslims from the grip of their scripture. The Qur’an, in this context, was not just a book. It was a problem to be solved.

This logic persists today, especially in policy and media discourses where Islam is framed as a kind of cultural essentialism—incapable of reform unless the Qur’an itself is reinterpreted, retranslated, or relativized. Whether in debates on gender, democracy, or violence, the Qur’an is still too often positioned as the hidden root of “the Muslim problem.”

What we see, then, is a long arc: from the Qur’an as heresy, to the Qur’an as obstacle, to the Qur’an as pathology. And at every stage, the same question animates the discourse: how can this text be managed? The pioneers of this view were not just Orientalists or colonial officials—they were architects of a global knowledge system that conflated theology with security, philology with control, and interpretation with discipline.

YH: Elaborating on your point about the western gaze and its framing of the Qur’an as lacking epistemological originality—if we were to trace the roots of the uneven power dynamic between indigenous Islamic traditions and Euro-American Qur’anic studies, what foundational ideological biases would you identify as shaping this long-standing asymmetry? How have these biases sustained a paradigm of misrecognition and appropriation of the Qur’an into a western scriptural genealogy?

MS: The ideological biases are both foundational and structural. At the heart of the Euro-American academic reception of the Qur’an lies a deep mistrust of Muslim sources, which are often dismissed as hagiographic or polemical. This skepticism, however, is rarely extended to non-Muslim sources—many of which are themselves hostile, polemical, or deeply embedded in theological agendas. The bias operates as an asymmetry: Islamic texts are judged by standards of forensic evidence, while non-Islamic texts are often taken at face value or even romanticized.

This double standard is part of a larger ideological project—a form of scholarly gatekeeping that maintains the authority to define what counts as legitimate knowledge. The Qur’an, in this view, must be filtered through secular historicism, biblical typologies, and Greco-Roman constructs before it can be admitted into the canon of “world scripture.” Its internal literary structure, rhetorical force, and indigenous intellectual frameworks are either ignored or rendered secondary. Even the act of translation is not innocent—many translations sanitize, flatten, or theologize the Qur’an to fit Western palates, often muting its moral urgency and linguistic complexity.

Another enduring bias is the presumption of progress—that Euro-American methods represent a more evolved, rational, or critical mode of engagement with the text. This presumption often obscures the Qur’an’s own epistemology and discredits the interpretive traditions that emerged organically within Islamic civilization—traditions that were deeply literary, linguistically rigorous, and ethically attentive.

In short, the ideological bias is not just about method; it’s about who is seen as capable of interpretation, and who must be interpreted. It’s about power: who gets to ask the questions, and whose answers are seen as legitimate.

YH: Have these systemic biases and asymmetries affected the translation of the Qur’an? If so, how does that in turn affect the reception and reading of the Qur’an in English and in the Euro-American academy?

MS: Absolutely—and profoundly so. Translation is never a neutral act. In the case of the Qur’an, translation becomes an arena where systemic biases are not only present but amplified. Most English translations of the Qur’an, even those produced with scholarly care, are shaped by theological, cultural, and political presumptions about what the text should say—about Islam, about God, about authority. These presumptions flatten the Qur’an’s rhetorical dynamism, obscure its poetic structure, and distort its ethical tone.

I recall a conversation with a non-Muslim friend of mine, someone deeply steeped in the Lutheran tradition and trained in its scriptural rigor. He had recently read the Qur’an in earnest—in a modern English translation—and told me, with genuine curiosity but some frustration, that he found it “exhaustingly repetitive.” I wasn’t surprised. It’s not that the text lacks meaning, but that its mode of meaning-making is fundamentally different from what he was trained to expect.

For someone raised on the narrative logic of the Bible—especially the sequential, covenantal arc from Old Testament to New, from Genesis to Revelation—the Qur’an can feel disorienting. Biblical narrative often follows a chronological logic: a beginning, middle, and end; a movement from fall to redemption; a linear culmination. The Qur’an, by contrast, speaks in what I would call enmeshed narrative layers. It revisits certain prophetic figures—Abraham, Moses, Lot, Jesus—not to progress toward a climactic resolution, but to echo moral principles across different contexts, to rehearse them anew with shifting emphases, linguistic nuance, and ethical urgency.

This recursive structure, so central to the Qur’an’s oral rhythm and prophetic force, is often flattened or misrepresented in translation. Repetition becomes redundancy. Polyphony becomes confusion. Readers, especially in the Euro-American academy, are offered a Qur’an stripped of its dialogic voice, its poetic resonance, its recursive moral clarity. They receive a product—textualized, historicized, domesticated—not the living speech that once moved entire communities with its cadence and defiance.

Translation, then, is not just about words—it is about epistemology. When done through the lens of Euro-American expectations, it can obscure as much as it reveals. It leaves readers with the illusion of having understood, when in fact they’ve been handed a version of the Qur’an whose narrative soul has been edited out.

 YH: Do you think the epistemic frameworks the early Islamic thinkers used to articulate their understanding of Islam in Arabic were linguistically and intellectually accessible to the Euro-American scholars who purported to translate this tradition to English? At what point would you say Euro-American scholarship formulated a solid grasp of the Islamic episteme, if at all?

MS: The short answer is: no, they were not accessible—neither linguistically nor conceptually. The early Euro-American scholars who took it upon themselves to translate Islamic texts often lacked not just fluency in Arabic, but sensitivity to its epistemic structure. Arabic is not just a language of grammar and syntax; it is a language of form, of gesture, of resonance. It carries with it an entire ontology—ways of knowing, remembering, and relating to the world—that were largely illegible to those trained in Latin, Greek, or the exegetical models of Christianity.

What these early translators often failed to grasp was not just the semantics of Arabic, but its epistemic terrain: its elliptical logic, its ethics of naming, its reverence for sound and repetition as vehicles of meaning. Concepts like علم، حقّ، فتنة، صبر cannot be transplanted directly into English without losing the ethical weight and communal memory they carry in Arabic discourse. Nor can the Qur’anic mode of address—its interpellation of its audience, its rhetorical shifts, its allusive structure—be flattened into linear English prose without distortion.

Even the theological categories were misunderstood. Islam was often framed through Christian binaries: prophecy vs. heresy, revelation vs. reason, grace vs. law. These categories not only failed to map onto Islamic thought, they actively obscured it. The Qur’an’s moral cosmology—its pairing of justice with beauty, knowledge with humility, power with accountability—was routinely mistranslated, not because of ill intent, but because of a fundamental epistemic dissonance.

Has the field ever fully grasped the Islamic episteme? Perhaps glimpses—yes. There are moments in more recent scholarship where we see serious attempts to reckon with Islamic thought on its own terms, but they remain the exception. Too often, even now, the Qur’an is studied as an object of comparison, not as a subject with its own internal logic and authority. Its engagement with the pre-Islamic world, its oral strategies, its ethical grammar—these are still treated as peripheral.

What is needed is not just linguistic training, but an immersion in the Qur’an’s intellectual and affective universe. An attentiveness to its cadence, its patterns of repetition, its layered meaning-making. Without that, what we end up with are not translations, but appropriations—texts that gesture toward the original while reinscribing the reader’s assumptions rather than conveying the text’s demands.

YH: What you describe is both fascinating (about the language of the Qur’an) and devastating (about its translation). Is the translation “loss” also to be construed as an instance of what is known from within the Arabic tradition as the Qur’an’s إعجاز—inimitability—or is it mainly to be attributed to the western epistemic self-absorption that you outlined earlier? In other words, can the translation loss be remedied through more attentiveness to cadence, recursive patterns, and layers of meaning, or is the loss, linguistically at least, inevitable?

MS: Thank you for this crucial question. The translation “loss,” as we call it, cannot be understood purely as a deficit or failure. It is more accurately a condition—one that stems from both the concept ofإعجاز  within the Islamic tradition and the structures of epistemic authority in Euro-American modernity. These are not mutually exclusive explanations. Rather, they intertwine across history.

From within the Islamic tradition,  إعجازrefers to the Qur’an’s linguistic inimitability—its rhetorical and affective power to arrest the listener and draw them into a mode of hearing and responding that is unlike anything else. It is not simply that the Qur’an is beautiful or well-composed, but that it incapacitates imitation. That power, to borrow the language of al-Jurjani and al-Sakkaki, is not always immediately perceptible. It reveals itself to those who are prepared to listen with taste, to feel its inner rhythm, its eloquence, its surplus. This is not about elitism but about the Qur’an’s mode of address: not as a passive text, but as a living summons.

In that sense, yes, part of the Qur’an resists translation—not because Arabic is superior, but because its orality is integral to its meaning. As Annemarie Schimmel notes, the Qur’an defines the very space in which the Muslim lives. Its sound carries theological weight, even for those who do not understand the words.

But we should not romanticize this limit. The Qur’an is also translated from the beginning. It declares itself a تَيسير—a facilitation of divine speech into human language. Communication itself is part of the miracle. As I’ve argued elsewhere, divine language communicates before it communicates anything. Its first miracle is its availability to be heard.

The issue, then, is not with translation itself, but with the kind of translation we choose to accept. Too often, English renderings of the Qur’an reflect the translator’s own ideological commitments. They reduce the text to a philosophical treatise, a biblical sibling, or a historical record, stripping it of its sonic force and ethical intimacy. In these cases, the loss is not linguistic. It is conceptual.

Can that loss be remedied? Not fully. But it can be reimagined. As Walter Benjamin wrote, translation is not about replication. It is about gesture, about reaching toward a language purer than either the source or the target. Translation, in his view, is not the fruit itself, but the echo of its ripeness.

So yes, every translation of the Qur’an fails. And yet, every translation also bears witness. It keeps the Qur’an moving through history. It allows it to be heard again, even if imperfectly. That movement, that gesture, is part of the Qur’an’s afterlife. And in that movement, even failure becomes a form of fidelity—not to the letter, but to the longing.

To translate the Qur’an is not to reproduce it. It is to accompany it. To carry its voice across borders. And that is not betrayal. It is reverence.

YH: Based on all these structural and ideological asymmetries you compellingly point out it seems that, in addition to the linguistic barriers, the filed hasn’t yet reckoned with postcolonial theory. Is that so? Are there uneven developments worthy of note?

MS: The field has, at best, flirted with postcolonial theory, but it has yet to meaningfully reckon with it. Postcolonialism challenges the authority of inherited epistemes, asks difficult questions about power and knowledge, and demands that we examine not just what we study but how and why we study it. Qur’anic studies, particularly in Euro-American contexts, remains largely insulated from these demands. Even when it gestures toward postcolonial critique, it often does so in a superficial or symbolic way—citing a theorist in the footnotes while maintaining a deeply colonial methodology at the core.

This reluctance is telling. To take postcolonial theory seriously would require dismantling the very foundations on which the discipline rests: its Eurocentric genealogy, its philological elitism, and its structural suspicion of Muslim intellectual traditions. It would mean acknowledging that for over a century, Qur’anic studies has not only ignored but actively excluded voices from the Global South, particularly Muslim scholars who read the text within its linguistic, cultural, and oral context. It would also mean admitting that much of what passes for “critical” inquiry is embedded in the ideological aftermath of empire.

That said, there are uneven developments worth noting. Some scholars—often working at the periphery of the field—have begun to foreground indigenous epistemologies, to incorporate literary theory, oral poetics, and ethical philosophy into their readings of the Qur’an. These developments are often marginalized, rarely cited, and almost never institutionally funded or canonized. But they exist. The challenge is not the absence of alternatives—it’s the persistence of a hegemonic structure that refuses to recognize them as intellectually viable.

So, the question is not whether postcolonial tools are available, but whether the field is willing to relinquish its gatekeeping function long enough to hear what those tools—and those voices—are trying to say.

YH: What would it take to relinquish the gatekeeping? To decolonize Euro-American Qur’anic studies? 

MS: It would take more than a shift in content—it would require a dismantling of the very scaffolding upon which the field has been built. Decolonizing Qur’anic studies means challenging the monopoly of Euro-American epistemologies and allowing the Qur’an to speak from within its own literary, rhetorical, and historical universe. It means relinquishing the idea that objectivity is only achievable through distance, skepticism, or secular historical methods—methods that often silence the text’s voice in the name of scholarly neutrality.

Decolonization begins by restoring—or perhaps more precisely, re-centering—the Qur’an’s Arabicity. I use “re-centering” here with full awareness of the irony, since the Qur’an’s Arabicity was never truly centered to begin with in Euro-American scholarship. But the term still matters: it signals a deliberate attempt to reposition the Qur’an within its native expressive tradition—one shaped not only by language, but by a distinct aesthetic sensibility, ethical grammar, and historical consciousness. This includes engaging the Qur’an’s internal structures—its recursive rhythm, dialogic address, and moral urgency—as essential to its meaning, not as obstacles to it.

It also requires taking pre-Islamic Arabic literature seriously—not as ancillary background or a mere stepping stone to revelation, but as a literary world unto its own. This body of poetry, prose, and lore deserves the full critical engagement afforded to Greek tragedy or biblical narrative. It is the cultural soil from which the Qur’an emerged, and it must be read on its own terms—as a tradition with its own ethics, forms, and linguistic power. The Qur’an engages this tradition not to mirror it, but to respond to it, reshape it, and at times, to subvert it with formidable rhetorical force.

Equally important is the critical inclusion of Islamic exegetical traditions—not to enshrine them, but to acknowledge their intellectual sophistication. For over a millennium, Muslim scholars have interrogated the Qur’an’s structure, logic, and implications. These are not just theological musings; they are deeply philological, ethical, and often profoundly literary. To sideline them as merely devotional while treating Euro-American skepticism as intellectually superior is to perpetuate a hierarchy of knowledge rooted in colonial assumptions.

Finally, decolonizing Qur’anic studies demands a redistribution of authority. It means amplifying voices long marginalized—Muslim, Indigenous, Black, feminist, queer, and Global South thinkers—who bring new grammars of reading and new relations of meaning. It also means embracing interpretive modes rooted in lived experience, moral imagination, and rhetorical care, not just the conventions of historical critique.

To decolonize Qur’anic studies is not to narrow its scope. It is to widen it, to make it genuinely hospitable to the richness of the text and to the communities who have always read it as more than a document—as a call, a presence, a companion in the struggle to live ethically and speak truth with clarity.

YH: You wrote that the indigeneity of the Qur’an “represents a sacred relationship between the Qur’an and the historical, cultural, and natural environment of pre-Islamic Arabia.” How do you reconcile the specificity of this Arab indigeneity with Islam’s ecumenical, pan-ethnic ideological thrust?

MS: This is not a contradiction—it’s a tension, and a generative one. The Qur’an is at once radically local and unmistakably universal. Its voice is grounded in the soil of Arabia: it speaks in the rhetorical patterns, ethical inflections, and sonic intensity of pre-Islamic Arabic expression—not necessarily in the prosodic meters of classical poetry, but in the rhythms of oral performance, tribal memory, and moral persuasion. Its language—Arabic—is not incidental; it is a vessel of meaning. The Qur’an asserts its authority not through abstraction, but through a deep entwinement with the landscape, soundscape, and social urgencies of its earliest community.

At the same time, it never claims to be a book only for the Arabs. Its ethical address is expansive, and its rhetorical movement reflects this. The Qur’an speaks to multiple audiences— يا أيها الذين آمنوا(“O you who believe”), يا أيها الناس (“O people”), and يا أيها الإنسان (“O human being”)—each invocation peeling back a layer of particularity to reveal a deeper, more universal claim. This structure is not accidental. It models a widening of ethical responsibility—from the believing community, to all of humanity, to the solitary human soul. It’s not an erasure of difference, but an expansion of moral inclusion.

So, the question is not whether the Qur’an is indigenous or universal. The real question is: can universality emerge from indigeneity? And the Qur’an’s answer is yes. Its universality is not a rejection of its roots—it is a flowering from them.

YH: To close on this hopeful note, orienting toward a more humane world, you argue that “by re-centering the Qur’ān within its indigenous poetic and cultural milieu, we uncover a humanistic vision that offers an alternative understanding of what it means to be human, one unafraid to define the human subject on its own terms.” Can you give examples of this re-centering?

MS: Yes. When we situate the Qur’an within the cultural, linguistic, and emotional world that first received it—not just geographically, but existentially—we begin to recover a vision of the human that is not abstract, but intimate. Not the autonomous rational agent of modern liberal thought. Not the metaphysically fallen subject of inherited sin. But the human as addressed, as summoned, as one who lives in relation—to God, to others, to time, to the weight of their own ethical choices.

The Qur’anic human is not a master of the world, but a bearer of trust (أمانة), prone to forgetting, yet capable of return. The human is vulnerable, uncertain, accountable. The Qur’an does not hide this; it amplifies it. Its rhetorical mode—shifting voices, refrains, direct questions—mirrors the rhythm of human struggle. The anthropology of the Qur’an is not about mastering the elements, but of responding to a call. The human emerges not through conquest of the world, but through listening—to revelation, to conscience, to the cry of the oppressed. The questions the Qur’an asks—Do you not reflect? Have you not considered?—are not theological riddles. They are invitations to wakefulness. They summon the human to consciousness, to care, to humility, to the cry of the oppressed.

This summon becomes clear in the Qur’an’s rhetorical mode. It doesn’t offer systematic theology; it offers interpellation. يا أيها الإنسان—“O human being”—is not just a call; it is an ethical invitation. The Qur’an constantly shifts registers, confronting the human with urgent questions: Have you not seen? Do you not reflect? These are not mere rhetorical flourishes—they are ontological provocations. To be human is to learn to listen and answer.

And that answerability unfolds in a literary form that mirrors the human condition: recursive, non-linear, rhythmic, filled with refrains, silences, and ruptures. The stories of Adam, Moses, Mary, and Luqman are not moral blueprints; they are portraits of humans in motion—doubting, resisting, surrendering, remembering. In each, the Qur’an dramatizes the human journey as one of ethical awakening, not doctrinal submission.

To re-center the Qur’an within its indigenous milieu, then, is to recover this humanism—a humanism not of emancipation from the divine, but of ethical proximity to it. It means affirming a vision of the human that is not afraid to be vulnerable, not afraid to be addressed, not afraid to be transformed. A humanism that begins not with “I think, therefore I am,” but with “I heard, and I bear witness.”

This vision of the human doesn’t begin with the Qur’an—it is already stirring in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. One of the most haunting examples comes from Tarafa ibn al-‘Abd, who, facing the inevitability of death, refuses to retreat into resignation and instead declares:

ألا أيّهذا الزاجري أحضر الوغى … وأن أشهد اللذاتِ هل أنت مخلدي
فإن كنت لا تستطيع دفع منيتي … فدعني أبادرها بما ملكت يدي

“Hey you, who blame me for going to war and indulging in pleasures—can you make me live forever?
If you cannot stop my death, then let me advance to it with all that I have.”

Here, we see the pre-Islamic human in full clarity: defiant, aware, trembling with the knowledge of his limits, yet choosing action, pleasure, even beauty, in the face of the end. He is not asking to be saved from mortality—he is asking to live in full awareness of it, to act in its presence without illusion. This gesture echoes what Heidegger would later describe as Being-toward-death—the capacity to confront finitude not as tragedy, but as the ground for becoming fully and consciously human.

Tarafa’s cry is not simply nihilistic; it is a demand for dignity in the face of the inevitable. And it is precisely this kind of existential lucidity that the Qur’an inherits, deepens, and transforms. It does not erase Tarafa—it responds to him. It takes the raw material of that human cry and reframes it within a moral cosmos where remembrance is no longer the domain of poetry alone, but a divine act: “We have not forgotten you.”

To re-center the Qur’an within this indigenous world is to recover not only a literary genealogy, but a human one. It allows us to see the Qur’an as part of a long conversation—between grief and grace, defiance and submission, forgetfulness and return. And in that conversation, the human is neither glorified nor condemned, but called—to respond, to remember, to walk humbly in the shadow of eternity.

This is humanity as the Qur’an envisions it: not autonomous, but answerable. Not perfect, but present. Not defined by dominion, but by the capacity to be addressed, to respond, to remember. And it is from this encounter—with finitude, with language, with the divine—that a new humanism emerges: one rooted not in mastery or certainty, but in humility, attentiveness, and the moral courage to listen and speak in return.

YH: A vision of humanity not defined by domination feels especially urgent in today’s world. Thank you for such a compelling and heartening conversation.