The Qur’an has primarily reached the anglophone West through translations by Indian Muslims in the first half of the twentieth century. Aly’s engaging book fascinatingly reviews their achievements, the wider social and political context that shaped them, and their enduring influence to this day. He contends that these translations need to be understood as products of their context, and especially their attempt to accommodate Islam with modernity.
At a time when Middle East Muslim authorities discouraged translations of the Qur’an, conditions in India favored translations. The East India Company Act of 1813 lifted the ban on Christian missions, which brought English-language materials with them. This challenge alerted Indian Muslims to the need also to engage in apologetics in English.
Further, after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Raj opened the civil service to Indians with a proficiency in English. This led to the rise of a modern English-speaking Muslim intellectual class, many of whom, like Yusuf Ali, had studied in Britain. They were acutely conscious of Islam’s weakened condition and the challenge that modernity presented to the Qur’an. Aly focuses on four such challenges: unscientific elements (such as jinn), the doctrine of jihad, Muslim supremacism, and the status of women.
Most interestingly, Aly discusses in detail the choices of translation to answer these challenges. Translators presented the Qur’an as consistent with science; as a religion of peace, insisting that jihad means “struggle” and that military jihad is only defensive; as universal, for all nations, softening verses pointing to Muslim superiority; and as respectful of women, downplaying the ill-treatment of women (most famously, Yusuf Ali added the word “lightly” to Sura 4:34, the wife beating verse).
Aly clearly agrees with those Indian translators, to the point that his partisanship sometimes shines through, as when he calls Sura 4:34 “ambiguous” even though the Arabic is very clear: it just says “hit her.”
Qur’an Translation as a Modern Phenomenon shows how profoundly the pioneering work of Indian translators has underpinned and empowered Islamic da‘wa (mission) in the West. The many Western converts to Islam, won over by a message of tolerance and universal peace, are testimony to the Indian translators’ remarkable success, despite the many divergences of their translations from the pre-modern Islamic understanding.
