First Holy Quran Translation by Women?

It was reported in an American media recently, that there is a 'new' translation of Al-Quran by an Iranian-American women, Laleh Bakhtiar PhD.



News Timeline:
November 2006: A brief announcement about this Qur’an translation was made at the WISE Conference: Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equity held in New York
March 24, 2007: Neil MacFarquhar published an article in the New York Times, New Translation Prompts Debate on Islamic Verse, and since then his article has been republished all over the world...and this had created debates in news and blogs globally.
April 2007: The English translation is now released, link here. The English Arabic version in September 2008. Samples of the text are available in the link.

Here is the interview transcript with Laleh Bakhtiar on this, published in The American Muslim Web.

If u dont have much time, below is the highlight of the interview about her translation called The Sublime Quran.

Features of The Sublime Quran

1. This translation reverts 4:34; “to beat” back to 'its original interpretation meaning' “to go away"
2. a universal, inclusive translation with no parenthetical expressions
3. the translation has internal consistency and reliability
4. There is a different English equivalent for each Arabic grammatical form
5. words not appearing in the Arabic but necessary for English are in italics
6. translation is presented line by line and not verse by verse
7. Symbols indicating how a line is recited in Arabic is indicated

You can find the elaborations of these and more of her arguments about the Arabic terms 'daraba' originally meant "to beat" which is now reverted to "to go away"in the interview transcript.

You can also find more about this in the New York Times article below...

March 25, 2007

New Translation Prompts Debate on Islamic Verse

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

CHICAGO — Laleh Bakhtiar had already spent two years working on an English translation of the Koran when she came upon Chapter 4, Verse 34.

She nearly dropped the project right then.

The hotly debated verse states that a rebellious woman should first be admonished, then abandoned in bed, and ultimately “beaten” — the most common translation for the Arabic word “daraba” — unless her behavior improves.

“I decided it either has to have a different meaning, or I can’t keep translating,” said Ms. Bakhtiar, an Iranian-American who adopted her father’s Islamic faith as an adult and had not dwelled on the verse before. “I couldn’t believe that God would sanction harming another human being except in war.”

Ms. Bakhtiar worked for five more years, with the translation to be published in April. But while she found a way through the problem, few verses in the Koran have generated as much debate, particularly as more Muslim women study their faith as an academic field.

“This verse became an issue of debate and controversy because of the ethics of the modern age, the universal notions of human rights,” said Khaled Abou El Fadl, an Egyptian-born law professor and Islamic scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The leader of the North American branch of a mystical Islamic order, Sheik Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, said he had been questioned about the verse in places around the world where women were struggling for greater rights, but most of all by Westerners.

Women want to be free “from some of the extreme ideology of some Muslims,” the sheik said, after delivering a sermon on the verse recently in Oakland, Calif.

[In Germany last week, a judge citing the verse caused a public outcry after she rejected the request for a fast track divorce by a Moroccan-German woman because her husband beat her. The judge, removed from the case, had written that the Koran sanctioned physical abuse.]

There are at least 20 English translations of the Koran. “Daraba” has been translated as beat, hit, strike, scourge, chastise, flog, make an example of, spank, pet, tap and even seduce.

“Spank?” exclaimed Professor Abou El Fadl, who has concluded that the verse refers to a rare public legal procedure that ended before the 10th century. “That is really kinky. That is the author fantasizing too much.”

Ms. Bakhtiar, who is 68 and has a doctorate in educational psychology, set out to translate the Koran because she found the existing version inaccessible for Westerners. Many Jewish and Christian names, for example, have been Arabized, so Moses and Jesus appear in the English version of the Koran as Musa and Issa.

When she reached the problematic verse, Ms. Bakhtiar spent the next three months on “daraba.” She does not speak Arabic, but she learned to read the holy texts in Arabic while studying and working as a translator in Iran in the 1970s and ’80s.

Her eureka moment came on roughly her 10th reading of the Arabic-English Lexicon by Edward William Lane, a 3,064-page volume from the 19th century, she said. Among the six pages of definitions for “daraba” was “to go away.”

“I said to myself, ‘Oh, God, that is what the prophet meant,’ ” said Ms. Bakhtiar, speaking in the offices of Kazi Publications in Chicago, a mail-order house for Islamic books that is publishing her translation. “When the prophet had difficulty with his wives, what did he do? He didn’t beat anybody, so why would any Muslim do what the prophet did not?”

She thinks the “beat” translation contradicts another verse, which states that if a woman wants a divorce, she should not be mistreated. Given the option of staying in the marriage and being beaten, or divorcing, women would obviously leave, she said.

There have been similar interpretations, but none have been incorporated into a translation. Debates over translations of the Koran — considered God’s eternal words — revolve around religious tradition and Arabic grammar. Critics fault Ms. Bakhtiar on both scores.

Ms. Bakhtiar said she expected opposition, not least because she is not an Islamic scholar. Men in the Muslim world, she said, will also oppose the idea of an American, especially a woman, reinterpreting the prevailing translation.

“They feel the onslaught of the West against their religious values, and they fear losing their whole suit of armor,” she said. “But women need to know that there is an alternative.”

Religious scholars outline several main threads in the translation of “daraba.”

Conservative scholars suggest the verse has to be taken at face value, with important reservations.

They consider that the Koran holds that force is an acceptable last resort to preserve important institutions, including marriages and nations. Some scholars have accused some Muslims of trying to make the verse palatable to the West.

“I am not apologetic about why the Koran says this,” said Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an Islamic scholar who teaches at George Washington University. The Bible, he noted, addresses stoning people to death.

Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian whose writings underpin the extremism of groups like Al Qaeda, published extensive commentaries about the Koran before he was hanged in 1966.

Islamic tradition states that Muhammad never hit his 11 wives, and Mr. Qutb considered a man striking his wife as the last measure to save a marriage. He cited the prophet’s horror at the practice by quoting one of his sayings: “Do not beat your wife like you beat your camel, for you will be flogging her early in the day and taking her to bed at night.”

The verse 4:34, with its three-step program, is often called a reform over the violent practices of seventh century Arabia, when the Koran was revealed. The verse was not a license for battery, scholars say, with other interpretations defining the heaviest instrument a man might employ as a twig commonly used as a toothbrush.

Sheik Ali Gomaa, the Islamic scholar who serves as Egypt’s grand mufti, said Koranic verses must be viewed through the prism of the era.

The advice “is always broad in order to be relevant to different cultures and in different times,” he said through a spokesman in an e-mail message. “In our modern context, hitting one’s wife is totally inappropriate as society deems it hateful and it will only serve to sow more discord.”

A caller on a television program in Egypt recently asked the mufti if he should stop sleeping with his wife if she was causing discord, the spokesman said. The mufti replied that the measures in the verse were meant to bring harmony, not to exact revenge.

More liberal commentators, particularly women, say the usual interpretation reflects the patriarchal practices of the Arabian peninsula.

This school holds that the sacred texts have become encrusted with medieval traditions that need to be scraped off like a layer of barnacles. Some Saudi women have been trying to do this by emphasizing the public role played by Aisha, one of the prophet’s wives, while the Asma Society gathered Muslim women from around the world in New York last fall to explore the establishment of a female council to interpret Islamic law.

Some analysts hold that the verse cannot be rendered meaningfully into English because it reflects social and legal practices of Muhammad’s time.

“The whole idea is not to punish her,” said Ingrid Mattson, an expert in early Islamic history at the Hartford Seminary and the first woman to be president of the Islamic Society of North America. “It is like a fear of sexual impropriety, that the husband takes these steps to try to bring their relationship to where it is supposed to be. I think it is a physical gesture of displeasure.”

Contrary, Sunni Sisters argued in their blog that Laleh is actually not the first

Why is it that when A’isha Bewley, who actually speaks Arabic, and is a known and respected translator of classical texts, published a translation of the Qur’an the NYT didn’t profile her? Heck, most Muslims didn’t even know she’d done this, and you have some people today talking about “the first translation by a woman” wrt Bakhtiar (and prior to Bewley’s, there was at least one other version that was done by an Egyptian woman). Is it because Bewley doesn’t fit the image of what Cheryl Benard and Rand told us “friendly” Muslims look like? Scoff all you like. I’m not a fan of conspiracy theories, but more and more coverage of Islam and Muslims seems to take a page from the infamous Rand report. And we go along with it.

Or is it because Bewley didn’t set out with the mindset that she was going to change what the Qur’an meant to English readers or not do it?

“I decided it either has to have a different meaning, or I can’t keep translating.”

What Bakhtiar is doing, then, is a grave, grave disservice to those people who pick up her version. She is doing what liberal Muslims accuse the ‘ulema of having done for 1400 years. It’s not a translation if she decides what the meaning is based on what she wants. It’s wishful thinking. Alhamdulillah, it doesn’t change the meaning of the Qur’an… but saying that English speakers are alienated by Arabic names, deciding yourself to do tafsir, even though you don’t really know Arabic and you admit to having no classical or scholarly training is changing how people who pick up your book will perceive the capital-T Truth, and this can lead one into spiritual territory where one would not want to be caught on the Day That Counts.

more arguments here

Well, Im not an expert in this, but I do agree with Sunni Sister bout the excessive features about this in the media, the fact that she is not the first women itself can actually prompt a debate. Thats not the issue.

But the issue here is, is it To beat or To go away? Yr decision I guess