you know that for instance uh uh allah
says
in the 22nd surah in hajj
allah
so one puts it in the active and the
other puts it in the passive
um and both meanings are sound
you know permission is granted to those
who are fighting in other words minute
muslim means
those who have been aggressed upon that
they they're they have a license to
defend themselves so
though those you know i mean i i i think
people who translate the quran have to
be aware of the
and that's a place for footnotes um
uh but in terms of in tunis you
recite
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was in his dialect so it's in the it's
in the quraishi dialect
and and imam malik preferred it over all
the other he preferred nephi
so did um he actually malik considered
sunnah and ahmed muhammad was
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you know and it's it's uh it's it became
popular
because um the abbasids adopted it you
know the
and was of awesome
so it became very popular but is a
beautiful
it's it's more difficult it's the one i
use um
it's more difficult to learn the medus
are are longer also because the
the uh you know the you have the six
harder cuts
um so if you're reciting it it's
it it takes longer to recite it than it
does uh
house you know so i i would just say
that um
iran is just something you you with fear
and trouble
nation you should have a humility with
the quran
and one of the things that the people of
hadith
say is that you always when you quote a
hadith and i forget to do this but you
really
should do it uh you end it by saying oh
come
on you
is factual it's as solid as any ayah in
the quran
so you know and i heard one of them
was a great scholar from mauritania felt
that
that anybody who has land in
transmitting these might fall in uh
because uh you're the prophet never
had lan so it's like and
kind of in arabic is very interesting
because
when the muhammad it doesn't necessarily
mean that he was intentionally a liar
what it meant is that he just
transmitted everything he heard
without ascertaining because of the
hadith that it's enough to call a man a
liar who transmits everything he hears
so if you're not if there's no tether
and
and to help on what's being said then
you can end up being a liar
yes thank you sheikh for these very
insightful explanations
on language and synonyms and so on
but i'm going to ask a question about uh
the context
not the verbal and the strict context of
words synonymy
exactly the broader context
and the importance of contextualization
and this is one tool in the hands of
translators they cannot transmit a
message
or convey something without
contextualizing it
in the first place and here
i'm not speaking about the sacred text
or the hadith but even
any classical text like
the text or the book by imam al-ghazali
and
i think in one of your books i think it
is the
vision of islam something like that you
said that it is very dangerous
to read a book by imam al-ghazali and
not understand that
imam al-ghazali was working in sixth
sixth century eastern islam
you are fortunate to know
sheikh binbaya to know you know him and
and you can
engage in a discussion with him to infer
the right
meaning from his uh what he has
said and the interpretation but
you cannot engage in a dialogue with uh
imam al-ghazali
because he lived in a different era
so and you cannot invoke the elements of
context
properly what to do in this case to be
faithful
to the philosophy of
a great writer like
okay well first of all i'd say you're
you're talking about context in two
different ways
and so in in the first sense everything
is embedded uh you know words are
embedded
in a context like for instance the
context of this discussion
is about me
speaking with a group of translators
about my own experiences in translating
and maybe helping
these students uh navigate something
that at my age now i've been navigating
for a long time and i can pass
so that's the context of this discussion
and and
and and that's why the subjects that
we're talking about
are contextualized in the context of
this
subject but now you're also talking
about historical context
so so language is embedded in the
context with which
it it emerges so for instance
uh in surat which comes after al-anfal
and some of the unum collapsed the two
together so there's no basmata
but others said no the basmallah is
absent because of the context
of the surah that it wasn't appropriate
because in belarus they say
that
it should correspond to the the context
that's literally what it means
and so so it's not appropriate in the
context
of the opening of toba to have bismillah
because it's talking about basically
warfare so
uh that that's an example of
context embedded uh language in context
historical context is a completely other
problem
and that is and and where we have to
differentiate
and and as philosophically as an
essentialist
i would argue that ghazali
is a man for all times in many things
and in some things he's a man for his
time
so women that read sometimes find
ouches in ghazali's writings because
sometimes he's he's really seems like
he's a man of his time
and in the way he talks about women
um but does that mean we throw him out
because he has some statements that in
today's
sensibilities would be considered sexist
you know i would argue that so sorry can
you give us an example on
on ghazali's view to to women
well if you read babanyika if you read
for instance
you know that uh you know things like um
you know making the remark that uh
you know a baron a sejada
in the corner of your house is better
than sleeping with a barren wife
i mean that's a pretty
it you know that's a that's a harsh
statement um
even though it's attributed to uh to uh
one of the sahaba i won't mention the
name but the point
the point of that statement is is that
abandon you know is is
that a lot of the olia saw
sexuality as as uh as procreation that
like the catholics that you went with
the nia of
procreation even audrey for instance
saw it as a very highly spiritual thing
and so
he would say with the right intention
sleeping with your spouse is actually an
act of ibadah
so you know i'm just using that as an
you asked for an example so
excuse me for the the explicit nature of
the example but
um you know and other things i mean you
just find things that
that are just i think uh
you know they're they're just a little
difficult but overall
he's he's universal far more than he is
particular to his time and place and in
that way
i think his words can be communicated
over time and this is why
you can take a work like uh like the the
20th chapter
of the on the prophet's fallation that
work is
is for all time and we can translate it
and
and we know what those words mean or or
we can
we can take kitab and
and that's speaking to us today or
kasura
or steven mode the 40th book i mean
i think that historical context is
important to understand
but we also have to recognize much of
what our islamic tradition
uh is grappling with our universals that
are true for every time and place
and so in some ways you know there if
you look at him even tamiya
even tamiya was living at a time when
the muslim world was under
siege so he has a siege mentality
his his mentality is very different from
somebody who
is living at a time when the muslims
were uh
in the full height of their power um
if you look for instance a lot of the
things about christians and jews in our
books
were said at a time when the christians
and jews
were completely uh in a state of
subjugation to to the muslims and so
they didn't feel any need to uh hide
their feelings
about this that or the other we're
living in a time which is
is the absolute opposite and so it's
important
that you know that we follow closer to
the earlier
tradition of just the prophet sam was
very conciliatory
um he did not offend people he did not
want to offend people but when people
are in power they tend to forget those
things
and so there's a lot of things in our
tradition that are very
ugly and um and they need to be
contextualized in their historical truth
i'll give you one example
if you look at the hadith in sahih
bukhari that
a the prophet stood for the jew uh
who was being taken to his field and
they said that it's a yahood
he said nafsa isn't it a soul
in the country and you can see this
a great scholar in the commentary some
of the ulama said
he was standing because of the foulness
of the stench
like how do you get that interpretation
out of that
you get it because of the
particularities of the time
you know they really had a low opinion
of other religions and of other peoples
that i don't think is the spirit of
islam allah says
let us
we have made every ummah think what that
what they're doing is good
like allah says he did that so
just like don't curse the idols of other
like hindu we're not supposed to curse
their idols
because we want to reach people and
share and
if you don't show respect for other
people why should they show respect for
you
yeah thank you sheikh uh i'm aware of
time now it is
almost five uh to uh
nine hour time and five to one pm your
time
i'm not uh sure if we can
add some a few minutes ten minutes
perhaps because i can see
so many requests on the floor so
uh would you accommodate ten or more
you very much uh
professor mohammed masoor you have the
floor please
i think you are muted professor muhammad
uh yes can you hear me now we can yes
can you hear me now
we can hear you quite well yes okay fine
okay
thanks for this uh opportunity dr salvi
and good evening to our speaker
and to the attendees i'd like also to
thank the speaker for highlighting the
the fact that poetry is a language
charged to the maximum
and also thanks for insisting on nuances
as related to prepositions i know
someone who wrote a
full phd dissertation on the meaning of
woe
uh why would uh
in in the language and
about synonymy also this is a this is an
important issue
maybe in in in the
you have synonymy but i don't think you
have synonymy
in three verse in free verse a poet
would
not sacrifice the meaning
for just a word that rhymes
and i have you know read this poetry and
i have discussed it
and i don't see in free verse
uh you know that pursuit of the
musical word or the word that rhymes at
the cost of
of the precise meaning
so maybe poetry is the place to start
to really know more about nuances of
meaning
as you said somebody called this in a
previous presentation as
full now to my query
i once started a project in which i was
uh
trying to you know show
the favor that
uh speakers of the language owe
to translated works that is
there are verses of the quran
i i you know i went to a quranic school
and i
really got trained uh fully trained i
believe
in in a quranic school but still there
are passages in the text
which i can grasp better in translation
that is in the english language not only
because those people
mastered the language but also because
they read
different exigencies of the of the text
and and and and kind of add different
kind of ethics
now my query is
in relation to
instances in the text where we have
sahib
and other instances where we have imra
and then instances where we find nissa
as a generic term any any any thoughts
on this
professor so yeah i
i think um the the great just on the
poetry
i think that the truly great masters of
poetry
would never arabic is so vast in its
vocabulary
that they would never have to
lose the meaning in search of uh of a
rhyming
word or so i mean there's that what
they're working with the the the corpus
the body
of of uh of language that they're
working with
is it's amazing i mean arabic has more
vocabulary than any other
language in the world so
and and as you know the great poets use
words that
we've never heard of we have to look
them up and one of the things i love
about the humility
of arab texts is that they will often um
explain the words at the bottom i wish i
wish english texts did that because
when you read really difficult writers
they often use words that you have to
look up
whereas the arabs put them down at the
bottom because they know
that this is a fast language and not
everybody has that vocabulary
in terms of of uh the only woman
mentioned in the quran is maryam
all of the other there's no other woman
mentioned by name in the quran
you know the imra you know
uh so luke's wife we don't know the
names we don't know imato aziz
which is uh some say it's you know
in in in the top seers uh the reason
that mufasa don't give
is that um they say that
for the arab it was bad adam to mention
a woman by name who was not your
sahiba or your own and because of
maryam's special
with allah she is law
and one of the very intriguing aspects
of in arabic
is that and
is an incredible subject
but isa is is
and if you look it ha it it doesn't drop
the alif
in the rasam so that it's actually
so isa is it's it's really a bit
a battle right it's not an a
it's like isa even um like
jesus the son of maryam as like a
it's like he's not just isa
he's the son of maryam and so
she has that special makaam that she's
the only one mentioned
in terms of the the other words i mean
nissa is
is is a is a generic uh plural you know
and arabic i mean there's a debate is
there in santa
in santa tune fatanitum you know they
they are
talk about that insane is more like
mensch in uh in german you know it's the
human being
um and and and arabs tend to
arabic when it when there's no ambiguity
it uses
the masculine form for the feminine so
for instance
a woman who's pregnant she's the only
one that can get pregnant she's
not called hamilton she's hammond and
which proves to you
that is arabic is not a sexist language
in that way
that it's it's it it's only using
uh you know the the the the the
masculine to
include both but when it when there's no
ambiguity it uses the masculine for the
feminine
even though it's a effect and sometimes
it uses the feminine for the masculine
you know like chimps or or uh
and on and on so so um i think
uh those nuances are are are
very often brought out in some of the
great commentators
uh of the quran um one if you're
interested in a really
interesting modern uh rhetorical i mean
kashaf is the is the great source for a
lot of this
but a samurai is who's an iraqi scholar
who wrote
a tapsir albayani um is a
really interesting four volumes but he
really gets into
the nuances of the of the different
words
uh in arabic yeah thank you chef we are
going to take a last
question and yeah
you are uh the luckiest to be the
last to ask question to so
um i i'm seeing the names are there is
this a multinational because
it seems like egyptian names yes yes
my name is in this context i'm
and it's not a question in fact i'm very
i'm very excited
and it's an honor really to to be able
to listen to you
uh virtually thank you hamuda thank you
sheikh
jazakallahu in fact
i'll give you a very brief background
i'm born in saudi arabia
i used to offer the quran uh
i'm graduate of al-azhar university and
i have it foreign
and regardless of that my first job
opportunity was
islamic it was the highest
highest institute and and i was like no
way
i'm scared i can't i cannot
it's not me guys i'm running away of
this civil
service and you know i need to we have
to have a civil serve
to be civil servants as a kind of
let's say security and i rejected that i
escaped it after
almost 15 years i was invited to
interpret
in a conference of adien
it was a terrifying experience
and i'm i was like no way this is one of
the most difficult fields i've ever
can deal with and that's why i decided
guys you are heroes
and i will never be able to do what you
do the more you talk like i said
that i'm ignorant guys i'm ignorant
alhamdulillah
that i'm just an interpreter
alhamdulillah
thank you so much
perhaps i will be ending this talk in
arabic
by way of summarizing in a couple of
minutes
what has been discussed in this very
insightful
and memorable uh discussion with the
prominent
scholar sheikh
you are really you've taken us
into a journey
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um
um
uh
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[Music]
um
the thing i'm most proud of in terms of
translation
is uh the prayer of the oppressed
and this took me a really long time
because
i i took a poem that was in the regis
meter
and i put it in a
hexameter which is very similar
to the regis meter so
if you look at it they're both metered
so if you say yeah
o you whose mercy is a refuge for all
those
in dire need who flee to you
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whose pardon is so near you answer all
in need they know that you do here
we beg for your relief redeemer of the
week
you are enough for us both humble then
so meek
so uh that's that's what i'm most proud
of in my
translation work is
intercultural communications
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foreign
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you