Summary: Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakaatuh. Alhamdulillah ….(Arabic)….I was told I have about 30-35 minutes (I have added the 5 myself) for this talk, Insha’Allah wa ta’ala. I am going to try to keep my conversation focused to a college student audience. I don’t want to cater this as a general talk, but I wanted to kind of focus it to a student audience, Insha’Allah wa ta’ala, on the subject of appreciating the Qur’an, and I’m cognizant of the fact there may be even some non-Muslims in the audience, and so I’ll try to avoid Arabic terminology in this conversation; and, at the same time, if I do use some Arabic terms, I will try my best to translate those terms and make them easier to process. Okay.<br> <br> So I want to start with a very straightforward phenomenon, and that is that the Qur’an for most people, Muslim and non-Muslim, is a veiled text. What that means is it’s very difficult to just pick up and read and process. And the reason for that is…there are several reasons, and the primary reason for that is it’s being introduced to most of the world, Muslim and non, in translation. Most Muslims do not have qualifications or training in classical Arabic, the original language of the Qur’an, and so either they are reading the translation of the Qur’an in Persian or Urdu or, you know, Somali, or, you know, even Chinese, Cantonese, English, French, German, etc., etc. And, like any literature, there is a lot lost in translation; there is quite a bit lost in translation, especially older languages, because older languages had something, what the Prophet called jawami al-kamin, the ability to encompass a lot of meanings in very few words. So even if you translate, for instance, one line for another line, like a line of Arabic to a line of English, there is a lot more nuance in the Arabic line that is completely lost, so you got kind of a droplet of the meaning that was suggested in the Arabic text, and you got very little of that communicated in the English text or whatever other translated text. There is an additional problem, and that is that in old languages, they had their own figures of speech. They had their own, you know, sort of things they said that they didn’t mean literally, they meant them figuratively. And that’s not just true of ancient languages; it’s true of our languages also. Okay? You know, for instance, in English, when you say someone to someone, ‘That is extremely cool. That is so cool.’ That can’t be taken literally, unless you live in, you know, Boston or something; but, generally, when somebody says it’s cool, it’s nice. You know, it’s not to be taken literally. And these are things that are dependent on context, so even though the English language has been around for a while, if you said to somebody, ‘That is cool,’ to somebody a hundred years ago, they probably wouldn’t understand you the same way. Right? So, language isn’t just about translating a word from a dictionary; it also evolves in a context. So the original context of the Qur’an is very particular, and a lot of times those figures of speech that are in and of themselves very beautiful and very deep and very contextual, they get translated literally in our translations, and then we read them and we just scratch our heads and go, ‘What’s this talking about? What does this even mean?’ You know? So this is probably, I would argue, the biggest problem in Qur’an education or awareness even or literary appreciation, for Muslims and non-Muslims. It is, in fact, a veiled text. And to un-veil this text…..so now you say, well, translation doesn’t suffice, what else can I do? What else can I study or maybe access to maybe try to understand this book better? Well, you’ve got 2 options before you, right? One option is to become a student of classical Arabic, which is probably not an option for most people. You know, some very driven, motivated individuals like myself, 10 or 12 years ago, I decided I wanted to learn this language and take it se...
