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MOST of us who read the Quran in English or Urdu do so with a quiet, unexamined assumption: that we are encountering the text itself. We underline verses, quote them in arguments, and even build moral positions upon them, rarely pausing to ask how much of what we are reading belongs to the Quran, and how much belongs to the human voice that carried it into our language.
Yet the moment revelation crosses into translation, it enters the fragile world of interpretation — a world shaped by history, culture, theology, and the moral imagination of the translator.
This matters far more than we usually admit. The Quran is not a book of abstract doctrines. It speaks in a moral and psychological language about fear, desire, power, gratitude, betrayal, patience, hope and trust. When those words are filtered through a translator’s assumptions, a theology quietly enters the reader’s mind.
Consider a word as central as ‘taqwa’. It is routinely translated as ‘piety’ or ‘fear of God’. Both are partial. ‘Piety’ carries a Victorian moralism that suggests social respectability. ‘Fear’ suggests anxiety before punishment. But in the Quran, ‘taqwa’ points to something closer to moral awareness — a kind of inward attentiveness to the reality of God. It is less about trembling and more about being awake. When we reduce it to fear, we create a religion of nervous obedience rather than conscious responsibility.
Much of our religious discourse has been outsourced to translations.
Or take ‘nafs’, often rendered simply as ‘self’ or ‘soul’. In the Quran, ‘nafs’ is dynamic: it desires, resists, lies to itself, regrets, and sometimes grows. It is the arena of moral struggle. When translation flattens it into a static ‘soul’, we lose the Quran’s profound psychology of human conflict — its insight into how people deceive themselves even while believing they are sincere.
The same happens with ‘zulm’, frequently translated as ‘wrongdoing’ or ‘injustice’. In Quranic usage, ‘zulm’ is not merely a legal violation; it is a distortion of reality — putting things where they do not belong, whether in one’s heart, in social relations, or in systems of power. A tyrant is more than unjust; he is a zalim because he violates the moral order of existence itself. When this depth is lost, Quranic ethics shrink into rule-keeping.
Why does this matter in Pakistan today? Because we live in a society where the Quran is everywhere — in political speeches, courtroom rhetoric, classroom walls, and television debates — yet it is rarely engaged as a text that challenges how we see ourselves. Much of our religious discourse has been outsourced to translations that quietly ‘smuggle’ in rigid moralism, legal reductionism or cultural conservatism under the guise of divine speech.
Translation also shapes what we think the Quran is for. Some renderings make it sound primarily like a book of laws. Others make it sound like a collection of moral maxims. Yet in Arabic, the Quran reads like something else entirely: a voice speaking to the human being in moments of doubt, temptation, gratitude, despair and hope. It argues, questions, warns, consoles and provokes.
This is why early Muslim scholars never imagined that translation could replace the original Arabic. They knew that the Quran’s meaning lives not just in vocabulary but in rhythm, metaphor and layered association. To translate it is to choose which meanings to highlight and which to mute.
None of this means that translations should be rejected. Without them, most of the world’s Muslims would have no access to the Quran at all. To adapt Tennyson’s famous line — “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” — one might say, with a smile, that it is better to have read the Quran in translation than never to have read it at all. But once the love has begun, one should not mistake the translation for the beloved.
A thoughtful engagement with the Quran begins not by memorising verses, but by learning how to listen. Language is the doorway into that listening, but it is never the house itself. To confuse the two is to mistake the map for the territory.
If this sounds like a technical concern, it is not. The way we translate the Quran shapes the kind of Muslims we become: anxious or awake, obedient or responsible, rigid or morally alive. In a society struggling with both injustice and despair, that difference could not be more consequential.
The Quran speaks to the human condition. Our task is not merely to read its words, but to learn how to hear its voice.
The writer is lecturer, Aga Khan University Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Published in Dawn, February 27th, 2026
