I.
Language is a big deal.
It’s the only way we have to communicate ideas. The ideas we transmit to one another can only be as legible as the words we use. So when dealing with the most important ideology there is — Islam — it’s of critical importance that we not miscommunicate it with misleading or ambiguous language.
Keeping this in mind, there’s a set of words that gets used in every explanation of Islam there is: “God”, “faith”, “religion”, “belief”, “worship”, “submit”, “obey”, “messenger”, “monotheism”, “polytheism”, “idol”, “complete”, and so on. If I asked most English speaking Muslims to explain Islam, they would probably string together some combination of these words. In fact, I asked Sheikh Google, and these were the first few definitions I got from Muslim sources:
Islam means to achieve peace – peace with God, peace within oneself, and peace with the creations of God – through wholly submitting oneself to God and accepting His guidance.
Islam is a monotheistic religion that teaches that there is only one divine being, one supreme Creator of the universe. Muslims believe that Islam is the true religion of God revealed to humanity. It is a universal religion that can be practiced by anyone at any time and in every place. The central concept of this way of life is total submission to God.
Here’s why these aren’t good enough.
First, any linguist will tell you that words have denotations (the dictionary definitions) and connotations (everything else the word implies in the language). Together, these comprise a word’s “meaning”. Translation of a word has the job of preserving both the denotation and the connotation of the word. Which is impossible to do exactly — the set of connotations in any word is like a fingerprint, unique to that word in that language. The best a translation can hope for is an approximation.
Let’s give an example for “imaan”, which has two common translations: “belief” and “faith”. “belief” is a close match for the denotation, but the connotations don’t match. Whereas imaan connotates rational conviction, belief has no such connotation. “faith” fails even at the denotative level. Belief might be a better approximation, but both fail to capture the meaning of “imaan” in one English word.
II.
The challenge of a good translation is even harder than that.
You see, words — the only way we have to communicate ideas— are a rare resource. The average English speaker has like 20,000 words in their vocabulary. There are infinitely many possible concepts out there in Concept Land, but our dictionaries are finite, and human vocabularies are tiny. Thus society has to make do with these 20,000 words to communicate every manner of idea between each other. Everything from restaurant orders to deep philosophy has to share the same dictionary.
Now ask yourself a question: if these words are so precious and rare, what kinds of ideas will the language let me talk about? We’ve already established we won’t have a word for every idea, but which ones?
The obvious answer: those ideas that the civilization talks about. If no one talks about an idea, why waste precious words to enable their discussion? Every society has a set of ideas and concepts that get discussed, debated, & put on the table as solutions. Chomsky’s idea of the “Overton window” is related. Since words are those vehicles of meaning, it only makes sense that these vehicles suit the landscape. It’s evolutionary biology; meanings that are relevant to the landscape of ideas survive, meanings that aren’t are selected out. And so naturally, the whole landscape of ideas — the ethos, zeitgeist, milieu, whatever you want to call it — affects the very meanings of words.
So, if the 21st century West has a very different landscape of ideas from 7th century Arabia, we have a problem.
Let’s take one example, which is maybe the most obvious one: the concept-category of “religion”. The landscape of ideas around “religion” in the west has experienced tectonic shifts. To make a long story short: Europe was traumatized by an overreaching autocratic Catholic Church. The schism of Martin Luther in the 1500s was the first major blow to the Church’s role in public affairs, and its deathblow was the French Revolution of 1789 and the subsequent exportation of that revolution to the rest of Europe under Napoleon (the American Liberal Revolution of 1776 was also won by the French). The result as we know it is the worldwide proliferation of the Liberal ideology, which relegated “religion” to the sphere of the individual, divorcing Church and State. As Thomas Jefferson put it:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties."
So is it any wonder that Muslims continue to have a secularized understanding of Islam, when we keep translating “deen” to “religion”? That word the West uses to describe a theistic system of beliefs became particularized for their current landscape of ideas . The other words in this blurb — “God”, “faith”, “worship” — were similarly distorted.
This idea that language itself is inseparably ideological shouldn’t be too surprising. Have you ever tried to speak English without making any allusions to luck? It’s infuriating — fortunately, unfortunately, luckily — all words that go back to pagan European ideas around “luck”, a concept that doesn’t exist in Islam. Common Arabic speech on the other hand is embedded with Islamic concepts. Case in point, the translation of “luck” into Arabic is حظ, which is understood through the Islamic concept of predestination. Interestingly, one of the synonyms of “luckily” you’ll find in a thesaurus is “providentially” — a word that does refer to the same Islamic concept. But no one uses it, and now you know why.
III.
Let’s give the translators a break for a moment. There’s another problem with these definitions that has nothing to do with translation, and it might be the biggest problem of all.
I’ll explain with an old internet meme:
“The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”
It seems that everyone coming out of high school biology remembers this. If you’re not in the loop, just write “the mito” into your search box and watch this sentence become the first autocomplete suggestion.
But why do we find this collective memory so amusing? I think it’s because it demonstrates that, while we all remember the textbook description of mitochondria, none of us know what it actually means. I have some fuzzy notion in my head of what it would mean for the mitochondria to be the “powerhouse” of the cell; it creates power in some way, delivers that power to some location(s) in the cell, and the cell does some stuff with it. But all of this just reveals the questions raised by “powerhouse of the cell”: what is the power? How is it made? How is it transmitted? How is it consumed? I have no clue.
So what have I understood about mitochondria? Absolutely nothing. But “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” makes me feel like I know. Thus the meme becomes a satire of our school experience. The teacher tells us “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell!”. On the multiple choice exam it becomes “Q. 36) The mitochondria is the _____ of the cell”. We select “(d) powerhouse” and get our A-. What did we actually learn?
There’s a name for this: the nominal fallacy. It describes the illusion that we understand something just because we gave it a name.
To explain, consider the following conversation:
Q: Why do objects fall to the ground?
A: Gravity!
Q: What’s Gravity?
A: Gravity is the force that attracts objects to the ground.
The point here is that A hasn’t explained anything. All he’s done is given the phenomenon of objects falling to the ground a name — “Gravity”. Notice what his answer would look if we unpacked his explanation for “Gravity” and dropped the jargon: “Objects fall to the ground because there’s something that makes objects fall to the ground”.
That was kind of an obvious example, but it’s not always so easy to spot. Consider this slightly more cunning response from A.
Q: Why do objects fall to the ground?
A: Gravity!
Q: What’s Gravity?
A: “Gravity, one of the four fundamental forces of nature, is a force of attraction that exists between two masses”.
This is still no more of an explanation than A’s original response. There’s some smoke-and-mirrors with describing Gravity as a “fundamental force”, that there are 3 others, and using the word “mass” instead of “object”. There’s still no substantive answer to Q’s question of why objects fall to the ground. Nevertheless, just the power of giving this phenomenon a name might give Q the illusion that he’s learned something about the answer to his question, when he hasn’t.
I’ve noticed “powerhouse of the cell”-type failures are common in our understanding of Islamic concepts. I teach a basics of Islam course to Muslim university students. If I asked them “what is shirk?”, the answer I invariably get is “to associate partners with Allah”.
Is this an answer? I’ll now ask them to explain, in their own words, what it means to associate partners with Allah — and very few can do so. The answers I get usually revolve around ritual acts of sanctification to other than Allah — associating partners is to prostrate before a man, or to pray to an idol, and so on. Wrong answers, but that’s the curse of the nominative fallacy: it fools you into thinking you know, so you never think to go learn. The answer of “To associate partners with Allah” was good enough to pass Saturday school, but not good enough to understand what Shirk is.
IV.
All of this is not to say that an explanation of Islam in the English language is impossible — far from it. But there are critical considerations that go unheeded, and as a result, the explanations we’ve heard about Islam fail miserably. To summarize:
Word-to-word translations are fundamentally approximate and not exact.
Translations must consider the cultural/ideological context of the languages in order to truly transmit the original meaning — words are not neutral.
Terminology is not an explanation.
With all of these preliminaries figured out, we can finally give an attempt to explain Islam in English without any of the common jargon — an exercise for my next post in shā'a Allāh.