Laleh Bakhtiar has published a new translation of the Quran called "The Sublime Quran" that aims to be more progressive and inclusive than previous translations. Her translation of a key verse that has been used to justify domestic violence changes the meaning from "beat" to "go away". While some Islamic scholars have criticized her translation, the president of the Islamic Society of North America has acknowledged Bakhtiar's authority as an Islamic scholar and the legitimacy of her translation. The article interviews Bakhtiar about her translation process, which involved meticulously translating each word in the Quran for internal consistency, and her goal of creating a more inclusive understanding of Islam.

1. 46 ascent magazine 37 spring 2008
the sublime
translation
laleh bakhtiar reaches back to the original
intentions of language & creates a
new inclusivity for the qur’an.
essay & interview by sikeena karmali.
photo by sally ryan
T
he Holy Qur’an appears in my life on a regular basis. I hear
it sung in the most beautiful of serpentine melodies during
ceremonies to mark deaths, births and weddings. When lis-
tening to poetry and music, I recognize quotes from it. Even in
my travels, it is ever present. On the minaret of a Friday mosque
in Kasgar China, I find the Arabic alphabet rendered most aston-
ishingly to resemble Mandarin calligraphy. At the Blue Mosque in
Istanbul, I find verses of the Qur’an etched on the dome in a splen-
dour of blue tiles. In my daily prayers, I recite Arabic verses from it,
the English meanings of which I memorized as a child. After long
years of studying Arabic and simultaneously navigating geographic

2. 47ascent magazine 37 spring 2008

3. 48 ascent magazine 37 spring 2008
and social spheres where it was the
principal language of communication, I
have made linguistic and grammatical
sense of what I have been reciting sev-
eral times a day for over thirty years.
The interpretation and practice of
the Tariqa or path of Islam to which I
belong is by all accounts extremely pro-
gressive. I was appointed, for the dur-
ationofoneyear,toleadaspecialMajalis,
or religious and educational gathering
especially for women (to which men
are not permitted entry), which has its
roots in the Fatimid traditions of the
tenth century. It is noteworthy that in
our contemporary practice, there is no
Majalis exclusively for men to which
women are not permitted entry.
Very recently, I began reciting “signs”
(verses from chapters of the Qur’an) on
important religious occasions such as
the Eid al-Adha, which marks the sacri-
fice of the Prophet Abraham of his Ish-
mael. Even in our tradition, it is quite
a new thing to have a young woman
stand before a congregation of the faith-
ful and belt out the sacred melodic
poetry of the Qur’an. The spiritual and
symbolic magnitude of these moments
is unmistakeable.
The other young women in my
community and I, who have not sub-
scribed to the traditional gender roles
of Muslim women that focus mainly on
creating and nurturing family, are not
just challenging the stereotype—we
are breaking it. And we are doing so
among Muslim communities as well as
in the face of the West, which insists on
painting us as either legless victims or
disenfranchised angry women. Many
of us imagine ourselves as clearing the
path for a sisterhood to come, so that
the generation of Muslim women after
us shall have the privilege of leading
lives and making choices, both religious
and secular, without the burden of pro-
viding a complicated explanation every
time they speak out or stay silent.
Understandably then, when I heard
that an Iranian-American woman had
written a progressive, inclusive and lin-
guistically consistent translation of the
Qur’an, I was rather excited. There has
been a susurrus of disapproval buzzing
around Laleh Bakhtiar’s recent Eng-
lish translation, The Sublime Qur’an.
The Islamic Society of North Amer-
ica’s (ISNA) Canadian secretary gen-
eral, Muneer Fareed, made a statement
that he would consider banning her
translation. However, he was quickly
overstepped by Ingrid Mattson, ISNA’s
American president, who apologized for
his statements and publicly acknow-
ledged Dr. Bakhtiar’s authority as an
Islamic scholar as well as the legitimacy
of her translation of the Qur’an.
It is curious that people are con-
testing the authority of Dr. Bakhtiar, a
scholar, writer, translator, editor and
publisher of awe-inspiring accomplish-
ment, to translate the Qur’an. Not only
is she a uniquely renowned and cele-
brated scholar of Sufism, but she has
founded a whole new school of psychol-
ogymergingGurdjieff’sEnneagramwith
its roots in thirteenth-century central
Asian Sufi Tariqas to develop a method-
ology for modern healing. In addition,
she is the author of over fourteen books
ranging in topic from Sufism, to the
Prophet Muhammad (may peace and
blessings be upon him), to the esteemed
fourteenth-century scholar Al-Ghazzali.
She has also translated over twenty-five
books, including Fatima is Fatima and
Iqbal: Manifestation of the Islamic Spirit,
as well as adapting the Encyclopaedia of
Islamic Law.
The language of the Qur’an is not
didactic but poetic, and therefore open
to many different kinds and even levels
of translation, from literal to symbolic to
esoteric. This diversity of interpretation
creates a diversity of belief that neces-
sitates tolerance and openness. How-
ever, as is the case with most religious
traditions, orthodox interpretations of
the faith often challenge or even reject
more progressive and liberal readings of
the same text.
In the case of The Sublime Qur’an,
The language of the Qur’an is not
didactic but poetic, and therefore
open to many different kinds and
even levels of translation, from
literal to symbolic to esoteric.

4. 49ascent magazine 37 spring 2008
the controversy largely concerns chap-
ter 4 (Surah), verse (Ayah or Sign) 34
of the Holy Qur’an. Dr. Bakhtiar reverts
the translation of the Arabic word dhar-
haba, translated for centuries by Muslim
clerics as “to beat,” back to its original
meaning of “to go away.” This is nothing
short of revolutionary for empowering
Muslim women in traditional societies,
where a system of patriarchy cites the
absolute authority of the Qur’an as the
legitimizing factor for domestic abuse.
Any educated man or woman who has
studied the Qur’an and understood
that it elevated, in the seventh century,
womankind as equal to, if not higher
than, mankind knows that the problem
is not with the Qur’an itself. Rather, the
problem lies with interpretation by a
specific group, with its own values, to
serve a particular agenda.
Dr. Bakhtiar’s desire to be inclu-
sive and to tolerate multiple points of
view and diverse paths has perhaps
been born out of her experience as the
daughter of an American mother and
Iranian father who was “not religious,
but spiritual, devoting his life as a phys-
ician to help to heal the suffering of
people.” Dr. Bakhtiar was raised a Cath-
olic and did not convert to Islam until
the age of twenty-four when she moved
to Iran and studied Islam under Seyyed
Hossein Nasr.
She speaks at length about the
“inclusiveness” of her translation and
by implication of her vision or under-
standing of Islam, which eschews the
narrow orthodoxy that is so often asso-
ciated with Islam by those who judge
it only from the symptoms of the acute
socio-political upheavals taking place
in many Muslim countries.
interview
Sikeena Karmali Let’s begin by talk-
ing a little about the translation pro-
cess. It can become quite complex, not
just from the point of view of deriving and
disseminating meaning across language
from the actual text itself but also, in
the case of sacred religious or canonical
texts, questions of authority and legitim-
acy. Let’s take the example of Mowlana
Jalal Uddin Rumi or simply Rumi, as he is
called in the West. Many of his fans do not
even know that he was a devout Muslim,
a Mowlana and the founder of an entire
tradition of Sufi mysticism. Although the
more popular translations eschew these
passages, his writing refers frequently to
the Qur’an and even quotes from it.
Laleh Bakhtiar People often forget
that Rumi actually wrote in Persian.
American scholars and poets who have
translated his work have done a great
service in introducing his ideas to the
public; so much so that, for a long time,
he was the best-selling poet in America.
But the major translator of Rumi does
not speak a word of Persian. He worked
with a Persian who is very well versed
in Rumi—this is what people say—and
then because he was a poet he was able
to put it into poetic language. Rumi’s
poems are recreations, another kind of
translation that is perfectly acceptable.
So, whereas Rumi became extremely
popular, the original idea of what he
was saying has not necessarily come
across. As you have said, for instance,
how often he refers to Qur’anic verses
or to the life of the Prophet (peace be
upon Him) because this puts a religious
tinge on it. And in fact, Rumi did not
“write” the poetry. He whirled as he was
reciting it and his disciples wrote it
down. This was an amazing opening of
the spiritual world, of intuition.
SK Can you tell us about your own
translation process?
LB I’ve translated twenty-five books,
so I have a great deal of experience
with translation. I used to begin at the
beginning of a book and go to the end.
Thinking back on that, I realized that
the translations I had done probably
lacked internal consistency. The same
word was not always translated the
same way, when the context allowed,
because when I got to the middle of the
work, I’d forget about what word I used
at the beginning and put a synonym.
For one Arabic word, the reader finds
maybe five, six, seven English syno-
nyms, so they’re thinking that this is a
new word rather than understanding
that this is the same word that was pre-
viously used. If you’re doing a normal
translation, then nobody is really both-
ered by that. But when you want to
translate a sacred text like the Qur’an
into English, so that people can learn

5. 50 ascent magazine 37 spring 2008
the Arabic from the English, then you
need to be consistent.
SK Well, language is given great prom-
inence in the Qur’an, so much so that
Muslim culture extols the pen as being
mightier than the sword. How did you
get around this labyrinth of words and
meanings?
LB I determined that I would begin
with the words first. There is a very
well-known Arabic lexicon, al-muj’in al
mufahris. It lists all the nouns and verbs
and some particles in the Qur’an, and
then it includes a part of each verse. I
began with that seven years ago. And at
that time my computer did not have an
Arabic program. I had to first transliter-
ate the word into English characters to
begin making a database of the words.
That took quite a long time.
Two years into it, I was talking to
a friend and I thought I had come up
with a new method of translation. I
was a little concerned because I wasn’t
sure if it would work, but I thought it
was like a social science experiment.
My friend told me that was how they
translated the King James version of
the Bible. The method is called “formal
equivalent” and it is the most objective
kind of translation because you use the
same word every time [it occurs], if the
context allows. This gives a consistency
to the translation, which is often lack-
ing when translators start at the begin-
ning and go to the end.
So this is the method that I used
and through this I was able to maintain
internal consistency; but at the same
time I also used language that was all-
inclusive. Arabic is so rich that there
are many different words you can use
for [the translation of] a word. I always
chose the word that would be most
inclusive of people of all faiths.
SK In your book, Sufi: Expressions of
the Mystic Quest, you say that, “The
Virgin Mary and the miracle of the virgin
birth of Christ, the Word of God, as con-
tained in the Qur’an, are important Sufi
symbols of aspects of the Truth: for the
birth of the Word to the Virgin Mary
is as the birth of the Word to the unlet-
tered Prophet. The miracle of Islam is the
Qur’an as the miracle of Christianity is
the Christ.”¹ Just as the symbol and icon
of the Virgin Madonna has shaped not
only the religious but also the social and
cultural imagination of Christendom, so
language has shaped the religious and cul-
tural consciousness of the Muslim world.
LB Yes, the greatest miracle of Islam
that was given to the Prophet Muham-
mad (may peace and blessings be upon
him) is the Qur’an. And the Qur’an
itself means recitation. The Qur’an was
the basis for the development of Islamic
literature, arts and architecture, where
so much of the calligraphy appears on
the mounts. Everybody throughout
Islamic civilization has been inspired
one way or another by the Qur’an.
As the word Qur’an itself means to
be recited, it was an oral tradition. The
1 Laleh Bakhtiar, Sufi: Expressions of the Mystic Quest (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 7.

6. 51ascent magazine 37 spring 2008
Qur’an was the first book-length book
in the Arabic language. There is a strong
oral tradition in the Islamic world, and
the literate people of the past would be
able to recite Rumi, Hafiz, Saadi, or any
of the other great poets of the Persian
language. So it is one of those wonder-
ful things that happens in the Islamic
world today, where you can recite a
line of poetry in response to some-
body…and maybe you’re a general in
the army and he is a taxi driver, yet he
can recite back to you the next line.
SK Given this strong oral tradition, did
you find it a challenge to translate the
“poetry” of the Qur’an?
LB The Arabic of the Qur’an is the
spiritual message. No matter how you
try to find the poetry and the rhythm
in it, you can never succeed. A transla-
tion is just that: a translation. It is never
comparable to the original. A person
receives spiritual blessings from reading
it in Arabic, listening to the recitation of
it in Arabic, or reciting it in the Arabic
language. So we’re at a second tier when
you talk about interpretations or trans-
lations or anything of that sort. What
happens with translations is that those
people—extremists for instance—who
rely on a traditional interpretation can
go to these and find whatever they are
looking for.
SK Muslims are told to use aql, the fac-
ulty of their intellect, to understand the
miracle of the Word of God. Do you feel
that you have given contemporary Mus-
lims, both men and women, both in the
East and the West, the gift of your Sub-
lime Qur’an to interpret for ourselves?
LB I just wanted the English-speaking
audience to be able to know exactly
what the words say without any inter-
pretation. There isn’t a translation in
the English language where a person
can read exactly what the words are at
the basic level, not the esoteric level of
mysticism and not the more orthodox
literal level. I object to many of the
versions of the Qur’an over the centur-
ies where the translator gives his own
interpretation. The Qur’an is eternal
and universal for all humankind at all
times.
Sikeena Karmali was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and
educated in Canada, the US, Italy and Egypt. From
1994 to 2004 she worked in the fields of inter-
national development and human rights. She now
lives in Vancouver, and is writing her second novel,
The Mulberry Courtesan.
calligraphy by sikeena karmali