Breaking the Language Barrier

Leaving aside my slightly snobbish view that using “Allah” is jarring in English, what is happening? The justification for this translation is the claim that “Allah” is the proper name of God, whereas god can also be used to refer to a great many imaginary entities that are not God. This is, in fact, a defensible position. The testimony of faith, lā ilāha illā allāh, “There is no god but Allah,” plays on this, though one might argue that the wordplay is better rendered by using the English convention of capitalizing references to the deity: “There is no god but God.” In any case, the Arabic grammar clearly indicates that Allah is an ilāh, a god, though the only one that there is. Obviously, on one level, for Muslims to insist on saying “Allah” rather than “God” in English can be counterproductive, as my correspondence with my local paper indicates, encouraging the very many speakers of European languages who are already prone to be suspicious of Muslims to think that Allah is, for example, a moon god (10,200,000 hits on Google).

However, I have a different concern: What happens when Islam comes to a language community that does not or cannot adopt Arabic religious terminology? The nations of the central Islamic world adopted the Arabic language if they had previously used a Semitic or Hamitic language (a language closely or distantly related linguistically to Arabic), as happened in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and North Africa—and with it, the Arabic script and Arabic religious terminology. The groups speaking non-Semitic languages usually adopted the Arabic script, and with it, religious loan words from Arabic, which they pronounced as though they were Turkic, Persian, or whatever, much to the bemusement of actual speakers of Arabic. Here I would like to look at two cases where even this could not happen: American English and Chinese.

In the case of American English, there is, of course, no obstacle to importing Arabic religious terminology into English. Allah is well known, and terms like śalāh, ĥajj, and Ramađān find their way into English dictionaries. English-speak- ing Muslims use such terms all the time. English is a remarkably slutty language, and objections by purists notwithstanding, words from innumerable languages have found their way into common English usage. The difficulty, though, is demographic: Muslims comprise a little over 1 percent of the American population, so while a few words may become generally familiar (jihād and sharī‘ah, to take two notorious examples), the bulk of Arabic words commonly used by Muslims—wuđū’, ¢umrah, fiqh, and the like—will be incomprehensible to ordinary American speakers of English. They certainly are not going to supplant terms such as ablutions, Islamic law, and pilgrimage in American English, at least not in the lifetime of anyone now alive.

For those trying to present Islam—whether scholars writing about it for a nonspecialist audience or Muslims simply trying to present their faith—this poses problems. For the scholar, the problem is precision and accuracy of translation. If he writes Sharī‘ah and fiqh, his readers will likely misunderstand the first and simply not know the second. He can explain the terms, but then he must hope that his readers will both understand his explanations and remember them when he next uses the terms. On the other hand, if he writes Islamic law, he could mean either Sharī‘ah or fiqh, and in ether case, the Western understanding of law doesn’t closely correspond to either. It’s not a problem for which there is an easy solution or any solution at all. For Muslims attempting to explain their faith to non-Muslims, the problem is—or at least I strongly think should be—not to make Islam seem more alien than it already appears. And that brings me back to my initial point: insisting on the use of words like Allah in Islamic public discourse simply plays into the hands of those wishing to prove that Islam is an alien and dangerous force in the West.

China and Chinese are quite another problem. Chinese Muslims claim that the first Muslims in China were companions of the Prophet during the lifetime of the Prophet himself. This seems improbable, but it is certainly the case that there have been well-established Islamic communities in China for well over a thousand years.

Though all the details of their history will likely never be known due to the fragmentary nature of the sources, the general picture is clear enough. In the northwest live the Uyghurs and some smaller groups. The Uyghurs are a Central Asian Turkic people who write their own language in a script derived from Arabic. They did not so much go to China, as China came to them, since their lands happened to be under the at least nominal control of the Chinese state when modern national borders took shape. The other major group of Chinese Muslims is the Hui, ethnic Han Chinese who practice Islam and not uncommonly claim to be descendants of Muslim traders or soldiers who settled in eastern China. These are almost all native speakers of Chinese.

For many centuries, Muslims in China seeking religious knowledge seem to have traveled to the northwest to study Arabic and Persian. They wrote little or nothing about their religion in Chinese and left few distinctive traces of their thoughts. This began to change in the latter part of the Ming Dynasty, with the rise of a distinctive Muslim educational network in eastern China whose teachers, often well educated in the Confucian classics, wrote and taught in Chinese. The traditional founder of this network was one Hu Dengzhou (ca. 1522–1597), known in Chinese Islamic tradition as “Great Teacher Hu.” Abandoning the study of the Chinese classics, Hu went to Central Asia, and then Mecca, to study Islam. On returning to China, he established a school in his hometown following methods resembling those of the madrasas of the central Islamic lands. With connections to the northwest weakened by war, Hu’s disciples began spreading his methods.

The key part of our story begins a half century later with Wang Daiyu (b. ca. 1570), a member of a family of Muslim astronomers in Nanjing, the Ming capital in east central China. Though he apparently came late to the study of the Chinese classics, he chose to write in Chinese, using a Chinese idiom for Islamic terminology. Though he wrote a number of books, Wang’s best-known work is the Zhenyi, “The True and One,” a two-volume guide to Islamic doctrine and practice. A series of scholarly works in Chinese and Chinese translations from Arabic and Persian by other Chinese Muslim scholars followed, until the tradition tapered off in the mid-eighteenth century. This literature constituted the famous Han Kitab, which is now beginning to regain its prestige among Chinese Muslims.