What You're Missing With Quran Translation

Hassan Saeed

Read time: 1.5 minutes

I’ve been blessed to have been born in an Arabic-speaking country, making Arabic my native language. It wasn’t until many years later, after I moved to the West and started reading the English translation of the Quran, that I noticed something: there’s a gap that’s hard to describe from the outside.

A language is not just vocabulary and grammar rules. It's a way of thinking, a point of view, a lifestyle. A translation can give you the meaning but almost never the context. It’s the difference between looking at an image of an orange and actually holding one and tasting it.

So I had planned to write a follow-up to the letter “How I Would Learn Arabic (If I Had to)” answering a more important question: why bother learning Arabic in the first place?

Then I found a video that answered it better than I could, and I want to share it with you.

Here's what stuck with me from it:

When you read the English translation of the meaning of the Quran, you are reading what a human translator understood from the Quran. And that person, however brilliant, had to make choices.

They chose one English word whereas the Arabic word contained five embedded meanings. They smoothed over linguistic miracle because English grammar doesn’t allow it.

Many other elements were lost in the translation.

Here’s the full video:

My hope is that it gives you enough of a reason to take even one step toward understanding the Quran in the language it came in.

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