cAbdullah Yūsuf cAlī & Muhammad Asad: Two Approaches to the English Translation of the Qur'an

2000 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muzaffar Iqbal

This article attempts to present a comparative study of the role of two twentieth-century English translations of the Qur'an: cAbdullah Yūsuf cAlī's The Meaning of the Glorious Qur'ān and Muḥammad Asad's The Message of the Qur'ān. No two men could have been more different in their background, social and political milieu and life experiences than Yūsuf cAlī and Asad. Yūsuf 'Alī was born and raised in British India and had a brilliant but traditional middle-class academic career. Asad traversed a vast cultural and geographical terrain: from a highly-disciplined childhood in Europe to the deserts of Arabia. Both men lived ‘intensely’ and with deep spiritual yearning. At some time in each of their lives they decided to embark upon the translation of the Qur'an. Their efforts have provided us with two incredibly rich monumental works, which both reflect their own unique approaches and the effects of the times and circumstances in which they lived. A comparative study of these two translations can provide rich insights into the exegesis and the phenomenon of human understanding of the divine text.

1986 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 414-441
Author(s):  
Paul Greenough

These observations, which open a widely read essay on primitive religion, might with equal profit be applied to the comparative study of complex societies. They suggest an unusual descriptive project: to catalog the threats to social order in particular cultures in order to make revealing comparisons. They also imply that, armed with such a catalog, unusual meanings might be wrung out of recurrent disasters and common dilemmas. Such a project has not been ventured for South Asia, and I should like to begin with modern Bengal, but the embarassment arises that I am not confident I possess the “active principles” of Bengali culture. It is only by taking up acknowledged instances of “dangers,” “cataclysms,” and “disasters” that I expect to be able to reason back to ordering concepts and thus to complete the catalog. In the course of this short essay, however, only one specific calamity—the death of C. R. Das, a charismatic Indian politician—can be examined in detail. If I succeed in showing that this one calamity has a hitherto unrealized significance in modern Bengal, perhaps the reader will grant that the role of relatedcalamities in Bengal, and even in the whole of modern India, has not been insignificant.


2005 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 198-207
Author(s):  
M. Mark Stolarik

Paul robert magocsi has written a thought-provoking essay on the role of North American political diasporas from east central Europe before and after the seminal years of 1918 and 1989. While he showed that the pre-1918 diasporas had a major impact on the future of east central Europe during and after World War I, he found very little evidence of a similar impact before and after 1989. He suggested that we look closely at 1989 to see what, if any, impact such diasporas had at the end of the twentieth century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 537
Author(s):  
Jianning Zheng

Sun Tzu: The Art of War, which was written by Sun Wu in the end of the Spring and Autumn period, is the oldest and the most famous military treatise in the world, and it has achieved a great popularity outside China. Sun Tzu is a book with universal value and eternal wisdom, which can be applied by people of all the times to human activities of all the fields. This book incorporates many military terms which are important for the understanding of it. All the Chinese commentators in the history have their own understanding of these terms, and the same is true for Sun Tzu’s English translators. The author of this paper aims to compare two English translations of Sun Tzu: the translation by American comparative philosopher Roger T. Ames and the translation by Chinese scholar Lin Wusun. The author selects twelve military terms from Sun Tzu and compares the translations of these two translators and makes an evaluation and comment on their renderings. In the end, he will try to explore the reasons behind the two translators’ translation methods.


2006 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zuhal Özaydin

The development of nursing education in Turkey was influenced by the twentieth-century political changes that encouraged the involvement of women in social life in Turkey. This study examines this development, beginning in the early twentieth century, including the role of relations between nurses in Turkey and the United States in advancing nursing education. The work is based on Ottoman archival sources, publications of the Ottoman-Turkish Red Crescent, and research on the history of nursing education in Turkey. The names of the institutions mentioned in documents and published works are in English, with the original Turkish names in parentheses. The dates in the Ottoman calendar (reckoned from the Hegira, Muslim era) and Roman calendar (adapted from the Gregorian calendar) that were used by Ottoman officials in their correspondence have been converted to the Western Christian calendar. English translations of Turkish references are in parentheses.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 298-318
Author(s):  
Roman Girma Teshome

The effectiveness of human rights adjudicative procedures partly, if not most importantly, hinges upon the adequacy of the remedies they grant and the implementation of those remedies. This assertion also holds water with regard to the international and regional monitoring bodies established to receive individual complaints related to economic, social and cultural rights (hereinafter ‘ESC rights’ or ‘socio-economic rights’). Remedies can serve two major functions: they are meant, first, to rectify the pecuniary and non-pecuniary damage sustained by the particular victim, and second, to resolve systematic problems existing in the state machinery in order to ensure the non-repetition of the act. Hence, the role of remedies is not confined to correcting the past but also shaping the future by providing reforming measures a state has to undertake. The adequacy of remedies awarded by international and regional human rights bodies is also assessed based on these two benchmarks. The present article examines these issues in relation to individual complaint procedures that deal with the violation of ESC rights, with particular reference to the case laws of the three jurisdictions selected for this work, i.e. the United Nations, Inter-American and African Human Rights Systems.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Gordon L. Miller

American zoologists and herpetologists during the past fifty years have successfully deciphered the mating calls of frogs and toads with ever increasing precision and sophistication. However, the vocalizations most commonly termed “rain calls,” which typically occur beyond both normal breeding seasons and breeding sites, have remained a persistent puzzle. This article traces the gradual disappearance of rain calls, along with a corresponding decline in any mention of emotional states, from herpetological studies of anuran vocalizations in the United States from the middle of the twentieth century to the present and examines the historical roots of this disappearance. This evaporation of rain calls is indicative of a much larger change in the scientific climate of the times involving the transition from traditional natural history to the Neo-Darwinian, adaptationist paradigm of contemporary biology. Rain calls thus increasingly became anomalous, thereby eliminating a possibly fruitful line of inquiry in the comparative study of human-animal communication, in this case with evolution's earliest vocalizers. The contours and benefits of a more encompassing paradigm, envisioned by some leading early twentieth-century zoologists, are briefly discussed.


2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1457-1461
Author(s):  
Pantelitsa Yerimou ◽  
◽  
George Panigyrakis

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