Friday Post 15

By Shofi Ahmed

The digital age. This is the time we are living in. It’s scientific yet artistic and more so simple. What it means is to enjoy its features we don’t need to know rocket science. For example you can browse the world on your mobile phone just knowing how to click. You don’t need to be a technical nerd for that although the innerworks that go behind these wonderful features of a smartphone are acute works of technical brilliance. But users need no technical knowledge to use it adequately.

To put it to perspective we could say that our technology is reaching out to its finer polished phases. In other words, it is getting simpler to contain technical and non techie users alike. It’s a remarkable progress. The wide spreading wings of our spanking digital flies curry us all on the fly regardless of our technical knowledge. It’s that smart and widespread. But that too only finds itself as a dwarf down the never touched moon. If it tends to touch the meaningful bottom of a divine verse an ayath a verse of the Qur’an. To be straight the computer falls short understanding the full meaning of a verse of the Qur’an. Thus it cannot spin or rewrite a divine verse.

The first step to spin a sentence the computer needs to grasp its exact meaning. So that it can put its evaluation into a variety of words that will not deviate from its original meaning. That pinpointing of exact meaning is not achievable in a verse of the Qur’an. A reason being the Quranic verses contain an infinite amount of connotations. Every verse contains swaths of deeper, symbolic meaning that defy translation. Even the most masterful translators can never do justice to the beauty of the language of the holy Qur’an, as its true understanding lies in the realm of divinity and truth. An application of it may be that therefore those who don’t read Arabic or understand the context of the verses can still feel its emotion and power, for its words are a doorway to a higher understanding. A translated version somewhere will fall short to do that.

A verse of the Qur’an is not a sentence nor a phrase but Ayath translated as a sign. Indeed it’s immeasurable. Its content is far beyond what a mundane sentence or phrase can contain. The cheer magnitude of its expression containing within goes beyond the scope of a human defined sentence.

Therefore defining a verse of the Qur’an as a sentence practically doesn’t hold the full picture. It can only be called Ayath, a sign. More to understand, more to explore translation is never enough. So in the prayer if we read ‘Alhamdulillahi Rabbil Alamin’ in the best ever translation in Bengali, Persia, Urdu or English or even in a different Arabic dialect the prayer won’t be valid. Simply because we missed reciting the Qur’an in the prayer which is mandatory. Though we recited the translation of it in another language but no. It may be the finest version of the translation, still it cannot convey the full meaning of ‘Alhamdulillahi Rabbil Alamin’. Therefore the translation is unable to validate our prayer.

Allah SWT knows best. In Shaa Allah continues.