A Reflection on the Qur'an, Heritage and Education Essay

A Reflection on the Qur'an, Heritage and Education - Essay Example This essay reflects on his ideas on the subjects of the Qur’an, laws, and education. It agrees with the foundations that the Qur’an laid for a comprehensive viewpoint on lawmaking and legal interpretation, as well as on a modern educational system that balances religious and rational sciences. The Qur’an is the foundation of Islam, which supports it as a way of life. The Qur’an is different from other religious texts, because it focuses on the moral development of humanity in a tangible and communal way (Rahman 2). It is different from Buddhist and Taoist texts that tend to be metaphysical or individualist in orientation. The Holy Bible of Christianity also attempts to morally guide Christians as individuals and as a community, but it does not attempt to affect the legal and political dimensions of human living. The Qur’an, on the other hand, is a blueprint not only for individual living, but how individuals should live together. It is a practical a nd moral guide for numerous issues, including peace, war, and various other public and private affairs (Rahman 2). This paper believes then that the basis of saying that Islam is a way of living is because the Qur’an provides for the direction of that way of living. In Christian societies, the Church and the law are separate, and so are the Church and legislative and executive functions of society. Muslim jurists, on the contrary, use the Qur’an to find answers to both historical and present-day legal questions and cases (Rahman 2). The idea is that God lives through the words of the Qur’an and to follow it completely entails that Muslims should believe in and depend on the Qur’an completely. This way, they truly fully surrender to Allah through living the Qur’an in every aspect of their existence. This essay agrees with Rahman that one of the main problems with present Islamic jurisprudence is the failure of jurists to have a unified reading of th e Qur’an, which leads to an atomistic and insufficient understanding of the verses and the entire Qur’an itself. Rahman criticizes the deductive reasoning used on the Qur’an, such as using qiyas, or analogical reasoning, because it reduces it to its parts, instead of using the parts to appreciate it as a whole (Rahman 2). Like Rahman, this essay believes that to properly read the Qur’an, people must go beyond literally reading the verses, and instead, they must read it in relation to the whole of the text too. In other words, the process starts from the specific and then goes to the general goals and values of the text. Rahman is concerned that by diving the text into verses, they will have unintended legal and religious interpretations (Rahman 2-3). In order to properly read the Qur’an, this paper believes too that the thought systems must come from it, and not from external sources, like what the Sufis did (Rahman 3). This way, fundamental ideas and thought structures will be derived from the Qur’an itself and not from the outside, which are forced on the Qur’an instead (Rahman 3). Rahman calls his process as a new hermeneutical method that highlights the cognitive aspect of the Qur’an (4). It consists of studying the Qur’an using its text, instead of relying on external resources to make sense of it. For me, it means that interpreting the Qur’an does not require outside sources, but an analysis of what the text means in its parts and then as a whole. The idea is to go inside the

Professional Translation Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Professional Translation - Essay Example This framed Nida's dynamic equivalence which is understanding not only the meaning of the source text but also the manner in which the intended receptors of a text are likely to understand it in the receptor language (Tianmin). In other words, Nida is more concerned in how the receptors would understand or digest the intended message of the original text. Nida has been into biblical translations. One theory of equivalence is that of Vinay and Darbelnet who view equivalence-oriented translation as a procedure which 'replicates the same situation as in the original, whilst using completely different wording' (Kenny: 342). They regard the method as ideal in dealing with proverbs, idioms, clichs, nominal or adjectival phrases and the onomatopoeia of animal sounds. Another theory of equivalence is that of Jakobson, known as the concept of equivalence in difference. Roman Jakobson's study of equivalence gave new impetus to the theoretical analysis of translation since he introduced the notion of 'equivalence in difference' (Jakobson, 1959:232). ... There is no full equivalence between code units. According to his theory, 'translation involves two equivalent messages in two different codes' (Jakobson, p. 233). From a grammatical point of view, languages may differ from one another to a greater or lesser degree, but this does not mean that a translation cannot be possible, meaning that the translator may face the problem of not finding a translation equivalent. Similarities of Vinay and Darbelnet's theory and Jakobson's theory can be found in the fact that both can rely on other procedures such as loan-translations or neologisms whenever linguistic approach is no longer suitable in the translation process. Nida and Taber's formal correspondence and dynamic equivalence is another theory of equivalence. Formal correspondence 'focuses attention on the message itself, in both form and content' (Nida and Taber, 1982), unlike dynamic equivalence which is based upon 'the principle of equivalent effect' (1964: 159). Formal correspondence consists of correspondence TL item which represents the closest equivalent of a SL word or phrase. There are not always formal equivalents between language pairs. These formal equivalents should be used wherever possible if the translation aims at achieving formal rather than dynamic equivalence. Nida and Taber assert that formal correspondence distorts the grammatical and stylistic patterns of the receptor language, and hence distorts the message, so as to cause the receptor to misunderstand or to labor unduly hard' (1964:201). Dynamic equivalence is defined as a translation principle according to which a translator seeks to translate the meaning of the origi nal in such a way that the TL wording will trigger the same