Join us in CHAT as we welcome Travis Zadeh (Religious Studies, Yale University) as he discusses his work, "Why Read the Quaran in Translation(?)" Zadeh's lecture is part of CHAT's ongoing Translation Lecture Series.

This lecture examines debates in the course of Islamic intellectual history over translating the Quran and their relation to broader theoretical problems for the fields of translation studies, the history of ideas, and the philosophy of language. Historically, there has been a strong current of thought in Islamic religious discourse that has rejected the possibility of translating the Quran on theological grounds, based largely on the notion that the text exhibits such supreme and inimitable eloquence that translation is itself impossible. Yet, since the earliest periods of Islamic history there have also developed complex traditions of explaining the Quran in translation. In this basic paradox abides a general misunderstanding of what exactly it means to translate the Quran. By probing the broader social, historical, and ideological frameworks governing these debates, this talk questions how it is that the Qur'an is translatable.