Ala! Netı sía jıao nábụshe Hó eq kê Mıe rú kê Tạqca. Bu dana Hô báq ẹchıoq rú báq ẹnuo. Bomu Hô tú nıe kê suoga rú tú nıe kê gaja. Hí poq, nä eq póq, ꝡé deq nımıtao hóa côm Hó cîa pó bọ́shoe Hô môq? Zao Hó ké fıa hâ rú ké sıe hâ, rú bu deq raqjuoı há tú bọzao Hô nạ́'ao pó bọ́shoe Hô. Reı túıfua Hobo ké suoga rú ké gaja, rú bu ca chıoq Hô báq ẹshue bâq po gú. Rú eq Hó ké Subọsaodoı rú ké Sụdeqcaı.
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Disclaimers
- I am not Muslim. My religion, the Bahá’í Faith, affirms the Qur’an as divinely revealed Scripture, but rejects the sunnah and most hadith as sources of divine guidance. I am not well-educated on Muslim interpretations of the Qur’an as a result, and I'm likely missing cultural context. In addition, the Bahá’í Faith has novel interpretations of previous Scriptures (gestures vaguely at the Kitáb-i-Íqán and Gems of Divine Mysteries in their entirety) that I may be biased by.
- I don't know Arabic. The only reason I'm able to do this is because of Khattab's, Pickthall's, and Yusuf Ali's English translations/interpretations, and Quran Word By Word's gloss (may God/Allah bless them for their hard work). I likely made some dubious word choices due to things being lost in translation or me being unfamiliar with the nuances of Arabic and translation/interpretation in general. I welcome corrections!
Notes
I agonized a bit over how exactly to translate "Allah", or if I should do so at all. The straightforward solution would be to translate it as «Jíao», and I don't see why one would object to that in informal usage...but this is the Qur’an, the most serious of serious business. The proper thing to do, I decided, was to translate "Allah" as a name, and the conundrum was how to do it, but it seems like it was solved for me already.
I decided to adopt Pronoun Structure here. The alternative was a clunky relative clause construction that I really didn't like.
al-Ḥayy literally translates as "the living", but that isn't quite right. As a Name of God/Allah, al-Ḥayy connotes not just life, but infinite vitality. God/Allah does not tire, does not have to fear aging or injury or sickness, and has no limits on what He is capable of. It is one of those things that just does not come across in translation.
I admit to maybe being biased here. al-Qayyum has a few equally valid translations, all of them sharing the common thread of God/Allah being an uncaused cause. I've seen "Eternal", "Self-Subsisting", "All-Sustaining", etc. To me, the fact that God/Allah is independent of everything else and has nothing preceding or sustaining Him is more essential than Him preceding and sustaining everything else. (It may also have to do with the fact that in the Bahá’í short obligatory prayer, al-Qayyum is consistently translated as "Self-Subsisting" into other languages.)
I use object incorporation a lot because of how Arabic inflection works. Thank you, interlinear gloss!
English speakers would say "in the heavens and on the earth", but in the original Arabic it's "in the heavens and in the earth". The word fī (within) is used in both cases.
This one was very troublesome to translate. Less the way the question is formed ("Who is he that...") but more that tricky little bit at the end: "...except by His permission?" I spent a good ten minutes or so trying to figure it out, before deciding that simply using «pó» was the best option. So it ends up being "...lacking His allowance? (lit. of that which He allows)"
This one threw me for a minor loop too. It translates into English as "He fully knows what is ahead of them and what is behind them...", leaving me to try to puzzle out who exactly "them" is. Yusuf Ali adds the clarification "...what (appeareth to His creatures as) before or after...", so it's probably some kind of generic reference?
Same problem as before ("...except what He wills"), so I decided to use the same solution. This verse is well-known for its fractal chiastic structure, being a chiasm in and of itself set within a much larger chiasm (the Sūrah al-Baqarah), so I tried to preserve that parallel phrasing as best I could.
Some tricky serialization here. What I intended was for «bu ca chıoq» to be read as a unit "___ does not cause ___ to be exhausted", with «Hô» being incorporated into «chıoq»'s singular slot and «chıoq Hô» serializing into the second slot of «ca», but I have no idea if that's actually the case; I just think it's probably right based on vibes. Also, enough «báq» can fix any quantification problem.
One of these Names of God/Allah I do know in the original Arabic, from one of the Bahá’í writings. It is rare that an Arabic phrase remains untranslated in the Bahá’í writings, but it does happen. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá once wrote a prayer invoking the name ‘Aliyy and it was a fairly straightforward translation after a quick search to see if I was remembering right.
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