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Shawkat M. Toorawa, "The Devotional Qur'an: Beloved Surahs and Verses" (Yale UP, 2025)
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Professor Shouka Tarawa
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Samuel Throup
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Professor Shouka Tarawa
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Professor Shouka Tarawa
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Professor Shouka Tarawa
Company affiliates, excludes Massachusetts.
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Podcast Host
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Samuel Throup
Hello and welcome to another episode of New Books in Islamic Studies, a channel of the New Books Network. I'm your host, Samuel Throup. I'm really honored to welcome Professor Shouka Tarawa to discuss his new translation the Devotional Beloved Surahs and Verses, published just last year by Yale University Press and also soon out in paperback. This is a book that is one at the same time, a work of poetry, a work of scholarship and an exemplar of a really great translation. So, Shalka, it's a pleasure, thank you for taking the time to be with us.
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Professor Shouka Tarawa
Pleasure's all mine.
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Samuel Throup
So before we start talking, I wanted to give a little more formal introduction, if that's okay. So, Shaukat Nturawa is the Brand Blanchard professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. His godly interests include classical and medieval Arabic literature, especially the literary and writerly culture of Abbasid Baghdad, the Quran, Indian Ocean studies, modern poetry translation and Esif film and literature. He has written widely on a number of topics including classical and contemporary Arabic literature, studies of the 9th century Baghdad, Bookman ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur, critical edition and translation of poems by Adonis, an edited collection of essays on the islands and islanders in the Western Indian Ocean, an anthology of poetry about New York City and a quote, critical edition and collaborative translation with the Editors of the Library of Arabic literature of a 12th century work by the historian Ibn Al Sayed. He's a director of the School of Abbasid Studies and is on the editorial or advisory board of a number of journals, including the Journal of Abbasid Studies and the Journal of Arabic Literature, and is also an executive editor of the Library of Arabic Literature. Does that all sound right? More or less.
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Professor Shouka Tarawa
It sounds right. It's how I spend my time. Yeah. When I'm not with my family or watching tv.
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Samuel Throup
So I want to start out with a question about you, about your own intellectual journey. So tell us a little bit about how you got to do all the amazing stuff that I just read in your bio.
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Professor Shouka Tarawa
I was in primary school in Paris and briefly in Hong Kong and then I was in Singapore and then secondary school in Singapore. I did the International Baccalaureate, which is a very wide ranging high school degree, a diploma, and we were expatriates in all those places. My family's from the island of Mauritius, made my parents multilingual. I myself grew up speaking English and French, studied Spanish in school, and when the time came to decide what to do after school, I thought I might study a language I didn't know which would then give me access to a literature in the original, because I already was someone who read very widely. I was already pretty well read in English literature and French literature and increasingly in Spanish. And I thought, well, what would it be like to read Japanese literature in Japanese or German literature in German and such things. And the three languages that I decided might be interesting to do for me, One was Arabic because I was raised Muslim and I had been taught how to read the Quran, to read vocalized Arabic without understanding it. Another was Gujarati, which is the. Our heritage. My parents are both from the island of Mauritius, but they're descendants of Gujarati merchants. And, well, actually on descendants they. Yeah, I mean, they were Gujarati merchants themselves, in fact. And.
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Because I was going to the United States, I thought it might be sensible to study an American language. And since I already knew English and I already knew Spanish and already knew French, I thought maybe a native American language. And on the basis of those three, I picked Hopi, and on the basis of those three languages I picked the University of Pennsylvania where all three were offered. But when I arrived, the professor of Arabic was more insistent that I do Arabic than was the professor of Gujarati, who was actually a kind of a legend, famous professor of Sanskrit called George Cardona. And the Hopi professor was on leave. So I was taking Gujarati in Arabic. And in the end Roger Allen said to me, you know, stop wasting your time learning your heritage language. Arabic needs more scholars do Arabic. And so that's how I started doing Arabic. And one of the things I didn't know when I went to university, which is why I picked the United States over England, which is where most of my friends in school picked, was I didn't know I was going to study. I didn't know what I wanted to be, what I wanted to do. I was very fortunate. My parents had applied no pressure on me about that. They said, go sort. Go sort it out. And it became increasingly clear to me that Roger Allen's life was an attractive one. He was this man who rode to work every day on his bicycle and then taught classes on Nagi Mahfouz, or taught classes on taught Arabic literature. He was actually not my Arabic teacher that year. He was director of the Arabic program. And I went up to him one day early in my freshman year, and I said, like, early in my first semester, and I said, how does someone become like you? And he said, what do you mean? I said, like, how do you end up being like you? And he said, well, you do a degree in Arabic, then you do a PhD in Arabic, and then you get a job at a university. And I said, great, that sounds like a plan. And so that's what I decided to do. And he said, it seems a little early. And I said, no, I mean, it's the current plan. I don't know if it'll come true, but at least I have something to work toward. And that's what I did. Yeah. And it was not. It was not. It was enjoyable the whole time, but it was not without its detours and challenges over the years. But I stuck with it. And over the course of that training and then eventually joining the professoriate, although I was briefly an Indian Ocean merchant working for the family company, in between that, I began to work on the things that I worked on. And I had the great, great good fortune and privilege of being trained by some of the greats. Roger Allen in Modern Arabic literature. George Maktisi in. In Medieval Arabic and Classical Arabic. Edward Peters in Medieval European history. And so this helped me embark on this path of studying things literary. But I never abandoned my interests. So I had always been interested in science fiction, and that was not something I abandoned. And I didn't see a need, for example, to study Arabic science fiction. So I continue to be interested in Anglophone science fiction, for example, and just that that accounts for things like the Anthology of New York Poetry, which is not within Arabic studies. But I also increasingly describe myself as a professor of literature or someone, or a scholar, a student of literature, not of Arabic literature, although that's clearly my training. So that's one way of thinking about my journey.
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Samuel Throup
Yeah, it's much more fruitful to be conversant and sort of across the disciplines and to be working on things that cross these, you know, these boundaries because that all that other information and all those other experiences and intellectual stimulation comes back in the end to whatever one's core interest is. Right. It comes back to Arabic.
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Professor Shouka Tarawa
I, I wonder about that silence because I think I could just as the. I mean, if George Cardona had put more pressure on me than Roger Allen, I might have become a scholar of Gujarati literature.
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Samuel Throup
Right.
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Professor Shouka Tarawa
I think the core interest is literature, not Arabic. That's how I think about it. And I suppose one could also say it's not even only literature, it's storytelling and narrative and how things are recounted. That is what. And that in fact ties my interest in science fiction to my interest in modern poetry, to my interest in Indian Ocean studies, to Arabic, modern Arabic or classical Arabic literature, or to the Quran. So even my work on the Quran, besides this book of translation, is. I'm editing a collection now called. Well, the title's still in discussion, but it's the Literary Study of the Quran, the Quran's literary dimensions. And that's what interests me, is how these words are deployed and put together to create the poem, the narrative, the novel, the chronicle.
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Samuel Throup
Yeah, so, so, so how did this book come to be this particular, this devotional Quran?
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Professor Shouka Tarawa
So in late, the late 90s, so I was not someone who ever worked on the Quran. It's a text with which I had to interact. You can't study Arabic literature without knowing the Quran, just as you can't really study English literature, especially pre modern, without knowing the King James Bible. It's just an integral part of the history of the language and of the literature. So I used to encounter the Quran in that regard, but I didn't work on it per se. As I began to look at it more for a couple of articles I was writing and for other things, I began to be more and more annoyed by the, what I thought were poor translations. Now I had grown up on poor translations. Not being Arabophone myself, we had translations of the Quran in my home because I was raised Muslim. And it didn't strike me then how bad I thought those were, you know, now I was encountering them at a point where I knew some Arabic or knew a lot of Arabic. And it didn't make sense to me that people were translated. People who are clearly wula, meaning people who were dedicating their lives to it, were not, I thought, paying enough attention to certain aspects of it. The principal one that annoyed me was sound. Sound and rhyme. 84, 85% of the Quran is in rhyme. All of it is sonorous, right? One of the things that's hard to explain to people who read it in English or in a translation is how it's so beautiful to the Arabic ear, right? One need not be Muslim to react positively to the sounds of the Quran. So I set about translating small bits of it, short surahs, very short suras, three, four lines, five, six lines. And then I published these in the journal Quranic Studies. And they were noticed by other Quran scholars. And I was urged and encouraged to keep working on those translations and also to start working on the Quran as a area of study, which of course was not hard for me to do, as someone interested in the literary. And the Quran is, has not been subject to enough literary analysis, in my view, or analysis from literary perspectives. So I started doing that. I continued to translate. And then as more and more translations appeared, almost all of them in the Journal of Quranic Studies, colleagues and friends said to me, you know, when are you going to do the whole Quran? And I said, I, I, you know, I've already made the decision never to do the whole Quran. And they said, well, then why don't you bring them together in a book? Wouldn't it be, Wouldn't it be helpful if they came together a book? And my response was, yes, but I can't just bring together a book of translations consisting of the surahs that I cherry picked. What would be the. It's not a defensible way to go forward. And in the end, maybe in 2020 or maybe a little before.
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There was a little before that, the idea occurred to me that I might be able to do something in which the surahs and verses I had, I was only thinking surahs at the time. The surahs that I include, right? So the surah is the, is the chapter unit in the Quran would be ones that Muslims used regularly, whether it was in prayer or they intoned, or they, they read for pious purposes. And then when I went back and looked at what I had done already, it became clear to me that I had been picking those surahs, in fact. And so I thought, well, this might be doable. And so I pulled together this book. And then I realized that it needed to have an organizing principle. There was no point in just organizing it sequentially the way the Quran is organized and thought, well, what if I try to divide it according to, in fact, the uses to which Muslims put them, which is how the book is divided? And I gave certain surahs their own section. They were the only surah in that section because they're so fundamentally important to Muslim practice, such as the Fatiha, which is the opening surah of the Quran. And it's read in every. Every ritual prayer. It's read at gatherings, it's read at birthdays, it's read everywhere imaginable. And the book began to take shape. And then I realized that there were some verses that were just as important as samsura. So it was important to actually include verses sometimes just in isolation because they were so well known and so well used. And the book took shape that way. And then I still felt a little uneasy. Well, what. It's still me deciding what those are. So I went through the tradition. I consulted the equivalent of day books or prayer books, which are available all over the world for Muslims to know what to read when, what do you read on a Tuesday, what do you read on a Wednesday, what do you read after the morning prayers, and so on. And I ensured that everything that was in my book appeared in some of those books. I didn't worry about everything that was in those books appearing in mine. So. So this one is a subset. So no one would look at it and say, I don't know why this is here. The only thing someone could say is, I wonder why this other surah isn't here. And. But I was concerned about that as well. So I showed the table of contents to lots of colleagues, Quranic study scholars and friends, and one surah was missing. It was clear that I needed to include Surah Mulk, and which I decided not to include. And 7 out of 10 people were like, don't you think you should include Muk? So I did. Right. So I responded to that reaction that that seemed to be one that needed to be in the book. So that's the one. I translated the latest last under. Under some pressure, because at that point I actually already had a contract for the book and. Or I was in conversation with you with Yale about it, and I thought, I better get this done. That's how it came together, and it's been delightful to do. The toughest part, strangely, was the introduction, because one of the things that Yale University Press said to me Was whatever you do, don't write an academic introduction, right? Write an introduction that talks about you and your relationship to this material. And this is not something I had ever done. I mean, I'd written a couple of essays here and there, three or four pages long, that kind of examined my life as an academic. But I'd never really written something that was going to come out as a book that wasn't scholarly, academic. And this one is, I think it's scholarly, or I should say it's rooted in a certain amount of learning and scholarship about Quran, but it's not an academic book. And that was, that was hard and in the end, deeply enjoyable.
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Samuel Throup
You know, it's so funny how you described the process, because I imagined it to be exactly the other way in the sense that, right. You talked about these prayer books or day books, like the Wazifahs that you mentioned in the introduction, then in the kind of post, Face to the Book. And I imagined that this was something that you'd known, you know, been exposed to, as you said, from, from childhood or from early adulthood. And then you set out to recreate, to translate that, to like recreate that experience of a devotional pamphlet. But it actually worked the other way.
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Professor Shouka Tarawa
I mean, I think at some level that was happening, right? So that if I was looking at my own experience being raised Muslim, right, And, and, and being in a Muslim household, and so we were already doing some of those things. My wife every day reads from one of those prayer books, but I hadn't, I didn't go to the prayer book and say, okay, I'm going to translate those. I, as you say, as. I mean, as I said, and as you've echoed, I went back to make sure that I wasn't misunderstanding. And I also wanted to, I wanted to try to represent the diversity of practices around the world. And I realized that's actually not possible. There are just simply too many Muslims in too many places who have different traditions of recitation or of practice. And so that's why there's a line in the introduction somewhere that says this is the perspective of a Sunni South Asian Muslim, because there are differences. For example, I learned, I don't think I mentioned it in the book, but I learned something that I did not know in, you know, 60 or 60 or I'm 60, but about 45 years of thinking about things that Surah an Am, the sixth surah in the Quran is a standard, is, Is a. It. It's a regularly recited surah in Iran in gatherings. I had no idea now, it would not have made it into the book. It's a very long one. But I learned a lot about practices in other places. And again, but this goes back to what I said earlier. No one is going to look at the book and say, why isn't surah an am in there? But if I had put surah and amin, the little prefaces that I have to each section would explain, oh, this surah is recited in such and such a place at such and such a time. So that was quite, it was quite illuminating. And I include an appendix in which I actually list the contents of some of the wazifahs so that people can get a sense of what the overlap is if they're interested, and also learn what the other surahs are and then maybe go consult another translation to find out what those surahs do. Right. The idea was not to close the corpus, but it was to define it in a way that was defensible but also make the entire corpus available to people.
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Samuel Throup
Yeah, that's really interesting.
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Samuel Throup
So I definitely want to talk about the translation itself, which was just. I've done some translation work on my own, and I love translation as an art and also as an intellectual practice. And your translations.
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Are very. They feel very contemporary and also very intimate. Meaning that the voice who we're engaging with in these, in these poems, right? In these verses of the Quran is a voice that's so. Yeah, it's so close. It feels very, very close, both divine and also. And also like someone, like a friend, like someone right next to us, talking to us. So I'd love to give our listeners a sense of that. Do you think you could read Solace?
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Professor Shouka Tarawa
Sure. So this is Surah in Shirah, which is Surah 94. And in some ways, I think this is probably the Surah in this book, the English of which is the most quote distant from the Arabic. I think this is the one where I really went out on a limb. And I originally translated it and published it in the Journal of Quranic Studies, much more literally because it was in rhyme and it seemed to match the cadence of the Arabic. But the reality is that it was quite wooden. The opening line of that translation, the one I did, I don't know, 20 years ago, is, did we not your breast prize open? And, you know, on rereading that, when I was working on this book, I thought to myself, oh my God, this sounds completely. I mean, there's any number of words. It sounds dorky. It certainly doesn't sound like God's voice. It's faux archaic. Right? There was all kinds of things that were wrong with it. And I thought, how does one fix that? How does one address that? I mean, and this surah is said by the tradition to be one of two. The one preceding it as well, Duha that are said to have been revealed to the prophet Muhammad when he was sad because he had lost his wife and he had lost his uncle. And that period in his life is called the period of sadness. And so this is meant to be. It presents. These surahs present themselves as being forms of consolation. And I thought to myself, it's gotta come off that way. It's gotta come off sounding that way. Or else the person who's unfamiliar with this text or this tradition, by which. In which category I include Muslims who don't understand the Arabic. So it's not just non Muslims or outside readers.
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Samuel Throup
How.
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Professor Shouka Tarawa
How are they gonna feel what this is supposed to be conveying, which that cadence that I was matching in the original version is trying to do, except I turned it into something that almost sounded like dog roll in that case. And I thought, how do I fix that? And how do I not let go of the rhyme, though? And so this is what I came up with. So I'll read it now. So all the surahs but one in the Quran begin with an invocation. So that precedes the surah. Surah actually starts with the word didn't shall get you. So it's called Solace in the name of God, Ever compassionate and full of compassion. Didn't I soothe your heart when you were down? Remove the burden that weighed you down, Lighten the load that kept you down, Raise you up and bring you renown. This shall pass, this too shall pass. When your work is done, attend and turn to your Lord. So, you know, it's actually came to me one night, as it were, in Ramadan. I was. I used to make it a practice to translate at least one surah every Ramadan. Felt like a nice pious thing to do. Didn't always work. And I was just really struggling with didn't we. Or breast prize open and trying to think, what. What can I do to this to open it up? You know, And I'm not, You know, I'm not a poet. And one of the things that's. I think a problem is that I'm not a poet, which is why I showed all of this to Peter Cole, great poet and translator, to help me identify places where it needed to be opened up, you know, his. His. I think I describe his. His input in the introduction as alchemical. Right. But, you know, he was. He's an amazing. He's also. He's also a professor of translation. And so he's an amazing guide, you know, what do you think about doing this here? What do you Think about doing that there. And, and I thought when he saw this, he would say, well, this isn't really working. But he, he, he didn't, he didn't really. I don't think he touched this one. In fact.
- [24:56]
I think it worked. So it was that rare moment where I was able to, I think, make it work. I wish all of it were at this level. Not all of it is. But even if this is the only one that's at that level or that people respond to, then my work is done. I think the idea is to get people to understand. And you mentioned intimacy. So one of the first things that I did in this surah, which is quite. Which some people regard as radical, which I do not regard as radical at all, is that I changed the royal we to the personal I. And I actually have a note about it in the back of the book in which I say I wanted to use the more intimate I because this is God trying to say to his beloved prophet, everything's going to be okay. And why would you speak in the royal we when you did that? Right. Unless you were being very. Unless you were pontificating. This is not pontificating. So I felt entirely.
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Authorized to change the we to I, which is what it is anyway. Right? It's, it's a standard feature of language that people in high authority can use the, the first person plural, but they can use the first person singular as well. And, and there are examples in the Quran where, where the God speaker uses the first person singular. So it's not something that I've done that innovates on the text. There are examples of that. So that was, that was good, I thought, successful way of showing some of that intimacy. And then this shall pass. This too shall pass, of course, echoes an entirely different scriptural tradition. And some people have queried that to me. They've said, you know, you sure you wanted to bring in texts from elsewhere? But the Quran also is in conversation with other scriptures. So I saw no reason not to do something that I thought would work. The original Arabic there reads.
- [26:40]
Indeed, with hardship or with distress comes ease. And I thought no one consoling someone then says, indeed, with hardship comes ease. Or, you know, apres la puis vient le bouton. The French say right after rain, good weather. I thought it had to be something that really continued to console. It's going to be okay. That's what I thought this did.
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Samuel Throup
Yeah, well, I think, I think you definitely succeeded here.
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And it's funny you mentioned Peter Cole and also mentioned him in the book, for those who don't know, he's a poet, a translator from Hebrew and Arabic of everything from.
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Medieval Hebrew poetry, from Al Andalus, from Spain, and also the contemporary Palestinian poet Tahab Muhammad Ali. And it sounds like. It sounds like a Peter Cole poem, kind of with the same sort of fluency and ease.
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That hides a lot of depth and contains so much feeling. Right. There's so much emotional transaction that happens with the reader when one encounters this translation of the Surah. That immediately was like an aha moment for me where I understood Ayahuasca. This is. This is the conversation that you've been having as you've created this work.
- [28:06]
Professor Shouka Tarawa
Well, there's no higher praise in being compared or mentioned in the same sentence as Peter Cole, but I don't think it works throughout. I think there are places that just, you know, where it hobbles along. But again, it's. I'm not, you know, I'm not Peter Cole. I'm no Peter Cole. I think the Quran still awaits a good, strong translation by a poet. There is one that just came out, translated, a co translation by a poet and a scholar, Rafi Habib and Bruce Lawrence, with Norton translated into verse. But I still, you know, with all due respect to Habib and Lawrence, I still want a kind of Seamus Haney, Simon Armitage, Leech de Stallings, Peter Cole, you know, Christian Wyman kind of intervention in this and that. You know, it might be a while.
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Samuel Throup
Right. So I want to ask also about the layout that is not as striking as the language in a lot of ways, because these individual verses, these individual ayahs that you mentioned before as being included in the translation, not just complete sorrows, but many of them stand alone on the page and are surrounded by a lot of white space. This book could have been a whole lot shorter, I'm sure, if all these individual verses had been clumped together. So what was. Could you describe that choice?
- [29:27]
Professor Shouka Tarawa
So I think so. One thing that I can assert is that it was not dictated by a desire to lengthen the book or to give it more heft. I would have been perfectly happy to put things in sequence if it made sense to sequence them. But the reality is that those isolated verses, or in some cases, clusters of verses, right? Sometimes it's two or four those are learned, recited, used, deployed, illustrated together in isolation. So you can go into someone's home and actually see one of those verses as part of a wall hanging. And it's there, surrounded by all the white space on the wall around it, right? Or someone will utter one of those phrases in certain situations.
- [30:13]
A moment of fear, a moment of joy, a moment of piety in isolation without anything else around them. And so it seemed entirely, not only reasonable, but actually important to give those verses the same amount of importance, those isolated ones, as, say, an entire surah, an entire chapter, right. Which should have a beginning and an end and presumably then a way of a marker that shows that it begins and it ends. Whereas I think if, for example, we'd taken.
- [30:45]
The final section is eight of the 42 instances in the Quran where a character in the Quran appeals to God with the expression either rabbi or rabbana, my Lord, or our Lord. And I didn't include all of them because many of them are very similar to one another. So I included the eight that I thought were the most prominently used, and those would have perhaps made sense altogether. I mean, you can buy little, Little booklets around the Muslim world called the 40. 40 is used as a. For the 42, the 40 rabbanas. And they come together and they're all in sequence, right? I mean, it's reasonable to people to see the 40 together. And so I think I would have been on safe ground doing that with those. But then I wasn't including all 42. And it isn't a little book of the 40 rabbanas, right. It's a. It's the. The devotional Quran, which is meant to give a glimpse into this world. And I thought, let's give each one of these their own. Their own space.
- [31:42]
That seemed to me not only, as I say, defensible, but actually right and correct as a way to present them.
- [31:49]
Samuel Throup
So I just want to link up to something that you just said now about the aim of the book, right? To give people an entree into this world. So who was the audience for whom you were writing? Who is the audience of this book?
- [32:04]
Professor Shouka Tarawa
So this, I don't know if it evolved. I suppose evolved is the right word. My initial audience when I first started translating surahs was other scholars and students of the Quran who I believed had access to what did not have access to enough sonorous translations of the Quran. So I was. Which is why I published in an academic journal, and I knew that my colleagues would read it and then they could then teach this in their classes, show it to their students. Right? I mean, who reads a journal, Quranic study? Certainly not lay folk and certainly not any Muslims I know unless they're scholars. And when they were reasonably successful, I started thinking about other Audiences. The reality is that the very first translation I ever did or ever published was commissioned by my own uncle when I was living in Mauritius. He said, I'd like to produce a little book for pious distribution. This is a common practice in the Muslim world. And I translated Surah 36, Surah Yasin. And so in fact, it was a Muslim who wanted me to translate this for pious purposes. And I realized that as I was thinking about the book, that that was also a very important audience. Right. There are many Anglophone Muslims who do not know Arabic who are reading what I think are not great translations. And.
- [33:25]
And I'm not suggesting my translation is great, but I think that those translations miss certain things. And I was hoping to fill in that missing gap. Right. So it wasn't an attempt to displace other translations, but to supplement them with something that was a little. Doing something a little differently. So the two main audiences are or had been scholars and academics and their students in the university classroom, presumably, and in the Anglophone world and Anglophone Muslims anywhere of any kind. The only thing that kind of changed was that I began to also think about people who were studying world literature. I realized that if you look at something like the Northern Anthology of World Literature or the Lama Anthology or pretty much any anthology of world literature, passages from the Quran are routinely included. And often those translations don't read to my mind terribly well. And I think a reader would be entitled to say, I understand that the Quran is important in the history of the world as a book, but how is it? Literature, like what I'm reading here, doesn't feel to me like it has that literary quality that world literature is supposed to demonstrate. So I then was animated a bit by the idea and the desire that to produce a translation that at least someone could look at and say, oh, I get it, you don't have to like it. It may not be your sensibility, you may not like the content, but you read it and you say, I get why this is regarded as a piece of world literature. It certainly is in Arabic, right? Scholars of Arabic literature, Muslims or not, all regard the Quran as a phenomenal and spectacular piece of writing. How can one convey that in English if you set aside the theological or the world changing nature of the text because of the fact that people have. Have lived by it. But how do you produce something that when someone just reads it, they go, oh, wow. And so that became a very important question. That is when I spoke to Peter and I said, look, I need you to help me with this because in my mind, if the Peter Coles, right, and Christian Wyman's and Sam Proaks of the world didn't read it and go, huh, then it was a failure if they just went, okay, whatever, and moved on. Right? I wanted to do that and I wanted it to be about the text, not about me. Right? It's not about my. I mean, it's tied up with my ability to do it, but it's not really about that, right? I mean, a great text is a great text. You know, solace is a beautiful surah in Arabic. How do you convey it? How do you get someone to see that? And even with the short verses, if you compare the translations, for example of Ayat al Kursi, the so called throne verse, although really should be called the pedestal verse, with other existing translations, it's very, very different. And I wanted it to work in a way that when you hear the Lord's Prayer for the first time or you hear a psalm for the first time, you may not remember it word for word again, but it leaves an imprint on you because there is something about. There's a. The word I like to use is the gravitas. There is a gravitas about it and I wanted to try and imbue some gravitas into the translation as well. So there's a lot of things going on. Trying to make it sound good, trying to make it rhyme when I can. Trying to imbue it with gravitas, trying to have the God voice sound like it is in fact a God speaker. Right? There's some, some deity speaking to humanity or to.
- [36:57]
To one human or one person.
- [37:02]
So that was. It was hard, if enjoyable.
- [37:07]
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- [37:35]
Professor Shouka Tarawa
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- [38:06]
Samuel Throup
You just mentioned sort of the challenges of how do you get the English reader to see or to experience the gravitas of these passages of the Quran? And I think the way that a lot of other translations do that is that they provide a lot of notes and a lot of explanation and a lot of, you know, surroundings, sort of a lot of apparatus, scholarly and technical apparatus to sort of bring the reader more into the. Into the text and provide the background.
- [38:40]
That a lot of native Arabic speakers know or that a lot of.
- [38:45]
Scholars know. Sort of. If you come without that background, this is what you need. Is it the toolkit? And I noticed that you don't do that, meaning that the apparatus is very minimal. Right. There's sort of a few pages of notes and explanations at the end and actually compared it with the study Quran, some of the same passages, to see the footnotes that they're providing and then what you're providing. And I wanted to, I want to ask about that also, sort of, how was that, what was that decision?
- [39:16]
Professor Shouka Tarawa
So, couple of things. One aspect of it is, if it is world literature, if it is going to be regarded in that category, then it's got to be treated that way. One, we don't publish extracts of the Bhagavad Gita and Penguin Classics with copious notes. I mean, there is notation. There's always notation. Things have to be explained. But if we have footnotes, if you put footnotes at the bottom of a page or you interrupt the writing with little footnote markers or little circles or whatever it is you do, the reader's act is interrupted. The Quran was, by all accounts, revealed and transmitted orally to people around Muhammad. So.
- [40:05]
They were not, they were receiving it, at least in its first instantiation, as revelation and as.
- [40:13]
Whatever you want to call it, as Quran as recitation. There is a long history of commentary of the Quran. The exegetical tradition is phenomenally rich. And so I think there's no problem with deciding, for example, to produce something like the study Quran, which is in fact meant to be for study and for commentary. But I wanted to situate this, as I said earlier, for people to have a kind of direct access to this, to understand how the Muslim engages with it. When Muslims recite the Quran, they Do not recite it and interrupt themselves to read commentary, or they don't look up notes. Those that do are studying it. And that's a different act. Which is why what I called this book was really important. The Devotional Quran. My, my working title 20 years ago, 15 years ago was the Liturgical Quran. And then I decided that the difficulty with that is there isn't really a liturgy per se. And it might give the impression that there's a liturgy, although there's liturgical use and devotional captured also the private acts of devotion, which is actually how most people, how most Muslims interact with the Quran is on a very private basis. So I wanted the English reader to be able to just read a surah and, or read a verse. And then if they had any curiosity about it, they can always go to the back of the book. There might or might not be a note. I don't indicate on the page whether there's a note relating to any surah. It's got to be the scholarly instinct that activates in order for someone to do that. And in some cases, the notes, by the way, are simply me providing cover for myself. Like the example I said earlier about saying I instead of we. It's to deflect the criticism. Oh, you didn't get it. You thought it was I, but it's we or you've done violence. No, this is the choice that I've made. For those of you who think that it's not a good choice. There would be even fewer notes if I didn't feel like I needed to explain certain things to certain potential. Not critics. I mean, they're welcome to criticize them. I welcome criticism, but just to people who might maybe made uneasy. I didn't want anyone to feel uneasy. I didn't want people to read this and go, this makes me uneasy. I don't know why he's done this. I wanted people to have.
- [42:22]
A kind of certainty that it was being done with responsibly and with a great deal of attention.
- [42:32]
And that meant paradoxically, removing all the notes, the poem or the verses or the scripture. As scripture, in the case of the Quran, I don't want to say it's more important, but it's especially important because the Quran is purveyed by Muslims and is said by the Quran itself to be God's word. So this is what God conveyed. So why interrupt that? Why not reproduce that conveying to the extent that one can, which is of course, how Qurans are produced. You cannot find Qurans in the Muslim world with Notes. When you buy a Quran, which is called a mus' haf anywhere, it may have introductory matter and it may have back matter, but it will never be interrupted. And it's one continuous text. The only thing you will have is recitational marks telling you where to stop, where to pause, where to take a breath. Sometimes it'll indicate where certain prominent readers or readings have paused or not paused, but there's nothing is actually explained. When you buy a commentary of the Quran, the Quran is reproduced and then the commentary is on the outside margins. It is not interrupted in any way. And that also seemed to me a correct thing to replicate. I'm not. Even though I've extracted parts of it for which there is also a tradition. So it's okay to buy to get a wazifa, which has certain surahs printed in it together, but they're not interrupted within the text. The only time I can think of, I don't mean the word interrupted because I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. But they're not. There's no intrusion. The famous exception to this is linear translation. So there, there's a long history of interlinear translation. So you could read a line of Arabic, then a line of Persian, a line of Arabic, then a line of Persian. But the idea is that it's a translation, not notes. Yeah. So I thought I would do the same.
- [44:20]
Samuel Throup
Reading the, the translations, reading the selections that, that you've made from the Quran. I was so struck by the. By how apocalyptic they are and how much that apocalypticism spoke to me as a reader in the 21st century. Things feel pretty apocalyptic right now, I would say.
- [44:41]
So I'd love for you to read another translation, sort of here we're approaching the end of the passage or the surah that you translate as enfoldment, which is also, I think, another great, a great choice, a great translation, a great word that really.
- [44:59]
Captivates. So which surah is this?
- [45:01]
Professor Shouka Tarawa
And then this is surah Rashiya, the 88th Surah. And it's in a section in the book called Friday Prayers and Verses. Because while I was deciding what to include, I realized there were some. That some verses and some surahs that are always recited or frequently recited on Fridays. The Friday communal prayer has.
- [45:25]
Usually not. Usually includes two surahs that are read out by the prayer leader. If you perform it in congregation, it'll be read out loud. Two that are, that are recommended apparently because the Prophet read those on Fridays. This is not done by everyone and it doesn't have to be done, but it's very common. And I thought, why not give the surahs and some of the verses that are usually recited in the sermons that are that are preached. Why not give it its own section? And.
- [45:55]
So that's where they appear in the book Rashia. I mean, maybe I would have translated it anyway. But what happened one year or one time is some colleagues at a conference on the Quran in London said to me, you know, how do you actually do it? Like, what's the process? And I said, you mean actually translate a surah from scratch? And they said, yeah. And I said, well, I don't know, I mean, I could describe it to you. And they said, well, you know, that'll be very interesting to know about. So what I did is I said, I'm going to set about now translating Asura from scratch. And so I happened to pick 88 because I hadn't done it yet. And I then kept all my notes and kept track of what I did and then wrote an article which I think is called Process and Product or Process and Outcome in the translated Surah ash and publish it in the journal Quranic Studies. And they reproduced my notes that I had taken to show the process. And that's how this surah first started. And one of the things I was thinking about when doing the surah was because I was still experimenting at the time with different ways of doing what the Quran does in Arabic, in English. And one of the things that was very liberating to me is the realization that, you know, just because the surah, the Arabic does something, say in verse one and two, doesn't mean I have to do that same thing in verses one and two. Maybe I can do that in verses four and five. So I'm still respecting choices being made linguistically and literarily, but I don't have to mirror them because after I'm not mirroring the Arabic either. I mean the different languages. And in the case of this surah, I made a specific choice which I will not divulge yet. Some of that has been taken out in my reformulating of it for this book. But I will get to that in a minute. So. But should I read it?
- [47:32]
Samuel Throup
Please do.
- [47:34]
Professor Shouka Tarawa
In the name of God, ever compassionate and full of compassion. Has word reached you of the unfoldment that day? Some faces will be dejected, laboring and defeated. The fire they enter will be vehement, the fount they drink from fulminant, their only food, thorn and bracken that neither satisfies Nor fattens that day. Others will be jubilant, content with their efforts, recumbent in a lofty garden, free of idle ranting, graced with a fountain overflowing, the couches there loftily displayed, cups carefully conveyed, cushions plentifully arrayed, carpets beautifully laid. Do people not wonder how camels were fashioned, how the high heavens were fastened, how the mountains were battened down, how the level earth was flattened? Remind them. You were sent to remind them not to rule and to mind them. But those who turn away in disbelief will receive God's punishment. All in the end must return to us, and their reckoning must go through us. So that's every Friday people get to hear that.
- [48:38]
Samuel Throup
Yeah.
- [48:39]
Professor Shouka Tarawa
So I don't know if you noticed, but there are a lot of Fs in it. And when I made the decision to call it the Unfoldment, I thought, since the surah is full of recurring patterns, Arabic morphological patterns, and full of repeat letters, what can I do in the English? So I selected the letter F and made sure that I deployed it throughout the surah. And it's especially apparent in the early parts of it. Right. So in. I think it's in every line in. In the early parts, it's enfoldment, faces defeated, fire, fount, fulminant, food satisfies, fattens, but it continues efforts free fountain flowing loftily, carefully, plentifully, and so on. So this was just a decision, and it kind of worked. And I thought, this is good. This is helpful. But I think it also. It wasn't just mechanical. The surah is conscious of what it's describing. It's describing this time of great upheaval, how it's gonna be very different for different people, and language is used in that service in the Arabic. And I was thinking there needs to be a way. And I thought that the. Even if it's not noticed, that is, if it's not. If it's not overtly perceived, the reader is going to be repeating this sound over and over again. And it's going to do a little bit of what the surah is doing as well. And it's that. That enfolding that's taking place.
- [50:03]
Samuel Throup
Yeah, It. It does the work. It does the work, even if unconsciously. Right. Not on a conscious level of translating that experience. Right. That we're supposed to be or the feeling that we're supposed to have.
- [50:16]
How. When you've. When you've shared translations like this with poets or with people who are not Muslims, who are not part of the tradition, how do they react to the apocalypticism?
- [50:31]
Professor Shouka Tarawa
I haven't had too many. In fact, I don't have had any negative reactions. The only negative reaction I've experienced, I mean I haven't gone on a book tour or anything, so maybe I need to do something like that. But I did present this at there was a book launch at SOAS at the University of London and one member of the audience, which was largely Muslim audience, it was an evening, it was community facing event, in fact.
- [50:55]
Was upset that I had changed word order and was unable to understand that. Well, maybe they were able to understand but they were unwilling to concede that English word order works differently from Arabic word order and you can't do anything about that. And I also moved certain verses around for that reason, but they were dictated by word order considerations, not by any other, I think other than that in which that person by the way, accused me of tarif. So this is the accusation of the distorting of the Quran. And I said, you can't do tariff of the Quran if it's not in Arabic. This is English, this is just me. But the apocalyptic material, I would say that what people have said to me is kind of interesting. They say, you know, we're glad you didn't whitewash anything, like you've just taken it what it is. And I've said, you know, it's kind of you to say that. But that's not what I did. I didn't go through the Quran and say what content am I going to include? I specifically chose the suras that Muslims write devotionally. And if it says apocalyptic things, that's what you're going to get. If it's a story, that's what you're going to get. I didn't, there was nothing, no choices were made based on actual content. Choices were made, made on, on use. Right. So that if, you know, if people recite the Lord's Prayer then it goes in. If there is like one Psalm but not the other than the one that they recite goes in. And the one that the other that they don't doesn't, I don't include the one that they don't. So one of my favorite surahs is Surah Maryam, Surah 19, which I have translated and which has been very well received. There was no question of including it in the book, even though I think it would have maybe upped the game a bit, but it just didn't belong. So, so I, in the end when I went through the book to decide to do a Survey of what was there. It was clear that most of the material is from what's the so called Meccan period, so the first half of Prophet Muhammad's life. It just so happens that short material is from that period. Certain passages, I don't think any liturgic, devotional or liturgical reasoning underlies this. It just so happens to be the case that material tends to be more apocalyptic. So I think, you know, if this was called the legal Quran, the chapters that it would have translated would have been some of the very long ones that are in the beginning of the actual published text. And there, there would have been much less apocalyptic material and much more material about the preceding prophets, material about Jesus, material about Moses, about Abraham. But I kind of like the apocalyptic material.
- [53:21]
It produces emotion of a particular kind, right? It forces the reader to grapple with.
- [53:28]
Not only the emotion, but the kind of, the awe, right? The awe of what this divine being is saying about the history of humanity. I mean, it's not. I had a colleague at Kona where I taught before I came to Yale say to me once, I'm preaching, she was preaching, I'm preaching next week at the chapel. And you know, I was hoping for several passages in the Quran about hope. And I said, hope.
- [53:52]
You know, that that's an interesting question. That's, that's, you know, you, of course there are, but they're always counterbalanced with like Russia, you know, you have the description of the people of the right, the paradise, and then the people who are going to be consigned to hell, or you have the people of the right and the people of the left, and you have, here's what happens if you obey, here's what happens if you disobey. You know, some people are made uneasy by this. They, some of my students when I teach the Quran, they're like, oh, you know, why is it so, why is it so black and white or cut and dried or carrot and stick? And I say, you know, I am not here to defend the choices made in this text. I'm here to describe and, and, and, and help you read this text.
- [54:34]
And I, I'd be interested in hearing from more people about the apocalyptic material. Just, I find it interesting to, to think about that. You know, as, you know, some of the surahs are only just downers, right? I mean, this is, what's, this is where you're heading, folks. Good luck. And you know, what do you do with something like that, like surah ulas, right? Humanity is in loss. It's just a Statement. It's quite powerful stuff.
- [55:02]
Samuel Throup
Yeah. I mean, I was thinking about it, actually, in a different way. That is kind of a downer, but that as another part of this book that's very contemporary, actually. Right. So much today feels apocalyptic. And here is a.
- [55:18]
A beautiful poem. Right. I think it's fair to call these poems as they Stand Alone.
- [55:24]
That captures that terror and awe and emotion that, you know, we also read. We also feel, reading the New York Times, like it doesn't feel very different.
- [55:34]
Professor Shouka Tarawa
Yeah, no, that's true. That's a good point. Yeah. No, I was. That's right, because you mentioned that earlier on. No, there's no doubt about that. There is a way in which. So it's not exactly the, you know.
- [55:47]
The person holding the placard in Times Square saying, the world is coming to an end. It's not just that. Right. It's not a crazy saying. Oh. It's a kind of parsing of what's going on and a kind of way. It's sort of almost like holding a mirror up to humanity and saying, you know, where is this heading?
- [56:09]
Or this is where it's heading, and take stock, do better. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and that's why it has appealed. I mean, otherwise it would not. I can't imagine this text and this message would have appealed to as many people as it has if it didn't, in fact, contain in it the seeds of sort of reflection about things. Right. It's not just, oh, the end is near, the end is near. Anyone can say that. And then that person is in the stereotype, never believed. Right. That's like a Sam figure. This is the exact opposite of that.
- [56:41]
Samuel Throup
Right.
- [56:41]
Professor Shouka Tarawa
This is saying, this is it. Right. This is it. I said a downer. I was thinking of someone who's not familiar with the text and they read it and they might think, wow, this is pretty grim. But you're right, because Muslims are uplifted by this. They are not. You know, they don't listen to this and go into some kind of, you know, dark place. They think, wow, yes. This is the reminder. Right. In the Quran talks about Muhammad being the reminder and the warner and itself and all prophets. Right. It's all about being reminded.
- [57:10]
Samuel Throup
Right.
- [57:10]
Professor Shouka Tarawa
Take stock, do good, treat people well. Remember God, remember the end. It is coming to an end. And how are you going to get to that point? You know.
- [57:24]
That is a powerful message.
- [57:27]
Samuel Throup
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. To shock us out of our complacency.
- [57:30]
Professor Shouka Tarawa
Right. And if. If the accounts are to be believed, Muhammad reveals this in a Society that has turned to at least his community, his. His class of society, which has turned to, you know, slavery and being rapacious and greedy and oppressive and misogynistic and love of lucre. And I mean, it's. It's the. It's the typical story, right? Prophets are sent to peoples who have been led astray by their own egos and lusts and desires and have forgotten what, you know, what matters and have forgotten where they come from. And what matters is to be righteous and to do good. And where they come from is God. Like God created humanity. And so, yeah, it's. In that sense, of course, it's just like every other. Just like every other text.
- [58:20]
Samuel Throup
So I just have one last question before we go and thank you so much again for. No, thank you for your time. It's great to talk. So I'm very curious about who else you read in terms of poets.
- [58:34]
Professor Shouka Tarawa
So I've been reading poetry my whole life. When I was asked once about a desert island book, what would be the one book I took to a desert island? I said, and I still say that it would be the Oxford Book of twentieth Century English Verse, which was edited by Philip Larkin. Came out in 74, I think. And I was. I've been reading poetry since I was very young. You know, one of my favorite poets is Charles Causley, the Cornwall poet. I don't think it's an accident that he's a poet who almost always rhymes. You know, he's part of that, that. That group of war po. Post war Second World War poets. I mean, I read. I read all poetry. I read very. Poetry very, very widely. I have no.
- [59:12]
You know, I don't say, oh, I'm going to only read certain kinds of poets. I read contemporary. I reread the greats from any language tradition. I've always loved poetry. And by poetry I mean it expansively. I'm very interested in song as well. So for me, you know.
- [59:33]
Listening to a Dylan song or, you know, a lot of the. I grew up in a household where we watched my fat. My mother watched my father, much less watched Bollywood films and the music. All films are accompanied by songs and many of them are written by famous poets. And so I was exposed to the language being used in these phenomenal ways in these wordsmiths that were putting words together and conveying all kinds of things, stories, emotions, affect all along. And I've always been a lover of that. So I read very, very widely and as much as I can. And I found helpfully that because I find I have less time to read, you know, Dostoevsky, like novels. It's not that hard for me to pick up a poetry collection, read a few poems the next evening, read another few poems. And so I continue to feed myself poetry. But I mean, if you mean specific people, I don't know Anna Akhmatova. I mentioned Charles Causley. But, you know, in terms of singers, you know, Georges Jacques Brel, you know, Dylan. What else? I mean, I read a lot of Arabic poets. Adonis, I find. Adonis is a different kind of poet, I think, from the ones I've already mentioned, but. Yeah, I can't imagine actually life without. Without poetry.
- [60:58]
Samuel Throup
Yeah. Well.
- [61:00]
I second the sentiment. And I'm glad that you've. Very thankful and glad that you've contributed another volume to the bookshelf and brought the Quran. Thank you. Now to poetry in this amazing translation. Thank you.
- [61:15]
Professor Shouka Tarawa
It was very kind.
- [61:16]
Samuel Throup
Yeah. So thank you once again for the time and for the book and. And I look forward to talking in the future.
- [61:23]
Professor Shouka Tarawa
Absolutely. Take care.