Arabic utterances in a multilingual world: Shāh Walī-Allāh and Qur’anic translatability in North India

Abstract

This article investigates how Arabic texts reached multilingual audiences in North India in the eighteenth century. Drawing on a remarkable treatise on translating the Qur’an into Persian by the Delhi intellectual Shāh Walī-Allāh (d. 1176/1762), it argues that so-called “interlinear” translations functioned to preserve the sound of Arabic utterances as well as their meaning. By anchoring another language to Arabic utterances, these translations also reified symbolic hierarchies between Arabic and languages used to translate it. Walī-Allāh’s understanding of translatability was closely tied up with notions of Qur’anic structure (naẓm) and the sonic qualities of the Arabic language, but also informed by a sensitivity to linguistic difference in the multilingual society he lived in.