Linguistic Encounters (Part I): Arabic-Dutch Interlinear Translation of the Qur’ān

May 2023

Genie Yoo

Figure 1. A grammatical exercise from Arabic to Dutch, with an interlinear translation of the 64^th surah of the Qur’an. Note that the Dutch translation is above the Arabic. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat.ind.7, f. 115r.

 

Since the seventeenth century, Dutch East India (VOC) scholar-administrators engaged in philological activities at the site of the Indonesian archipelago. This not only entailed learning local languages and collecting manuscripts, but also creating interlinear translations for their own purposes, from Arabic to Dutch. This blogpost quickly introduces one such manuscript from the turn of the seventeenth century: a VOC administrator’s Arabic-Dutch interlinear translation of the 64th surah from the Qur’an, Sūrat al-Taghābun, intended as a grammatical exercise for Dutch learners of Arabic (Figure 1). Here, I focus briefly on the centrality of Arabic, particularly concerning the story of creation, and the encounter between the sacred language of Arabic with a European vernacular. This might help us to reconsider the importance of Arabic, not only for the islands’ Muslim inhabitants, but significantly for the VOC’s missionary and philological enterprise at the site of the Dutch East Indies. Whether such linguistic encounters in the context of empire nurture closeness or distance between peoples and cultures is a question that lingers throughout. 

The manuscript, now preserved in the Vatican Library (Vat.ind.7), is labeled “Malay Lexicon and Grammar.”^[i] According to Dr. Bart Jaski, a VOC translator named Cornelis Mutter, who had once been commissioned to assist in the Malay translation of the Bible in Batavia in 1698, likely sent this manuscript, along with many others, to the Dutch scholar Adriaan Reland (1676-1718) in Utrecht.^[ii] While Mutter had once owned this manuscript, he likely did not write in it. A close inspection of Vat.ind.7 reveals that it has two parts, each written in a different hand, neither of which belonged to Mutter: first, a Malay-Dutch lexicon, a scrupulous listing of words in Malay and Dutch in alphabetical order; second, an incomplete explanation of Arabic grammar, which includes a word-for-word interlinear translation from Arabic to Dutch. The interlinear translation was titled, “A grammatical exercise of the Arabic language, on the 64th Chapter of the Quran, which is titled, the Chapter of Fraudulence” (Figure 2).^[iii] The purpose of this interlinear translation, then, was to assist Dutch learners interested in basic Arabic grammar, presumably in the Dutch East Indies.

 

Unlike most interlinear translations made by Islamic authority figures in the archipelago, the VOC administrator, in this case, wrote the Dutch interlinear translation above the Arabic:

 

Dutch Interlinear Translation

Hij is dewelke ú geschapen heeft en onder d’ úwe (zijn) ongelovige en onder d’ úwe heeft men gelovige, ende god (is) over t’gene dat gijlieden doet ziende. Hij heeft geschapen de Hemelen en d'aarde, in der waarhijt ende hij heeft úl[en] geformt, en moy of goed gem[aak]t úwe gedaante, en tot hem is de toekomst.^[iv]

[English translation: He is the one who has created you and among you (are) unbelievers and among you one has believers, and god (is) seeing over that which you do. He has created the Heavens and the earth in the truth and he has formed you and made your form beautiful or good, and to him is the arrival.]

 

Arabic from the Second and Third Verses

Huwa al-ladhī khalaqakum faminkum kāfirun wa minkum mu’minun wa Allāhu bimā ta’malūna baṣīrun. Khalaqa al-samawāti wa al-arḍi bi al-ḥaqqi wa ṣawwarakum wa aḥsana ṣuwarakum wa ilayhi al-maṣīru.^[v]

[English translation: He is the one who created you, though among you are unbelievers and among you are believers, and Allah is all-seeing in what you do. He created the heavens and the earth with truth and formed you and made your form good and to him is the place of destination.]

 

Word-for-word translations, for instance, of khalaqa as “heeft geschapen” (has created), al-samawāt as “de Hemelen” (the Heavens), al-arḍ as “d’aarde” (the earth), and aḥsana ṣuwarakum as “moy of goed gem[aak]t úwe gedaante” (made your form beautiful or good), all point to familiar terms of comparison in biblical understandings of Creation, with slight variations. Here, it is the Dutch language that bends towards Arabic, bringing the vernacular to align more closely with the sacred language. While “de Hemel” (the Heaven) in the singular is more common in the Dutch translation of Genesis, the translator would faithfully render al-samawāt as “de Hemelen” (the Heavens),  specifying in the grammatical explanation of individual Arabic terms, that al-samawāt was the plural form of the singular noun “samā’ the Heaven [de Hemel], from the root samawa.”^[vi] Moreover, rather than translating aḥsana ṣuwarakum as “made your form good,” the translator would add another adjective “moy” (beautiful), which hews closely to other meanings stemming from the same Arabic root. Choosing this particular surah as a “grammatical exercise of the Arabic language” over other, more popular surahs in the archipelago likely highlights its intended readers and students in the Dutch East Indies: VOC administrators, likely all familiar with the Dutch Bible, who were interested in learning Arabic with a textual guide in Dutch.

 

Figure 2. The second page of the VOC administrator’s grammatical exercise from Arabic to Dutch. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat.ind.7, f. 115v.

 

This blogpost showed how a VOC administrator stationed in the archipelago attempted to translate the sacred language of Arabic into a European vernacular. In the VOC’s philological and missionary enterprise, administrators used the form of the interlinear translation for various reasons, in this case, to provide a pedagogical exercise to train Dutch administrators interested in learning Arabic grammar. These linguistic encounters can invoke to a sense of closeness, as one sees how one language bends to conform to the other. In the second part of this blogpost, I will discuss another VOC administrator’s efforts to provide a Malay interlinear translation of the Arabic translation of the Hebrew Bible, a linguistic encounter that creates distance. Whether such textual encounters have led to a crossing of cultural and religious boundaries between historical actors of vastly different backgrounds in the context of Dutch imperialism is a question that remains to be answered.

 

 

Works Cited

 

Primary Sources

 

Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat.ind.7.

 

Secondary Sources

 

Jaski, Bart. “The Manuscript Collection of Adriaan Reland in the University Library of Utrecht and Beyond.” In The Orient in Utrecht: Adriaan Reland (1676-1718), Arabist, Cartographer, Antiquarian and Scholar of Comparative Religion, edited by Bart Jaski, Christian Lange, Anna Pytlowany, and Henk J. van Rinsum, 321-361. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2021.

 

Jaski, Bart. “Appendix 2: The Manuscript Collection of Adriaan Reland.” In The Orient in Utrecht: Adriaan Reland (1676-1718), Arabist, Cartographer, Antiquarian and Scholar of Comparative Religion, edited by Bart Jaski, Christian Lange, Anna Pytlowany, and Henk J. van Rinsum, 434-484. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2021.