The Long and Winding Road to Translating Raḥmān-Raḥīm (Part I)
May 2025
Muhammad Dluha Luthfillah
The story of writing this blog post began with my surprise when I first came across an 18th-century interlinear Javanese translation of the Qur’an. The manuscript—now housed in the National Library of Indonesia under the shelfmark A 54 a–e— struck me from the very first page, where it renders the first sura, al-Fātiḥa, and in particular the verse al-Raḥmān al-Raḥīm. The phrase is translated as “kang murah ing dunyā, kang asih ing akherat” (“the One who is murah in this world, the One who is asih [loving] in the hereafter”).
Figure 1. A 54 from the collection of the National Library of Indonesia, fol. 1v. An earlier common translation of al-Raḥmān and al-Raḥīm into Javanese.
I was familiar with the translation of raḥīm as asih and the interpretive additions of “ing dunyā” (in this world) and “ing akherat” (in the hereafter), which I had learned over years of studying in traditional pesantren. There, we read Arabic textbooks using a traditional interlinear translation method. Every time we began a new book, we encountered the formula bismillāh al-Raḥmān al-Raḥīm at the very beginning, and we consistently translated it using this traditional method. Over time, the translation became so familiar that we memorized it by heart: “kelawan nyebut asmane Allāh Kang Maha Welas ing dunyā, Kang Maha Asih ing akhirat” (“by invoking Allah’s name, Who is Most welas [Compassionate] in this world, and Most asih [Loving] in the hereafter”). Yes, we, students of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, used welas—not murah!
Figure 2. Misbah Mustafa, al-Iklīl fī Maʿānī l-Tanzīl. A common modern (late 20th and early 21st century) translation of basmala.
I was even more surprised when, a few years later, I discovered that murah was also used to translate raḥmān in old manuscripts preserved at my own pesantren, Pondok Pesantren Qomaruddin in Gresik, East Java! These manuscripts show that this usage continued well into the 19th century—and possibly even into the early 20th.
Figure 3. DS 0097 00053, a copy and translation of Safīnat al-Ṣalā by Isḥāq b. Muḥammad Rāwī in 1318/1900-1, fol. 1v. The use of murah for raḥmān in the early 20th century.
In that moment of surprise, I realized something: the seemingly “formulaic” translation—since several alternative translations are also used in pesantren—of this recurring formula was something I had always taken for granted. I began looking into Modern Javanese dictionaries and came across explanations by Johann Gericke and Taco Roorda. In their dictionary, murah is defined as “overvloedig; veel en gemakkelijk te bekomen; goedkoop; laag van prijs; een lage prijs bieden; ook mild, milddadig, goedertieren (vrg. loma)” (“abundant; in abundance and easy to obtain; cheap; low in price; to offer a low price; also gentle, benevolent, kind (cf. loma)”) (Gericke and Roorda 1901, 2:480). Stuart O. Robson’s Javanese-English Dictionary goes further, noting that the sense of murah as generous, gracious, or merciful is specifically used for God (Robson and Wibisono 2002, 501).
However, when I cross-checked with Old Javanese literature and dictionaries collected on the website www.sealang.net, “generous,” “gracious,” and “merciful” are not listed as meanings of murah; murah only means “cheap” and “copious.” The website’s reverse search feature also allows for the search of Old Javanese words meaning “generous,” “gracious,” and “merciful,” but murah never appears in the results. These all made the case more interesting to me and prompted me to undertake further investigation. In the two sections of this blog post, I will outline what I have uncovered so far. In Part I, I will explore the historical use of murah in Islamic literature, while in Part II, I will present the findings of my preliminary inquiry into the potential origins of this usage.
Murah-asih has been there since the 16th century!
My search began with three manuscripts that, to this day, are the oldest known Arabic-Javanese interlinear texts: I F 31 and I H 1 in the University of Amsterdam’s collection, and Sloane 2645 in the British Museum’s collection. I consider these three manuscripts to represent the 16th-century interlinear translation practices, as the first two were purchased by a Dutch collector around 1610, and the third manuscript dates its creation to 1545 in the Javanese calendar (1623-24 AD) in its colophon. All three manuscripts are copies and translations of legal texts, and none of them translate the basmala or include al-raḥmān and al-raḥīm within the body of the text.
In other 17th-century manuscripts written in the following decades, I have not found murah used for raḥmān. One reason for this is that the basmala was once again not translated, and raḥmān was never included in the body of the text. On the other hand, raḥīm appears more frequently in these manuscripts and is consistently translated as asih or kasih (which are possibly variants of the pronunciation of asih or its derivation, both meaning “loving”). However, in these manuscripts, I found the word murah—in the form of kamurahan/kemurahan with the prefix ke-/ka- and the suffix -an to turn the adjective murah into a noun) used to translate jūd and karam (both meaning generosity) (for example, in manuscript A 97 from the National Library of Indonesia, written after 1100/1688, fol. 5 for jūd and fol. 17 for karam). The context for these two words is actually similar to the meaning of raḥmān as “generous”.
The earliest Javanese Islamic literature in which murah is used for raḥmān is manuscript Or. 2016 from the Leiden University Library collection, dated 1116/1705. This manuscript includes a page with Allah’s asmāʾ al-ḥusnā, the “beautiful names,” all of which are provided with interlinear translations. Raḥmān and raḥīm, as part of the asmāʾ al-ḥusnā, are translated as “kang murah ing dunya, kang asih ing akhirat.” Since it was written five years after the turn of the century, I assume that it somewhat reflects the translation norms of the 17th century.
Figure 4. Leiden University Library, Or. 2016, a compendium written in 1116/1705, fol. 1v. The use of murah for God’s attribute raḥmān.
Assuming www.sealang.net is accurate in noting the absence of the meanings “generous,” “gracious,” and “merciful” for murah in Old Javanese, then the 17th-century usa of murah in this sense prompts the question of whether this semantic expansion arose within Modern Javanese more generally, or was shaped by the particular influence of the Javanese Islamic literary tradition. I will explore this further in Part II. Stay tuned!
References
Manuscript
Leiden University Library, Or. 2016
The National Library of the Republic of Indonesia, A 54
Dreamsea collection, DS 0097 00053, Safīnat al-Ṣalā, https://www.hmmlcloud.org/dreamsea/detail.php?msid=4495
Website
Literature
Gericke, Johann F.C., and Taco Roorda. 1901. Javaansch-Nederlandsch Handwoordenboek. Vol. 2. Leiden: Brill.
Mustafa, Misbah. n.d. Al-Iklīl Fī Ma‘ānī al-Tanzīl. Surabaya: al-Ihsan.
Robson, Stuart O., and Singgih Wibisono. 2002. Javanese-English Dictionary. Singapore: Periplus.