1. Twentieth-Century Debates on the Translatability of the Qur’an in the Middle East

Chapter One, ‘Twentieth-Century Debates on the Translatability of the Qur’an in the Middle East’, covers not only the period of the first debates over the translatability of the Qur’an in the Muslim world (primarily Egypt, Syria, and Iraq) during the early- and mid-twentieth century but also the local development of the ‘translation movement’ in the Saudi context. It discusses the significance to these debates of a corpus of religious texts by authors ranging from the twelfth-century thinker Ibn Taymiyya to later scholars from the eighteenth-century family of Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb and how these came to form a kind of exegetical canon, both in essential terms (that is, what exactly should be interpreted) and textually (which sources are ‘suitable’ to do that with). This hermeneutics also incorporates the problem of translation [tarjama] and the limits of interpretation, for example, ideas about which meanings can be explained in Arabic and explicitly transferred to other languages. The chapter also briefly addresses foreign language learning in Saudi Arabia and modern developments in higher education there.