Introduction

Many twentieth-century translators of the Qurʾān, including Marmaduke Pickthall (1930), Yusuf Ali (1934), and Muhamad Asad (1980) use words like “city” and “village” in translating terms like balad (68: 1), qarya and madīna (27: 34, 48). But to what extent are the English equivalents indeed equivalent to or commensurate with the originary and classical understandings of such terms? Etymological mutation is a process as old as language, one whose inevitable sociological transformations, as Raymond Williams reminds us in The Country and the City, invite us to relate texts to their social contexts. For instance, the word madīna appears in the Qurʾān twelve times and only with the definite article “al-,” and in some cases it seems to be synonymous with qarya (12: 30/82 and 36: 13/20). Some may even argue that madīna is a very specific place that conveys the presence of a prophet or a messenger, whereas qarya refers to a vaster geographical space. What then are the semantic subtleties that characterize both words? What peripheral and/or central space do they imply? What do they have in common, and how do they differ from one another, and from one Qurʾānic chapter to the next, connotatively as well as denotatively? In what way(s) are they translatable into the typical “town,” “village,” and “city” of our current use? The point is not to pinpoint morphological anachronisms or locate the erroneous categorizations of equivalence theory in translation, but rather to investigate the complex imbrications and contextual nuances of the so-called “city” in the Qurʾān. A historically rich text like the Qurʾān continues to force us to revise our customary classifications of linguistically and sociohistorically distinct words and recognize the challenges they pose to even the most advanced learners of the Islamic tradition. Qarya and madīna are only two examples of this boundless area of infinite significations. But it is precisely those challenges posed by the act of translation that make the need for translation even more compelling. We translate foreign texts precisely because we need to understand them, yet we also understand that the best of all translations must always question itself, and more so with the Qurʾān, the mother of all untranslatables.