Islam’s Encounter with English and Ismail al-Faruqi’s Concept of Islamic English: A Postcolonial Reading

In the past, many Muslims maintained strong reservations about
using English as a means of communication, interaction, and intellectual
practices mainly due to its association with British colonialism.
In the postcolonial world Muslims and other religious
communities, as well as various ethnic and indigenous groups,
have moved away from the ideological and political assumptions
of a binary relationship between English and their cultural and religious
identities. As a result, several hundred million Muslims
now use English as their first or second language, and more books
on Islam are published in it than in any other language. However,
Ismail al-Faruqi (1921-86) sees a serious anomaly in how Muslim
names and Islamic theological terms are transliterated and translated,
as the dominant practice shows not a loyalty to meaning,
but to the norms of the target language.

Source: American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences

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