Thoughts On Maulana Wahiduddin Khan’s Article, ‘Islam And Arab Culture’
By Asif Merchant, New Age Islam
29 May 2014
Apart from Islam,
other religions have also had to face the conflict between the supremacy
of the original language, and the need for people to understand what
their religion says.
The Buddha understood
this and therefore, preached in Maghadi, the language in general use in
that part of the world, known as Magadh. The holy language of the Hindus
was Sanskrit, which few could understand, but Maghadi was intelligible
to the general population.
The Bible was written
in Ancient Hebrew, with some of the later sections in Aramaic, the
language spoken in northern Syria. The New Testament was written in
Greek, that being the cultural language preferable to Latin, the
language of the Romans, who were the rulers. Later, when Christianity
spread through the Roman Empire, Latin translations were needed to make
it intelligible to the general populace. The Bible remained in Latin
till the early sixteenth century, when a German priest, Martin Luther
translated the Bible into German, thus making it available to the
general population of his country. For this, Martin Luther was
excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church.
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