Why we translate

The classical scholars did not write in English. They wrote in Arabic — often, specifically, in the classical Arabic of the ʿAbbāsid period: dense, technical, structured around a shared body of references that a modern reader, even a modern Arabic-reading one, no longer possesses.

A billion Muslims today do not read that Arabic. They read English. They read Turkish, Urdu, Bengali, French. The tradition is theirs — and it is available to them only at second or third remove, through translations written decades or centuries ago, often by scholars writing for other scholars, in prose that creaks in the modern ear.

Someone has to carry the books across.

What we mean by "translation"

There is a common assumption that translation is a mechanical act — put the Arabic on one side, English on the other, find equivalents. It is not that. Translation is a second act of authorship, performed under constraints. The translator is bound to what the author said. They are also bound to speak, in their target language, with the clarity and weight the original carried.

A translation that is pretty but imprecise is a kind of deception. A translation that is precise but unreadable is a kind of waste. We refuse both.

What we keep, what we render

When al-Ghazali writes ikhlāṣ, we could translate it as "sincerity." But ikhlāṣ in the classical sciences carries a specific meaning — the purification of intention such that an act is for Allah alone, undiluted by self-regard. "Sincerity" in modern English carries whatever we mean when we say a politician is "sincere." These are not the same concept.

So where a term has no clean English equivalent — ikhlāṣ, taqwā, yaqīn, zuhd — we keep the Arabic. We annotate it the first time it appears, then let it stand. A reader who listens to enough Joyful Muslims audio will, by the twentieth hour, know exactly what ikhlāṣ means. Not because we defined it, but because al-Ghazali did, by using it a hundred times in context.

What we do not do

We do not modernise the scholars. We do not make Ibn Kathir sound like he is trying to be on a podcast. His rhythm in Arabic is the rhythm of a 14th-century historian — careful, slow, deliberate — and that rhythm has weight. If we flatten it into colloquial English, we lose what we were sent to carry.

We do not soften the scholars, either. When al-Ghazali says envy eats good deeds the way fire eats wood, he means it. We do not euphemise. We do not add a contemporary gloss that would let a reader off the hook. The scholars held us to a high bar; we hold the translation to that same bar.

The test of a translation is not whether it sounds beautiful. It is whether the reader, closing the book, has been given what the author was trying to give.

Why audio

The first Muslims were an oral people. The Qurʾan was a recitation before it was a book. Hadith were transmitted by chains of memorisers, each one hearing the words spoken aloud before saying them again. For a thousand years, sacred knowledge in Islam lived on the tongue — the written page was a backup, a way to preserve what was meant to be heard.

Modern Muslims mostly read. They read on their phones, in their browsers, in the two minutes between meetings. That is an astonishing privilege. But it is also a loss. A passage from the Iḥyāʾ read silently at 3x speed is not the same passage that al-Ghazali's students heard in a Baghdad classroom over the course of a morning.

Audio returns the texts to something closer to how they were meant to travel. You listen in the car. You listen while walking. You listen, not because you were trying to study, but because sacred knowledge came with you into the day. That is the classical pattern — and we built Joyful Muslims around it.

A small note on trust

Every book in the Joyful Muslims library was translated by our in-house editorial team from the original Arabic, checked against at least one printed critical edition, reviewed by two editors before recording, and narrated by a voice actor briefed on Islamic textual etiquette — proper honorifics, correct pronunciation of names, the weight each passage should carry.

We will miss things. When we do, we want to know. Write to us at [email protected] and we will publish the correction in public.

That is the whole of the project. Carrying a thousand-year tradition across one more gap. Imperfectly. Carefully. As a trust.