I say Qur’ān, you say Koran

As I sat in the library yesterday for four hours performing "quranic exegesis" for my Prophet Muhammad seminar, all I kept thinking was, "this time, girl, you have got in over your head." Quranic exegesis, like Biblical exegesis, is looking at a religious text and critically examining it. A lot of it has to do with word choice, so, for instance, why a translator translated Hebrew one way, and how another version might vary slightly, or why certain passages are important. I had Biblical exegesis coming out my ears two years ago, so I figured the article on the translation problems in the Qur’ān wouldn't be too awful. Well, I figured wrong.

Two problems arose early on: I know very, very little about the Qur’ān, and this author presupposed that I had read it, and apparently remembered every chapter and verse number, as he had a tendency to say things like, "obviously, in Q 6:112 this is also evident," AND I unfortunately can not read Latin, Hebrew, Greek, or Arabic, which, along with German and Italian, were used by this author WITHOUT providing translations.

An example of what I'm talking about. This is from the eighth page.
"Instructive examples of parallel phraseology for divine and satanic inspiration are generated by Quranic application of the verb alqā (literally to cast, but often synonymous with arsala, or with awhā, in the sense of dispatch), e.g. Q. 40:15 [arabic phrase] (cf. 4:171; and a similar construction with nafakha 21:91), 20:39 [arabic phrase]. The imagery was perpetuated in the exegetical tradition, e.g. [long arabic phrase] describing the activity of Gabriel."
(Wansbrough, Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation, 60.)

So if I could read Arabic, this wouldn't be too bad, and I'm planning on locating a translated Qur’ān and at least checking some of the verses. But even just ignoring all of the non-English words, the friend I was working with and I had to get out the English dictionary, because half of his English words were ones I had never even HEARD of. We are also two of four people in the seminar who can not read Arabic, so I just had this feeling that everyone else would be breezing through the article, gamely reading the Arabic, while I stared at it, hating it. You had to have professorial permission to get into this class and she obviously let us in, so she must trust us well enough. But feeling like you're the one person at the party who doesn't know what is going on is not a great feeling to have.

The two of us are slated to lead discussion on this reading and three others next Wednesday in class. Send us some scholarly vibes, please.