In the Qur'an we find different concepts of trust situated within different ethical discourses. A rather unambiguous ethico-religious discourse of the trust relationship between the believer and God can be seen embodied in conceptions of tawakkul. God is the absolute wakīl, the guardian, trustee or protector. Consequently He is the only holder of an all-encompassing trusteeship, and the normative claim upon the human being is to trust God unconditionally. There are however other, more polyvalent, conceptions of trust. The main discussion in this article evolves around the conceptions of trust as expressed in the polysemic notion of amāna, involving both trust relationships between God and man and inter-human trust relationships. This concept of trust involves both trusting and being trusted, although the strongest and most explicit normative claim put forward is on being trustworthy in terms of social ethics as well as in ethico-religious discourse. However, ‘trusting’ when it comes to fellow human beings is, as we shall see, framed in the Qur'an in less absolute terms, and conditioned by circumstantial factors; the Qur'anic antithesis to social trust is primarily betrayal, ‘khiyāna’, rather than mistrust.
In this article I offer a case study on conceptualisations of Islam in translations of the Qur'an into the Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian languages during the past 170 years. While situating the translations as well as their translators in their historical and cultural contexts, the study does not take an assumed motivation of the translator as a starting point for the analysis, nor is it source text oriented and framed by discussions on translatability. Rather, this study aims at investigating the conceptual impact of different translation strategies, through a comprehensive micro-level analysis of eight target texts and their translations of the Qur'anic lexical cluster islām/aslama/muslim. The differences between the translations are mainly born out of two overall translation strategies: choosing between a monosemantic and a polysemantic view of the Qur'anic language and between the generic and the technical sense of the lexemes. I argue that these choices and how they are negotiated in the translated texts with their paratexts produces universalised versus particularised conceptualisations of Islam.
Gjennom det siste århundret har koranoversettelser i Skandinavia utgjort en sentral kilde til innsikt i islam. Oversettelsene kan gi oss innsikt i en historisk forståelse av tekstens budskap samt i oppfatningene omkring teksten og islam i en bredere diskurs.
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