back in december i put up a short glossary if islamic terms in chinese and uyghur. the idea was that i’d have a collection of the words that are most used and would thus be needed by someone visiting the area who wasn’t otherwise fluent. if you scroll down to the bottom of the comments, right before the one where i say i’l have it done in a week (which was some time ago), there’s a request for terms.

i had considered some of these terms in the initial list but ended up ditching them for various reasons. a big part of me wonders how things are represented vs how they should be. if, for example, i mention the word jihad جهاد‎, it’s probably not likely most people think of anything but a holy war to kill the infidels. except this is pretty wrong, at least in liturgical terms. there’s no doubt that this is the way the word is used by terrorists and extremists, but this is not the way it should be. jihad in arabic means struggle, but not struggle against the other as much as it’s struggle to do what’s right in the eyes of the divine, were the divine to have eyes. think of it, in western terms, as conscience.

so i offer two possible translations into chinese. the first is shèngzhàn*, ‘holy war’. this is consistent with the knee-jerk definition. the second, dòuzhēng, ’struggle’. this is much more consistent with the actual meaning of the arabic word. the trilateral root of jihad also appears in the word ijtihad اجتهاد‎, legal jurisprudence. that is, struggling to come up with the best interpretation of the laws of god.

to give the right answer i’d need to know the intention of the person making the request. as kafir, mushkirun and taqiyya are included in the request, words not used to speak well of others, i can guess which one they’d be looking for. probably dòuzhēng would be better suited for the hadith while shèngzhàn would be more appropriate for translating episodes of sleeper cell, which, by the way, is how they translate it.

as i add to the glossary i need to keep in ming my original reasons. holy war isn’t really what you’d need to have a conversation at a mosque in shanghai. dhimmi would have little use given the massively low number of jews or christians, and so ahl al-kitaab would really only be of use for listening to a sermon.

regarding the rest:
- hudna, an arabic word meaning truce that carries religious meaning, wouldn’t be needed when 停火, cease-fire, works just as well.
- jizya, a tax paid in islamic states, isn’t relevant as china is not an islamic state.
- dar al-harb and dar al-islam wouldn’t really have 1:1 chinese translations or really any good chinese translations that weren’t just descriptions, e.g. 伊斯兰的国家. further, the terms aren’t really applicable (potentially outdated given pluralistic societies?**) without inclusion of a dozen more which you can read about on wikipedia.

so there are my reasons for not yet updating the glossary. hopefully those looking for the new terms will understand my reasoning.

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* i’ve skipped the characters this time to avoid any attention from anti-terror gov’t folk who might notice an odd convergence of keywords appearing on this site.
** i have much more to say on this and may end up saving it for a later entry.