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Koran vs. Qur’an

Dean Esmay
The primary Muslim religious book, recited by Mohammed and written down and
compiled by his followers over the course of a generation, has been known for a
long time amongst English speakers as the Koran. In more recent times, a
movement has been afoot to change the spelling to Qur’an. I have had people,
on occasion; take me to task (usually gently) about sticking with the old spelling.
They reason that Qur’an is supposedly closer to the Arabic spelling and
pronunciation, and that “Koran” was a transliteration made up centuries ago that
doesn’t really fit.
My answer is that, well, I just don’t like Qur’an. There is no English word
constructed like that. Your average person looks at that and has no idea how to
pronounce it. And, while I don’t know much Arabic, I am willing to bet that Qur’an
is still only a pretty rough transliteration, since Arabic includes letters and sounds
and punctuation that aren’t readily found in English, and vice-versa.
I’m willing to bet that if you go the other way and transliterate English names into
Arabic script and language, they don’t come out exactly right either. From my
perspective, that’s perfectly acceptable: people who are translating a proper
noun into another language should feel free to come up with a relatively easy
way to spell and pronounce it in their own tongue, and let it go at that. I don’t
think they should have to invent spellings and punctuations and pronunciations
that don’t come naturally to them, either.
I know, for example, that if I go to a Spanish-speaking country, it’s really quite
hard for people to pronounce the name “Dean.” It does not fall naturally off the
Spanish-speaking tongue. “Dino,” on the other hand, does. So, fine, they can call
me that. My stepdad’s name is Gary, and he used to travel to Mexico a lot. He
learned pretty quickly that almost no one there can pronounce the name “Gary”
properly. As simple as it looks to us, it causes Mexicans (at least, Mexicans who
don’t already speak English) to stutter and stop. So he just tells them to call him
“Miguel” and forgets about it.
As it happens, I used to live in an area absolutely filled with Arab immigrants.
They almost invariably wind up with first and last names that they’ve
transliterated only roughly into English, because there’s no easy way to
transliterate them perfectly. Sometimes they don’t even try to transliterate them
and pick something new; for reasons I’ve never quite understood, a whole lot of
them choose to go by “Sam.” It’s a running gag: go into a store run by Arabs and
ask for Sam, and they’ll take ten minutes trying to figure out which Sam you’re
talking about.
In the rules of English spelling, you do not have constructions like Qur. Qu is
supposed to be followed by a vowel. And an apostrophe is followed by an “s” and
not other letters. Qur’an literally, to me, looks like someone punched a keyboard
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with their fists and those are the random characters that came out. I can
pronounce it–at least, I think I can–but it causes most people to just stop and
crinkle their foreheads.
I even note a certain irony here: within the Qur’an, those who wrote it felt free to
change Biblical names to suit easy Arabic spelling and pronunciation. Thus,
when figures like Abraham or Jesus appear in it, those characters are known as
“Ibraheem” and “Isa.” Although I suspect that those names are probably closer to
the original Aramaic names than the English spellings are, I’m equally certain
that they, too, are only rough approximations of the original.
It used to be that nobody made a big deal out of any of this stuff. It used to be
that if you transliterated a name into another language, you came up with a
reasonably close approximation that was easy to read and say, and you moved
on. I don’t really understand the point of going back and revisiting it, especially if
you’re going to try a new transliteration that’s still imperfect. Why confuse people
unnecessarily?