One Arabic Word, THREE TRANSLATIONS! Who Decides?
25 views · 2026/10/28
One Arabic expression, three completely different English translations! In Qur'an 18:29, 44:45, and 70:8, the identical Arabic expression كَٱلْمُهْلِ (kal-muhli) is translated as molten brass, murky oil, and molten copper. This short investigates the Quranic Arabic Corpus, Arabic linguistics, and the difference between translation and interpretation. Are readers being given the meaning of the Qur'an, or a translator's preferred interpretation?
How can the same Arabic expression produce three different English substances? Classical Arabic lexicons record multiple meanings for مُهْل, but that raises an important question about translation consistency, linguistic transparency, and contextual interpretation. Through Quranic root analysis, comparative translation, and critical thinking, we examine whether English translations communicate the original Arabic faithfully. The objective is not to deny lexical variation, but to question why particular meanings are selected without clearly explaining the alternatives.
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Words can have connotations, but i wonder in this case, it's no surprise imprecise words exist, tbh in this instance i don't think it's malicious...
It would have been nice to see the context of the ayats tho brother, so we can look at it together, tho we can all research it on our own in any case.
Salam
وَذَرْنِى وَٱلْمُكَذِّبِينَ أُو۟لِى ٱلنَّعْمَةِ وَمَهِّلْهُمْ قَلِيلًا
And leave thou Me with the deniers, the possessors of prosperity, and grant thou them respite a little.
(73:11)
Interesting indeed.
Obviously it's not a perfect equivalence but almost.
In english you got the word "butter" it means that, butter, it's food, good for gears etc...
But we have the expression "butter up"
And it doesn't mean to literally cover someone in butter, it means to relax your stance to make things have less "friction"
This is not poetry, it is an idiom but unlike poetry it's not fluid, if you say "butter up" in english, it means 1 thing...
But, the word itself can mean different things as seen above, depending on context.
Language in essence works that way, the same amont of letters can mean many different things depending on how you combine them, to a lesser degree of flexibility words also work this way, arabic is not free from this and in fact it only makes sense arabic works like that also since it's practical... and it's how people before the Qur'an was revealed also spoke and the Qur'an, while different was also familiar to the people it came down to... it was not precisely like poetry so "complex" and "unreachable" that only the highly educated in the mystical occult arts were able to understand it...
It was and is reachable by anyone with a clean heart who knows that tongue... (and remember the word "language" comes from "lingua" meaning tongue... it's the same thing but allegedly from the latin root...)
We both know translations are not precise, but that doesn't mean they always are so wrong in that sense, again if the word "oil" in the Qur'an now means to "oil up" instead of butter up, that would be weird and make no sense in the context...
"context is king" as they say.
In the case we mentioned maybe it does mean just one thing, but i was talking more in general about the idea of a basic meaning and a connotation or idiom, which is nothing weird nor a stretch...
Salam