Lost In Transliteration

However frivolous it may appear to defend the ampersand, the appearance of language on the page does matter, and nowhere more conspicuously than with regard to the perpetual familiarity of Judaism and the perpetual strangeness of Islam in a Christian cultural context.

Within my lifetime, it was once regarded as perfectly proper to speak of Moslems and their holy book, the Koran. These days, however, some Muslims regard the former transliteration as offensive, it having gone the way of Peking and Bombay. Their holy book is The Qur'an. For Western readers - an increasing number of whom are challenged by the distinction between it's and its - the presence of this apostrophe (representing the Arabic letter hamza) is an obstacle too far. For all that Muslims regard their theology as fraternal to Christianity, there is little chance on casual acquaintance that an English-speaking Christian would recognise this while coughing up a glottal stop.

The Jews, of course, have the Tanakh. This title is the acronymic combination of Torah, Nevi'im and Ketuvim, but Western readers are more familiar with this document in the redaction that we know as the Old Testament. Since Western readers are happy to ignore the body of Jewish religious literature aside from the Tanakh, the only Jewish holy book that they are required to encounter is something translated from Greek by, um, Shakespeare. Even the name of the Judaic-Christian holy book, the Bible, is etymologically orthodox, comforting to those bibliophiles amongst us.

So, how absurd is it to treat the relative distances between the three major monotheistic religions as partly, perhaps largely, orthographic?

The counterargument, I suppose, is that the Tanakh became incorporated in the Bible because Jewish religious writings were constitutive to Christianity in a way that Islam (being historically later) could never be. Most Christians have (however inadvertently) a Tanakh in their home; few have a Qur'an. Islam was a world political force long after the Jewish Diaspora, leading to a clash of civilisations that established a long rivalry between Christian and Islam nations. Those looking for substantive reasons for Western Christians to feel that Jews have an underlying similarity to them have plenty of arguments to call upon.

In reality, however, the Tanakh and the Qur'an are not staggeringly different documents, and they draw upon similar material. Muslims draw on Jewish history just as much as Christians do and incidents such as Abraham's near sacrifice of his son (albeit of Ishmael rather than Isaac) is just one of the narrative focal points that are shared. Moreover, while Jesus finds a place both in Islam and in Christian-era Jewish teaching, Islam gives a far more prominent role to Jesus than Judaism does. Theologically speaking, Islam has a much more Christian mindset than Judaism does, not least because Judaism retains its focus on the fate of the Chosen People, whereas Islam and Christianity are both strongly transracial and evangelical religions.

Now that there is a U.S. president with a heteronymic name (however much people try to force it to conform to an Irish-American logic as President O'Bahmer) perhaps the alien nature of Arabic will be somewhat diminished in the public mind. Given, however, the reflex to which many Westerners appear to have become conditioned at hearing the declaration in Arabic that "God is great", there may be some work left to do in reconciling Western fear of the unknown.