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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 December 2009
Professor Guillaume's new translation of the Sīrah of Ibn Isḥāq (in the recension of Ibn Hishām) will stand as an enduring monument to his tenure of the Chair of Arabic at the University of London. The Arabic has been rendered into elegant classical English, very readable in style, with none of that awkwardness of English idiom which often besets translations attempting to present an Arabian setting and outlook so utterly different from those of the Occident as that portrayed in the Sīrah.
page 3 note 1 Minor points of criticism in the translation are first of all the transcriptions of the type Abu ‘Abdu Shams, which does not seem very consistent, and secondly, the avoidance of the literal translation of obscenities which might perhaps have been rendered in good orientalist tradition into the decent obscurity of Latin! For example (p. 177) farj does not mean ‘ womb ’, and on p. 502 the translation of a phrase well known to Arabists as, ‘ Suck al-Lāt's nipples! ’ might well lead the sociologist who is not at the same time an Arabist to formulate theories entirely baseless concerning the mother-nature of al-Lāt! The significance of Abū Bakr's rudeness is better understood when one recalls that ‘Urwa, to whom it was addressed, was actually the sādin of al-Lāt. It is a pity that, owing to the shortness of time, the indices are so incomplete, but for the scholar this is not so vital a matter as he can have recourse to those provided with the standard Arabic versions.
