Arabic utterances in a multilingual world: Shāh Walī-Allāh and Qur’anic translatability in North India

This article investigates how Arabic texts reached multilingual audiences in North India the eighteenth century. Drawing on a remarkable treatise translating Qur’an into Persian by Delhi intellectual Shāh Walī-Allāh (d. 1176/1762), it argues that so-called “interlinear” translations functioned to preserve sound of utterances as well their meaning. By anchoring another language utterances, these also reified symbolic hierarchies between and languages used translate it. Walī-Allāh’s understanding translatability was closely tied up with notions Qur’anic structure (naẓm) sonic qualities language, but informed sensitivity linguistic difference society he lived in.