Lost in translation: Australia’s top cleric

I could not pretend to have a ready answer … if there is one.

All the same, al Hilali made me realise that language is largely an understanding between members of a community that they share the meanings assigned to certain symbols. When the community does not like the symbols they can change them because they are the ones that created them.

Like English, Arabic can be whatever its speakers want it to be. It is mostly a reflection on the state of mind of its people. There may be some truth in the suggestion that in order to breathe badly-needed life into the Arabic language we have to change the vision of its speakers.

Australian Muslims and others have said that leaders in al Hilali’s position must have a good command of English. It could also be recommended that they command an Arabic adapted to the ways of a new world: more concrete, with fewer flourishes, subtle but not evasive, shaped to a different sensibility.

In this it would be true to its own history - an intellectual and social instrument which encountered many worlds and mastered them. Of those worlds Australia could be the latest, and not the last.