This page is not a reading summary; it is one leg of our reading framework. Here we do not interpret Dost; we only explain this: do we hold on to the words of the Futuhat that we read, or is a transmission error accumulating in our hands? We asked this of ourselves too, because every line of this work rests on a quotation.
What we wondered
We do not read the Futuhat from its Arabic. We have Ekrem Demirli's 18-volume Turkish translation. Our reading notes, in turn, came from the site's summary of this translation. From time to time a quoted phrase appears in the summary, a sentence given as "Dost says this." The question was: do those phrases put in quotation marks in the summary actually stand on the pages of the translation itself?
The answer to this question matters. On one side is the fear of "did we transmit it wrongly"; on the other, that every word we use in the side-by-side reading should have its feet on the ground. Even if this is a work of the heart, we want to stand firm when we give our word.
How we looked
We set apart the items we found surprising in our reading (those at degree 3, the highest in our own working label). Among them we looked at those carrying a quoted fragment, on condition that the fragment be at least twenty characters.
Then we had a machine do the following. We put both the fragment in the summary and the relevant volume of the translation into the same mold, without regard to letters, accents, spaces, and punctuation. We cut the fragment into small windows of twenty-four characters and searched for each window in the text of the relevant volume. If we found at least eighty percent of the windows, we said "found." Between forty and eighty percent was "partly"; below forty percent was "not found."
The text of the translation itself (the scanned copy sitting in Murat's Drive) did not enter the repository or the site; for copyright reasons we do not give a single sentence from the translation here either. Only the numbers remained.
What came out
There were 1087 items carrying a quoted fragment.
- In 937 items, the phrase in the summary was seen to occur in the text of the translation itself as well.
- In 71 items it was found partly.
- In 79 items it was not found.
Looking only at items of the "quotation" type (922 items), the picture is somewhat better: 834 found, 54 partly, 34 not found. This is because in the quotation type the main task is to give the phrase itself; in the other types the summary uses the phrase of the translation more freely.
So the overwhelming majority of the phrases stand in place in the translation. This relieved us, but it did not make us say "all is well"; the ones not found had to be looked at one by one.
What the not-found ones may mean
"Not found" points not to an error but to a list of possibilities. The ones that came to our minds:
- The scanned book being corrupted in reading. A word split at the end of a line, a misread letter, a shifted page number can confuse the machine's search.
- The summary putting its own words in quotation marks. The summary may have shortened a sentence, changed a suffix, or joined two sentences; the meaning stays the same, but the letter-for-letter match is lost.
- A shift in volume or page number. The word is right but in another place.
- A difference in the rendering of a verse. The summary gives the verse in one rendering, the translation in Demirli's own.
We looked one by one at the 34 quotations that were not found. For each we found the closest passage in the translation and compared them by hand. The result: no genuinely wrong quotation came out. The distribution of the thirty-four:
- 14 are due to scanning errors and line-end splitting. The text is the same; only the letters in the scanned book are corrupted.
- 17 are the summary's adaptation. The meaning is the same as the sentence in the translation; the summary shortened the sentence or changed the suffix, keeping the quotation marks.
- 2 are verse-rendering differences. The summary gave one rendering, the translation another.
- 1 was in fact found in the translation; because it was short, it stayed below the threshold in the first scan.
We checked one example by hand in particular: the summary's sentence saying that even Moses was afraid and fled. The translation says that if the staff's turning into a serpent had been from Moses's resolve, he would not have turned back and fled, and it says in many places that Moses was afraid. The summary's sentence turned out to be consistent with this.
What this means, and what it does not
This is not an Arabic check. Here we looked at the fidelity of the summary to the translation; we did not look at the translation's conformity to the Arabic original. That is a separate job. Unless a comparison with the Arabic original is made, no sentence of this work should be read as "Dost's own word"; it should be read as "according to the site's summary of the Demirli translation."
Let us also say one thing openly: this check does not test the interpretation of what is said at all. It only asks whether the phrase inside the quotation marks is really in the translation. The closenesses in the side-by-side reading are a separate question, and they remain a question.
What is left to us
It is possible to pull the 19 quotations in the summary (the adaptation group and the verse-rendering group) one-to-one to the sentence in the translation. This would accord with the principle that a quotation is the source's own word. It would affect only the research notes; it would not touch the Futuhat summaries on the site. We have not yet done this; we are waiting for Murat's approval.
The question also stands: who can make the comparison with the Arabic original, and how? We do not understand Dost; nor do we give up trying to understand.
Arabic check: the first thirty quotations
We were able to reach the Arabic text of the Futuhat: the text digitized by OpenITI (Dar Ihya al-Turath al-Arabi, Beirut 1998 edition; footnotes and table of contents cleaned). We searched in this text for the thirty quotations that stand foremost on the form pages: with the Arabic phrases we extracted from the Turkish sentences, according to the unvocalized writing, with several different attempts.
Result: twenty-three quotations agree with the Arabic, three agree partly, four were not found. "Not found" does not mean that the Turkish is wrong: it may be an edition difference, a free rendering, or the limit of our search. For the four that were not found we noted the nearest passages, but those passages are not the same word; so we did not count them as "agree."
A few observations:
- The couplet "Had He not been, we would not have been / Had we not been, He would not have been" occurs in the Arabic exactly.
- The first half of the sentence "Every breath is construction and creation" is not in the Arabic as such; there is another sentence that gives the same idea ("in every breath a new construction in us").
- The Arabic of the sentence "Time and nature have no external existence" says "time and place (hayyiz)"; the scope of "nature" in the Turkish is somewhat different.
- The sentence "by means of ... through the occasion of ..." on the Cause page appears in the Arabic in the form "beside a thing"; the details are on the Cause page.
Limits: the Arabic text is from a single edition; our section numbering does not fit one-to-one with the edition's chapter and page arrangement, so in most places we made the matching from the sentence itself. There may be digitization errors. More than these thirty quotations have not been compared with the Arabic.