An interesting interview with a translator

Posted on March 11, 2026March 11, 2026 by Roger Pearse

The following 2015 article, “Interview with Translator Abdul Aziz Suraqah,” contains some interesting insights.

I recently had the honour of interviewing Sidi Abdul Aziz Suraqah, an inspiring translator, editor and educator, currently based in Toronto (Canada), who has translated some of the best available Classical Islamic text out there from Arabic to English. Moreover, he is famously known for his fantastic website and blog: Ibriz Media….

Sidra: Please could you share a bit about yourself?

Abdul Aziz : My name is Abdul Aziz Suraqah. I was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. During the golden age of Hip Hop, when I was 14 years old, I was inspired by groups like Public Enemy and KRS One to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. That led to an interest in Islam, and so after reading a translation of the Quran I embraced Islam, al-Hamdulillah. A couple of years later I began to study Arabic and soon thereafter pursued further studies in Yemen, Mauritania, and Morocco. I currently teach at Dar al-Ma’rifah and Risalah Foundation here in Toronto, Canada. And since 2007 I’ve been translating Islamic texts full time. The name of my service is Ibriz Media. ….

Sidra: Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing?

Abdul Aziz : The most challenging thing in translating Islamic literature, for me at least, is maintaining a good intention and upholding adab in the entire process from beginning to end. It’s not always easy to translate these incredibly profound spiritual or theological works day in and day out—it’s hard to be “on” and in the moment with the texts every single day. When I experience constriction (qabd) or a mental block or setback, I’ll work on less intensive projects or even pull back for a day or two and double up when my energy returns. …

From a technical perspective, the biggest challenge is striking a balance between fidelity to the source language, i.e., the original words of the author, and readability in the target language. It’s incredibly challenging and there are several possibilities to choose from, so the first rule I try to observe is “Do no harm.”

Sidra: What are the most rewarding elements of translating a book?

Abdul Aziz : …

It’s also very touching to meet someone who says they benefitted from a book I’ve translated. Translation work is lonely and most translators don’t get to hear back from readers, so when we do hear that someone has enjoyed or benefitted from our work it makes all the efforts worthwhile, al-Hamdulillah. The best feedback I’ve received was from a friend who read The Drink of the People of Purity and saw the author Shaykh Muhammad al-Qandusi in a dream. Here is what he said:

I fell asleep reading The Drink of The People of Purity. As soon as I fell asleep, I found myself at Bab al-Futuh [a large cemetery in Fez, Morocco in which lie thousands of saints and scholars] in front of the Maqam of Sayyidna Abdul Aziz al-Dabbagh. At the Maqam, I found an old man sitting with his back resting on the outer left wall of the Maqam. I walked to the man and asked him to make du’a for my affairs. He raised his head and said, “What more is there to give you after my book?” I was puzzled and then I asked him, “Are you Shaykh Muhammad al-Qandusi?” The man replied with a very intense stare, “I am him but he is not I. He knows where I am.” I lowered my gaze and begged for du’a. He said, “Do not wait to drink until you are overcome with thirst. Drink! And always stay hydrated.” He then said “If you don’t know what I mean then ask my Translator.” After he said this, His Jalal [majesty] immediately turned into Jamal [beauty] with a radiant smile. I kissed his forehead and woke up.

Sidra: Can you give us some examples of a word or phrase that just doesn’t translate well?

Abdul Aziz : Let’s see. Taqwa comes up a lot and there doesn’t seem to be good translation of it that is accurate and a single word. You’ll see renderings such as Godfearingness (my preferred choice when it is not used in a different context), mindfulness (a nice sounding translation but still a bit opaque), God-consciousness, and even fear.

When translating Shaykh Yusuf al-Nabahani’s Wasa’il al-wusul (Muhammad: His Character and Beauty) I had to wrestle with an oft-used word pair, mudarat and mudahana. Mudarat is defined as “the sacrifice of a worldly interest in order to attain either a worldly or a religious benefit, or both together,” so after much mental wrangling I settled on the word sociability. The other word, mudahana, literally means lubricity (yeah, that’s a word). It is defined as “the sacrifice of one’s religion for the sake of attaining a worldly benefit.” (Bajuri) The late translator Muhtar Holland (Allah have mercy upon him) translated it is “fawning flattery.” That’s a sound translation, but after consultation with some teachers I decided to translate it as sycophancy.

In Arabic there are many phrases that are hard to turn around into English. Sometimes the original flow is lost in order to preserve the structure of the target language; but over the years translators develop a repertoire of maneuvers and turns of phrase that get them out of tight spots.

Sidra: Which book past or present, do you imagine was the most difficult to translate?

Abdul Aziz : No need to imagine that one! The most difficult translation by far was Shaykh Sa’id Foudah’s A Refined Explanation on the Sanusi Creed. That project cost me blood, sweat, and tears (the latter two literally!) It’s an intermediate text in classical Sunni-Ash’ari theology detailing the textual and rational proofs for the tenets of faith. What made the project so challenging was the footnotes, as Shaykh Sa’id was quoting from earlier theologians who are known to use a very tightly packed style of speech where detailed meanings are crammed into terse phrases. It’s no exaggeration to say that unpacking those into clear English was at times terrifying. This is theology after all; who wants to mistranslate something about belief in Allah and His Messengers and unknowingly mislead innocent readers? Ya Latif!

Sidra: How long does it take you to translate a book roughly?

Abdul Aziz : It all depends on the nature of the book, the time period in which it was written, the size, etc. For a book in Arabic that is, say, 100 pages with average sized font, it can take anywhere from a month to two months to translate it provided it’s the only thing I’m working on. But that doesn’t factor in all of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into preparing a book for publication: self-edits, research, copy editing, typesetting, proofreading, etc. It usually takes 18 months or more for a book to get from A to Z and in bookstores, so when you see a translation made available at a bookstore or online, it was probably finished around two years ago.

There is more at the link, and all interesting. This is not an academic translator, but someone doing this in the field. “Abdul Aziz” is or was an American by birth, I should add. His website, https://ibrizmedia.com/, is offline now, and it looks as if the domain has gone, but it is archived here.

The dream anecdote reminded me of an anecdote by Kevin Sylvan Guthrie, who translated various works of Proclus, including the Life by Marinus (online here):

This reissue of Proclus’ works came about in a strange, Providential way, Mr Emil Verch was a California miner, with no classical education, but with a deep desire to know the truth, and with abstemious impulses, and desire for knowledge of the Invisible.

One day, much to his surprise, he heard a great oration, in an unknown tongue, by a sage who appeared to him, and who was demonstrating geometrical and symbolic figures. After his great surprise was over, he insisted on knowing the sage’s name, and was told it was PROCLUS (this happened in a miner’s cabin in California’s mountain mining district, and later in the Delta Hotel in San Francisco).

As Mr Verch did not know anything about PROCLUS he went around asking about him, and ultimately, while working as engineer on a ship in New York Harbour, through the Marine Y.M.C.A, thanks to the enlightened liberality of Mr Beard who could appreciate mystic devotion even if in unfamiliar language, he came to me, and visited TEOCALLI, where I showed him what works of Proclus I happened to have, and a list of his works.

Till then I had neglected Proclus, being absorbed in Plotinus, Numenius, Pythagoras. Indeed, the ebbing of the forces of my life seemed to preclude any new interests; but Mr Verch’s insistence that I do something for PROCLUS led me to assent in principle. Encouraged by vague promises of assistance when I gave up my heart-breaking work at ALL SAINTS, during the 1924 Christmas vacation, I did my best to investigate anew a manifolding process, through which I have managed to get this much together, trusting to God to help. [K.S.G.]

The parallel is not exact. Indeed I fear that Guthrie may have been the victim of a prank by this Emil Verch, who amused himself at the expense of his victim. But interesting to see people getting translators to do work for them by claiming a vision in a dream.

TES article calls for translation of Latin, Greek, to be valid research goals

Posted on March 18, 2016 by Roger Pearse

An important article by Dr Emma Gee of St Andrews University has appeared in the Times Higher Education supplement here.

Recently, an audience of “disadvantaged” 16-year-olds listened with rapt attention when I read from my translation of Lucretius’ On the Nature of the Universe.

Written around 55BC, this is the first surviving full-scale account of a cosmology based on atoms and void, dispensing with an active role for the gods. Lucretius’ hallucinogenic poem unpacks every aspect of the world, from the physics of colour to the anatomy of love. It is not a fossil: it is startlingly modern.

Any translation of it, therefore, must be punchy and immediate. In mine, Lucretius’ Latin hexameters play out in the rhythms of rap; the Roman goddess of love morphs into Richard Dawkins’ “selfish gene”; birds rain down from the sky like satellite debris; and the catastrophic collapse of the structures of the universe leaves us stumbling around the ground zero of our exploded certainties.

At no stage did the kids listening seem patronised or alienated. Their questions showed a keen awareness that many ideas we might consider “modern” in fact have a long history.

Last year, Edith Hall, professor of Classics at King’s College London, complained in a newspaper article about the “apartheid system in British Classics”: the subject’s enduring role as an instrument of social differentiation, based on proficiency in ancient Greek and Latin. Yet translation can make powerful classical texts available to people well beyond traditional elite audiences.

…

You might expect, therefore, translation to enjoy high status among classicists. But you would be wrong. The Classics subpanel in the 2014 research excellence framework, for instance, offered no separate submission category for translations. They fell under the “other” category, which accounted for only 0.5 per cent of total submissions –and no stand-alone translations were submitted at all.

…

Furthermore, the REF guidelines were applied in a way that militated against translation. Universities played it safe, to the extent of introducing their own supplementary limiting criteria that actively discouraged translation. A former director of research for one of the UK’s larger Classics departments commented: “We worked on the assumption that translations…simply would not be deemed to constitute research.” Perhaps more surprising, translation was marginalised even under the banner of impact. Of the 65 case studies submitted, none obviously involves translation.

Nor does the problem appear to be confined to Classics. Modern languages too had no separate REF category for translations. Among the 4,943 submissions to the modern languages sub-panel, just nine were “other assessable outputs”, which may have included translations. Many colleagues around the country have told me that they either did not produce translations or did not submit them to the REF because they didn’t think they would be valued.

The unavoidable conclusion is that humanities research has become almost exclusively inward-looking in its privileging of academic discourse for academics. Of course, those of us at the coalface knew this anyway: research is a game not about truth. But it is a shame that classicists are failing to use one of the key tools for breaking down class barriers and giving people access to many of the life-changing documents that their discipline has spent millennia preserving.

This is very well said. I hope that important ears are listening.

Agapius translation – great minds think alike

Posted on November 27, 2008 by Roger Pearse

The Arabic history of Agapius was published with a very simple French translation in the Patrologia Orientalis. Since there is no English translation of this interesting work, I’ve been working on making one from the French. The PO version was made by a Russian, so is not complex French and machine translators can make quite a good attempt at it.

I heard today from another online chap, who has been doing the same! He’s suggesting we look at collaboration, or at least avoiding doing the same job twice. That would be sensible, I think.

I never imagined that there was any risk of someone else doing this. I felt a bit shifty about it; translating a translation is a bit rubbish. But after a century it is clear that no-one was going to make an English translation of any of the five important Arabic Christian histories. Maybe my efforts might provoke one!

In a way, we’re looking at a positive spiral here. An amateur does a rubbishy translation of part of it from French, which provokes another amateur to do a better one, which provokes someone who knows Arabic to improve the situation again, which leads a professional to do an academic version. That’s what is happening with Eusebius Chronicle (more or less!), and everyone benefits as momentum takes hold.

Of course there is a negative spiral possible, as Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie found out almost a century ago. He produced some bad translations of Proclus, often from the French. No-one took any notice. The only person to take any notice was a now-forgotten academic, who published a review slagging them off as worthless. So Guthrie was discouraged, no-one else was motivated to do better, and to this day the works he attempted have never received a proper translation.

Let’s hope that everyone who sees efforts like mine will think “I can do better” — and do better; rather than spend time debunking them. Per ardua ad astra.