Ibn Al-Ja'abi

Salams, The books I mentioned are ones I've used or examined myself in depth. I have seen the second volume of al-Kitaab and it's an alright book, but it's scope is to teach you the Arabic of educated Egyptians. It's great for what it is but my recommendations cover books on Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic. Good luck, InshaAllah. You can do really well with this book. Wassalam

Salams, I made a post mentioning all the books I've come across that I've liked here. Many of them can be found on library genesis to be downloaded for free, otherwise they're rather inexpensive on Amazon. Check out Arabic Verb Tenses, you can download it, though the edition online is older and not nearly as good as the one on Amazon (which is under $20, I think). It's great for learning MSA well and doesn't require a lot of commitment. You can also do the Standard Arabic Course afterwards, but it's a much greater commitment in time and requires a great deal of diligence.

Salams, In regards to the picture, it's likely that this is the result of careless printers who didn't go over their work proper. This has happened before as well, I remember a Shaykh showed me a copy of Yusuf Ali's translation which had an error. An infamous case for Biblical translations was when a careless printer printed out a Bible with "thou shalt commit adultery", these copies were deemed the "Wicked Bible". In any case, I'm more willing to believe that there are printers who should be out of business at fault here rather than a coordinated conspiracy. This is generally sound advice, you'd also want to consult a more reputable translator. There are, broadly speaking, two types of translation, dynamic and formal equivalence. The difference between them can be understood rendering what is intended by a passage versus what is literally said by it. Translators won't really do completely dynamic or completely formal equivelance translations, rather they might be closer to one type or the other. An overly literal translation might be clunky and hard to understand as the idioms of languages don't match up, older translators are notorious for attempting to be overly literal and employing archaisms (think of "verily" appearing every line in Quranic translations for "inna" and such words, or "and it came to pass" in Biblical translations for "wayhī", it's awkward when a modern English speaker reads it). These two styles can be seen at play in the translations you listed in those screenshots, translators who believe in Gabriel being referenced in that verse included him though he was nowhere to be found in the Arabic, others rendered "statement" as "Quran", the more literal translators just stated what the Arabic meant. Continuing from before, there is always an interpretive element in translating the Quran with arguments employed to justify those translations, trying to find a non-obvious grammatical justification or referencing hadith and tafsir literature. In some cases even more formal equivalence translators might do this when they feel it might be awkward to render a verse literally, think of Q.18:86 where it's quite literally said that "he saw the sun setting into a pool of murky (or hot) water", some have attempted to render this in other ways so that it doesn't seem a false fact is stated. Even in less extreme cases, there will always be an interpretive element to translations. Translations are, after all, renderings of one man's understanding of a text written in another. I've posted this advice before regarding Biblical translations, I think the best course of action is to choose a more literal rendering of the verse with as little interpretive elements as possible (so this excludes such translations as Mohsin Khan's, Dr. Ghalib, or Mustafa Khattabs), better translations would probably be Ali Quli Qarai's, Abdul-Hameed's, or Arberry's. This is also good advice, generally speaking. You need to have a good dictionary and probably some basic knowledge of Arabic to be effective at this as there are different possibilities for what a word can be rendered as in certain instances. This is what I meant by all translations have an interpretive element. wassalam

Salams, He has lectured on topics of Usul al-Fiqh and these have been written down and published as taqrirat, or lecture notes. You can find a collection of his works on this site. None of them are translated. wassalam

Salams, Easy Persian is easily is one of the best resources. In something like 185 short lessons you'll know Persian. However, my only two gripes with this site are (1) it doesn't seem to be complete and (2) you need to do 185 lessons! It isn't bad nonetheless, I know someone who used only 70 lessons but it gave him an excellent foundation in Persian. Here are some textbooks going from most basic to most advanced (with links to library genesis whence you can download these books for free): Basic Persian, an excellent beginner to intermediate text with a lot of vocabulary given to you. I'd recommend doing a few lessons a week and doing the exercises throughout. You should put the vocab on flashcards and go over them whenever you have 5 minutes -- if you have a smart phone, try the anki app. Anki uses an SRS software so you get cards you know well more infrequently than cards you know and the app learns from your study habits. If you get through this book you'll have a solid foundation. Thackston's Introduction to Persian, a book which has quickly become a classic text (he also has excellent textbooks in Classical Arabic, Classical Syriac, and Sorani and Kurmanji Kurdish). It's a very well-designed textbook with good explanations of grammar and it gives you a lot of opportunities to create your own sentences. It's also a beginner to intermediate text but it requires a lot more from its student than Basic Persian does, it'll through a lot of grammatical terms which can make using this book daunting. In my opinion it'd be best if you do this book after Basic Persian, that is, if you want to consolidate elementary to intermediate Persian and consolidate what you've learned. Two major pros of this book are (1) the indicies in which he gives archaic usages and modern colloquial usages you'd hear in Iran. And (2) the reader he gives at the end of the text of prose literature, it's annotated and you can practice everything you've learned if you don't want to go and read Farsi on your own yet. You'd do well even if you just read the reader at the end after doing Basic Persian. The one major drawback of this book is that the answer key isn't digitized and it isn't very cheap either. Ann K. Lambton's Persian Grammar, this is an absolutely classic book which you definitely should refer to. The author was the foremost expert of Iranian studies in her day -- even having a hand in the overthrow of Mohammed Mosaddeq in the 50s. Her dirty politics aside, her knowledge of Persian is phenomenal and this textbook is absolutely great. It's relatively advanced so if you did this after Basic Persian or after doing Thackston's Introduction to Persian you'd probably fare better than jumping into it straight away. This is a very dense text half of which also covers the Arabic grammar found in Classical Persian. It aims to ensure you'll be able to read even the most baroque texts and has exercises (both translating from and into Persian) and has its own answer key at the end as well as indicies with important information. Keep in mind that towards the end instead of getting translation exercises you'll start getting readings which are annotated, I think it also has a final reading at the end but not a reader like Thackston's, I don't find that problematic though. You'd do well if you did this as an intermediate to high intermediate or advanced grammar. As far as dictionaries go, I can't think of anyone better than Dehkhoda's dictionary. It's the Hans Wehr of Persian dictionaries, if you've studied Arabic. You can find it online here. If you have a smartphone, install the fastdic app which is also very good and based on Dehkhoda's dictionary -- the drawback of this app is that it really is more like a dictionary than an app, you can't search present stems. Wiktionary is excellent as well, I use it for everything, install the app if you can. If you want to refer to readers to practice reading, there's really only three worth mentioning: Arberry's Modern Persian Reader, based off formal texts such as newspapers and books. Haidari's Modern Persian Reader, also based of such printed sources. Thackston's translation of Gulistan-e Sa'adi (titled Saadi's Gulistan), it's a bilingual reader with glossaries at the back. Unfortunately none of them are online, but if you can save up to buy them any of them would be helpful for the serious student of Persian. There is one bilingual reader online at the end of a small reference grammar called Modern Persian Colloquial Grammar by Fritz Rosen, funnily the reader is much larger than the grammar. Nevertheless it's the only book I've found online that I found worth mentioning. It is Modern Persian for sure, in the sense that it's not Middle Persian or Old Persian, and is useful for practicing what you've learned, but it's a stretch of the imagination to think this is reflective of how people would be speaking today colloquially. This book was written in 1897 when there was still an emperor of Persia from the Qajar dynasty, it's exactly a century older than I am! Nevertheless, it's not bad. I'm not sure about you, personally I always find having a physical resource is more helpful for me than using PDFs, these books aren't too expensive on amazon so you could buy them, else you can print them out and have them spiral bound. However the PDFs are fine as well, of course. I might update this post in the future with any new resources I might come across. Finally, language is something that is a form of oral communication and that is how it evolved in the mind due to the grace of God. To learn well you need to speak and listen, not just rely on reading. Listen to Persian radio. Speak often, even if only to yourself. Sign up on a website like italki and try to get a Persian speaker to practice with. Write in Persian whenever you can. Watch Persian TV shows, movies, and lectures. InshaAllah you'll be successful. Wassalam

Salams, Br. @Qa'im has spent a decade researching, translating, compiling and arranging, noting the strength of traditions, and editing his book. It is unbelievably inconsiderate and unreasonable to assume that people put such an effort into working and not be compensated for their work. In doesn't matter if there is an ajr with God, God's rizq manifests in this world as well and demanding a reward for your work is reasonable. This knowledge wasn't with Qa'im a priori like knowledge was apparently with the Imams and Prophet, he had to work for years. If he wants compensation, compensation should be given to him. Once upon a time you had princes and nobles who would sponsor the work of scholars to write books, research, and compile traditions. They aren't around anymore and reading is more a democratic task, the authors need to be rewarded in some way. And all that aside, even if Brother Qa'im wanted no money to go to his bank account for the countless hours he spent writing this book, he still needs to publish these books. People on this site need to understand that if they don't actually provide people for incentives to work then they won't be able to since they still need to live. If you want research to be done and good material to be presented, you need to ensure that those who do this research and presentation are able to have their needs met by compensating them for their efforts and realizing that publishers will not print out books for free and couriers will not ship books for free. It's entirely reasonable to ask for compensation. Learn Arabic, get a working knowledge of how hadith sciences work, read a bunch of hadith books, compile and evaluate traditions, write a book, edit it over the course of a decade, and publish it out of pocket and ship it at your own expense if you don't want others having to pay. But you won't and no one would since the cost of doing that is much greater for you than spending $17 or $32 would be to the wallets of Shia readership. wassalam

Salams, The etymology for the Arabic name ʿĪsā is a mystery, but it's not the same as the Syriac pronunciation of Christ's name you're referring to. The historical Jesus was a Jew (at least as far as he's depicted in the Bible) and had a Hebrew name corresponding to the English name Joshua, that is יֵשׁוּעַ, (Yēšūaʿ, in Standard Biblical Hebrew: Yəhōšūaʿ (God saves)). In the first few centuries after Christ the dominant language of the near east became a specific dialect of Eastern Aramaic known as Syriac (note: this is not the same dialect Jesus would have spoken) in which an initial yōḏ becomes pronounced as if there were an initial Ālep̱ before it with a Ḥḇāṣā vowel (a long "i"), there is also a lack of a furtive paṯaḥ on final guttarals in Syriac as there is in Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic dialects, thus the lack of a pṯāḥā pronounced before the ʿayin, thus Yēšūaʿ > Yēšūʿ > ʾĪšōʿ ~ ʾĪšūʿ (ܝܫܘܥ in the Syriac script). In Arabic the transcription of the written name would be like يشوع (many Arab Christians will use the similar Yasūʿ instead of ʿĪsā) though the pronunciation is more like إيشوع which clearly isn't the same as عيسى. Furthermore in the Qurashi dialect the ʾalif maqṣūrah was always pronounced as an "ē" (with Imālāh), thus the Quranic pronunciation was more like ʿĪsē, clearly different from ʾĪšōʿ ~ ʾĪšūʿ (with an initial ālep̱ and terminal ʿayin). I wrote a more detailed post on this with citations a couple of years ago: The etymology of this name will likely remain a mystery with no clear and definite answer, however it is definitely the case that the Syriac pronunciation you're referring to is not the same as the Quranic name. It's also likely that the Quranic name was in usage already by the various Christian communities in Arabia (as there was a major presence of various Christian groups all around the peninsula). God knows. ___________________________________________________ The Latinized Greek version of his name is, however, quite obviously an attempt to preserve the Hebrew name as best as could be done in those languages, so though as @GD41586 that it isn't his name (in that he would have never called himself Ιησους or Iesus (eventually, Jesus)), this is how his name was transcribed in a somewhat logical manner over the centuries. The Greek transcription was an already accepted one for the name Joshua dating back to the Septuagint (a translation of the OT into Koine Greek), thus the jump from יֵשׁוּעַ > Ιησους (Yēšūaʿ > Iēsous) can be explained with the iota representing the semivowel "y", a substitution of the "š" of the šin with the closest Greek sound, the "s" of the "sigma" (since there is no "sh" sound in Greek), and the terminal sigma was to indicate the case as Greek is an inflected language. In the Vulgate Latin, elsewhere the name Yēšūaʿ seems to be transcribed as Iosue like the Standard Biblical Hebrew Yəhōšūaʿ, even in books written in late Biblical Hebrew, while Christ's name is transcribed by Jerome as Iesus (irregular fourth declension), this transcription belongs to only a handful of other people as well -- notably Ben Sirach. It's a reasonable assumption to think this was done in order to distinguish from other Joshuas mentioned in the Bible and to provide as close a rendering of his name as possible, and obviously there's an element of tradition associated with using Jesus. It doesn't seem sensible to say it's the wrong name in order to have a gotcha moment with our Christian friend, @Son of Placid. wassalam

Yes it has and was published by Ansariyaan, though I remember it not being a very good translation.

Salams, This thread is 3 years old and the post which was replied to is by a member who has long since been banned. If you want to discuss this topic feel free to open a new thread on it. I can only hope that an important fiqhi matter like this is addressed properly, with an analysis of the evidence and arguments and a legal epistemology with which to approach the discussion. Looking at the posts above I fear I'll be let down. However I hope that there will be civility, not curses being thrown around so lightly. Thread is locked.

Salams, Here's a link to the Ibn Battuta one. You can also find these MSA readers to download from Library Genesis: Routledge's reader for advanced Modern Standard and a reader for elementary MSA. These are alright, nothing to write home about though. There's also a reader for Classical Arabic, but it's a bit old school, I prefer the Classical Arabic reader I recommend, however this isn't the worst thing you could use, don't like how the annotations are done. Then there's Chaim Rabin's reader which is on archive.org. I do like this reader, it's a good introduction to various pieces of literature in MSA and gives you a good variety of passages to read. Unfortunately the Kalila wa Dimna reader doesn't seem to be online. It also is an annotated reader as opposed to a bilingual reader. I personally am a fan of annotated readers wherein you can translate the text yourself with new or difficult vocabulary or phrases being noted by the author, you'll also get a feel of reading books on your own this way. You also need to see if the translations in Bilingual readers are literal or more stylized, for a reader you'd want a more literal rendering of the sentence.

Salams, From what I remember the Madina course is more focused on MSA. That being said it is still very good. You are right that MSA is very similar to classical Arabic in that it tries to maintain as much Classical vocabulary as possible and employs grammatical categories from Classical Arabic which are otherwise phased out in dialects (e.g. duality). Any book teaching MSA worth its salt would give you a solid foundation for Classical Arabic, however you need to keep in mind there are differences. MSA repurposed a lot of vocabulary from classical Arabic in order to avoid importing vocabulary from foreign languages (which does still happen). So you ended up having shura become a parliament rather than a council which elects a Caliph, and the example I always like to give is that Ja'far al-Tayyar ends up becoming Ja'far the pilot rather than Ja'far the winged. There is also a somewhat more simplified sentence structure. You also have a lot of archaic vocabulary in Classical Arabic which doesn't show up in MSA. Overall, if you know MSA well you'll be able to read a Classical Arabic text as long as you have a dictionary near by to look up archaic words and can stand what can be rather baroque sentences at times. You should think of it like a reasonably educated English speaker trying to read English texts written between 1600-1900, you'll be able to especially with practice. I've also added another book (New Arabic Grammar by Haywoord and Nahmad) to the list that I discovered recently, it's a book designed to teach MSA but is incredibly useful for giving you a solid foundation for approaching classical Arabic.

Resellers will still shamelessly hike up the price of a book, sometimes double or triple (or even more) it's real value when it comes to niche subjects. I usually buy a book on Prime if I'm buying it new for this reason. I've seen this even with books the price of which is written on the back (or books where the publishers catalogue will list out how much they're selling it for). I think Robert Hoyland's Seeing Islam as Others Saw It was going for over a thousand dollars on Amazon, its real value is something like 130 dollars. They can and will hike up the price no matter what you do, whether writing the price on the cover, having the publisher put the price on their catalogue, or putting a sticker on of its price. I think Br. Qa'im took a reasonable precaution here.

Salams, Please refer to pgs. 305-312 for a discussion on the historical and linguistic background of the Masoretic text (from Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics, ed. Geoffrey Khan): https://www.academia.edu/37461996/Geoffrey_Khan_Biblical_Hebrew_Linguistic_background_of_Masoretic_Text_in_Geoffrey_Khan_et_al._eds._Encyclopedia_of_Hebrew_Language_and_Linguistics_vol._1_Leiden_Brill_2013_304-315 The reading traditions originate from dialects of Hebrew dating to the second century and reading practices preserve these. This does originate in the second temple period. wassalam

Salams, The Masoretic readings originate during the second temple period around the same time as the books written in Late Biblical Hebrew were composed (discussed at length by Geoffrey Khan in the Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics). It's generally agreed that the documentary hypothesis places the final recensions of the Torah several centuries earlier than the Maccabeean revolt (during the earlier part of the second temple period). wassalam

But what exactly was rewritten? Are you talking about the Masoretic reading tradition which did originate from that period?