A critic of the Quran can publish on it without knowing Arabic

Evidence

Having discovered the historical Muhammad in 2000, in 2002 Ibn Warraq went on to tell his readers about what the Quran really says in a book by that title. He spends the Introduction trying to disguise the fact that he does not know Arabic. “Muslims in general,” he writes, “have a tendency to disarm any criticisms of Islam and in particular the Koran by asking if the critic has read the Koran in the original Arabic … ” He complains of their “almost mystical and rather irrational attitude to the untranslatability of the Koran.” (There are Muslims who have the same attitude toward Hamlet and the Bhagavad-Gita.) Hiding behind the irrelevant fact that for the majority of Muslims Arabic is the liturgical language of their faith (as Latin has been for Christians and Hebrew for Jews—who often do not speak it) rather than the functional language of their quotidian and literary lives, Ibn Warraq proceeds to deliver a phantasmagoric account of the “Afro-Asiatic, Semitic, Aramaic, Syriac, and Arabic” division of languages—only to hide his ignorance of Arabic, which is particularly embarrassing for someone publishing a book on What the Koran Really Says—not merely says, or nearly says, but really says. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 519

Categorization

• SHARE: The point that a public critic can publish ‘What the Koran Really Says’ while hiding ignorance of Arabic is precisely aimed at anyone tracking ex-Muslim/atheist polemics against Islam.
• XREF: connects to: Claims that the Quran borrowed from Scripture were linguistically unserious

Related

• Claims that the Quran borrowed from Scripture were linguistically unserious (similarity 0.86)
• Ibn Warraq argues Arabic fluency is unnecessary for valid critique of Islam. (similarity 0.84)
• Muslims have long practiced self-criticism within their own languages under their own names (similarity 0.79)
• Untranslatable Arabic aesthetics were read as proof of barbarism (similarity 0.79)
• Insular academic language on Islam enables public charlatans (similarity 0.79)