Islam Online: "Ask About Islam: How and Why Scriptures Got Distorted"

I have noted this sort of thinking before:

If we take the Bible as an example, the process of distortion, in my personal view, was a process of interpretation that happened through translation. When you translate something from one language to another, you are actually giving your own interpretation in the target language of translation, which interpretation could be accurate or distorted, that is, close to or far from the original meaning.

This is one of the lessons that we Muslims are to learn as well. The Qur'an should certainly remain in Arabic. Yes, we have to translate its meanings as accurately as we can for many practical reasons (writing articles in English is one of them!). But the original Arabic Scripture has to remain preserved. The way by which Islam preserved its Scripture was to encourage millions of people, in every era, to memorize it by heart and be vigilant to the slightest distortion in it. This is not what happened with the Bible, unfortunately, and what we have now is an English translation of the Greek translation of the original language. The original (Jesus's Aramaic and Moses's Hebrew) is lost.

That's right, all we have now is an English translation of the Torah.

Tags: Islam, Torah, translation, Koran, morons