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Originally Posted by cmdahler
That's all well and good, but can you imagine the response in the Islamic community if an ebook Arabic version of the Koran were published with an error or two in the text, even something you personally would consider a minor font issue? Don't you imagine that the publisher would take a lot of time to ensure such errors didn't exist before making it available?
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Please understand that I am
not denigrating your very evident concern over this. What I'm struggling to understand is how, with so very, very many translations of the Bible out there, any given one of them can be regarded as being an authoritative text, since they are all different. Or are they
all authoritative? Is this typographical convention for the various forms of the Hebrew name of God something that they all do in the same way? I don't read Hebrew, only Greek, and the matter doesn't arise in Greek because the word for "God" used in both the Septuagint and the New Testament is just "theos", which is an ordinary everyday word, and exactly the same word you'd use if you were talking about one of the "classical" gods.
The situation with the Koran, where there's just one accepted text, is very different. It's either right or it's wrong.
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I seriously doubt, for example, that every single Muslim in the world is capable of reading Arabic, yet they manage to be devotional and strongly religious just the same.
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Mosques all over the world teach children to read the Koran in Arabic, just as the more traditional branches of Judaism teach children to read the Bible in Hebrew, regardless of their everyday spoken language. It's just the way that the thing is done.