Lessons from Translating the Muwatta

In 2019, the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School published a new translation of the seminal Islamic legal text, the Muwaṭṭaʾ of Imam Mālik b. Anas (d. 179/795), according to the recension of the Andalusian legal scholar, Yaḥyā b. Yaḥyā (d. 234/848). This translation was the culmination of several years of work involving a team of translators from Morocco and North America. I was responsible for ensuring the accuracy of the translation from the perspective of Islamic law.

Our translation of the Muwatta is available for free download from ShariaSource, a project of the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School.

In recognition of the importance of the translation, the Moroccan Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs invited me to give a lecture to the High Council of Religious Scholars on June 29, 2022, to discuss the work behind the translation and the methods we used. The High Council of Religious Scholars supervised the editing and publication of the Royal Moroccan Edition of the Muwatta of Yahya b. Yahya (the “RME”).

The RME was the first critical edition of the text based on the oldest North African and Andalusian manuscripts of the text. The Arabic text of the RME also includes many of the copious notes and glosses found in the marginalia of these ancient manuscripts that were left by the North African and Andalusian scholars who studied the Muwatta in the centuries after the introduction of the text to Muslim Iberia and North Africa.

For those interested in the subject of translating Arabic texts, they might find my lecture on how we approached the translation to be of interest. I also prepared slides illustrating the different stages of the translation process, and the differences between our translation and prior translations.

The Arabic text of the second edition of the RME is available on line at this link. A downloadable and (mostly) searchable pdf version of the Arabic text of the RME is available here.