An-Najah Staff

ABSTRACT Definitions of the words: orient and orientalism: Orientalism is the name of western thinking and its foundation is based on the ideology of racial division of east and west. According to it, the western people have a racial and cultural superiority over eastern people. A very common definition of Orientalism is as follows:-" The involvement of non-eastern people in the eastern languages, civilization, philosophy, literature and religion and to get themselves busy in its study. " The definition of Orientalist according to latest Oxford Dictionary is as follows:-" Orientalist is one who gets skill in the eastern literature and studies ". The concept of Orientalist according to Al-Manjid is as follows: " The scholar of eastern languages, literatures and studies is called Orient and the name of its study is Orientalism ". (Al-Azhari, 1983) Means Orient is one who is the expert of eastern languages and history. There are four main objectives for orientalism: 1. Religious objectives 2. Educational objectives 3. Economical objectives 4. Political objectives I'm very much concerned here with the first objective as the paper concentrates on translating the Holy Qur'an which is the book of Islam. Religious Objectives: Although Orientalism Movement is known as the educational movement, but it is not difficult to decide for the student of history of this movement that the actual purpose under which this movement was initiated was religious. There were three basic objectives they had in their mind regarding their religion while turning towards the Islamic knowledge. (i) Islam should be stopped to spread, partly among the nations of world and especially in the Christian and Jewish nations. Rana Qadri: Orientalists and the Holy Qur'an: Translation or Distorion (ii) Efforts should be paid to make Muslims convert to Christianity. (iii) The third reason regarding the Christians to take interest in Arabic language and eastern knowledge was that some people appeared at that time among them who thought it better to trust the Hebrew translations of their holy book instead of other translations in European languages in order to know about the actual Christian belief (Al-Jabri, 1995) Orientalism started as a religious and cultural movement searching in the Arab World to know about the Arab's religion, culture, history, and tradition. They tried hard to dig deeply in the Arab's religion through the Holy Quran, Sunnah, the history of the prophet's life and his friends, and in the Arabic Language and any other details related to their culture. Then it moved to be a political movement.