PHD, Kent State University, 2025, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies

The dynamic landscape of Quranic translation into English has been significantly influenced by historical events, socio-political contexts, and evolving interpretations (al-Amri, 2019). Among the socio-political contexts, the post-9/11 era emerges as a distinctive period, with certain terms, notably kufr (disbelief), jihad (strife), hijab (head/body covering [referred to as jalabeeb and khumur]), and darb (strike), becoming especially contentious in Quran translations (Haddad, 2007; Abdulla, 2007; and Alsultany, 2021). While previous studies have examined linguistic difficulties of pre- and post-9/11 Quran translations (Haddad, 2007; Ghazali, 2012; al-Amri, 2016; Nabeel, 2012), none have undertaken a comprehensive analysis of the event's direct influence on Quran translation. This study, therefore, addresses this gap in the literature by methodically examining if, and how, the 9/1 attacks1 have changed the Quran translations that were published in North America (US and Canada). To address this issue, a corpus of 32 complete English translations was compiled from the online libraries of Quran Archive and Islam Awakened to facilitate a nuanced, close reading and contextualized content analysis of key passages. While the contextualized content analysis method focuses on interpreting the Quranic verses that have been controversial post-9/11, the close reading examines the 32 Quran translations from both a translation strategy's perspective and translator's background perspective (i.e., the translators' religious beliefs, nationality, qualifications, and publication venues). The findings of the study substantiate the hypothesis that the 9/11 attacks had a profound impact on the translation of the four key terms. The results further demonstrate a notable shift in translation strategies, transitioning from a predominant reliance on literal translation and borrowing prior to 9/11 to an increased use of modulation and explicitation in the post-9/11 period. Overall, the infl (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Said Shiyab (Advisor); Françoise Massardier-Kenney (Committee Member); Ryan Miller (Other); David Odell-Scott (Committee Member); Babacar M’baye (Committee Member) Subjects: Language; Language Arts; Religion; Religious Congregations; Religious Education; Religious History; Theology

Master of Arts (MA), Wright State University, 2023, English

Zora Neale Hurston is an African-American writer, anthropologist, and ethnographer of the Harlem Renaissance. She is distinguished for documenting and celebrating the religions of African Americans in the South. In this study, the author argues that Hurston represents the practiced religions in Southern African-American communities in Jonah's Gourd Vine and Moses, Man of the Mountain while noticeably omitting Islam, despite the fact that Islam predominated in more Northern African-American Communities as a reclaimed religious history and practice. Hurston's exclusion prompts inquiries into the history of Islamic erasures in Southern African-American communities and introduces ambiguity in interpreting the metaphors found in Jonah's Gourd Vine because of the differences between the Biblical and Quranic narratives surrounding the figure of Jonah. The author concludes that Hurston omits Islam because it was not noticeably practiced in the South among the African-American community. Finally, the author argues that Muslim readers must understand the Biblical Jonah to understand the metaphorical meanings of the vine relative to the protagonist John Buddy Pearson in Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine.

Committee: Crystal B. Lake Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Andrew Strombeck Ph.D. (Committee Member); Shengrong Cai Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; Literature; Religion; Religious History; Spirituality

PHD, Kent State University, 2021, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies

Over the last two decades, researchers have shown an increased interest in studying gender-related issues in the translations of the Quran (Hassen, 2012; Maliki, 2015; Hassen, 2018). Existing research recognizes the influence of translators' ideologies on their translation of gender in the Quran. However, this research has relied on subjective approaches and small-scale qualitative analysis. The existing studies (Habibeh Khosravi & Majid Pourmohammadi, 2016; Maliki, 2015; Hassen, 2012; Herrag, 2012) tend to focus on a limited number of verses known to be problematic with regard to our understanding of gender and provide an in-depth textual analysis of excerpts from different translations. These micro-level methodologies fail to account for all the instances of reference to women in the texts and subsequently cannot provide a comprehensive picture of the representation of women in the translations of the Quran. Quantitative methods are needed to provide a systematic, more objective, large-scale analysis to account for all the instances of reference to women and to take into consideration the whole discourse defining and describing women in these translations. Thus, the present study employs, for the first time, a combination of qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth CDA), (an analytical approach for critically investigating the ways in which discourses construct, maintain and legitimize social inequalities) and quantitative corpus-based methods to investigate how women are translated in five different English translations of the Quran. The use of mixed methods analysis offers a balanced way to study gender in translation. While corpus methods provide a point of entry to the data through frequencies, collocates and concordances, CDA uncovers the connection between the text and the ideology of the translator. The findings make an important contribution to the theory and praxis of feminist translation by extending its boundaries to include nonwestern percep (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Françoise Massardier-Kenney (Advisor) Subjects: Gender Studies; Language; Middle Eastern Studies; Religion; Womens Studies