تابعین کرام کا مقام و مرتبہ اور ان کی علمی و ادبی خدمات

After the Prophets of Allah Almighty, the most sacred class of mankind is the class of Prophet Muhammad's Companions. Those are the people who had seen the prophet of Islam with their naked eyes, remained in his companionship and got the heights of knowledge and actions and proved to be a great example of character by attaining the image of Prophet Muhammad's model of excellence. Another class which, like the companions of Prophet (pbuh), deserves such honor is the class of Tabe’en (The followers of the Companions).  Tabe'en had contributed a matchless role in the history of Islam regarding religious knowledge and literature. They had also examplary performed in social, economical, political and military services. Due to these great services they are considered the most sacred class of the Ummah after the prophet’companions. There is a list of academic and literary services ahead of the name of each person in this class. And these services are the great testimony to the greatness of these people. The prophet's companions received the religious knowledge directly from the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him), while Tabe'en got it from the companions and then published it in the whole world. The sincere efforts performed by Tabe'en regarding Quran, Hadith, Tafseer and Islamic litrature are of so high level that no one had reached such level of sincerity in the entire history of Islam. The steps that occur after that period, regarding the development of Islamic culture are only the effects of their services. Actually ‘‘Tabe’en’’ is the only class that has spread the social, moral and spritual blessings of Islam throughout the world. That is why, it is not only the Quran that witnesses their greatness but the Prophet (peace be upon him) also praises them.

A Comparative Study of Pragmatic Losses in English Translations of the Holy Quran

The chief objective of a translation is to convey the meanings of the source text to the target text readership. It is the transfer of the content as well as the textual mood to the possible extent. However, achieving this objective remains a crucial challenge on account of social, cultural and linguistic differences among the people of different colors, religions and geographical regions. Morphological, lexical, phonological, syntactical, stylistic, social, psychological and cultural differences among the languages result cumulatively into a broad range of pragmatic losses during the process of translation. The situation gets more intricate when it is the matter of religious literature, especially, the revealed sacred texts. In this regard, it is deemed highly significant to identify the elements of pragmatic loss in the source text and their respective manifestations in translated texts for the awareness of the translators and readers to curtail the possible distortion of the meaning enshrined in the source text. The present qualitative research aimed at investigating three different English translations (wordfor-word translation, literal translation and running translation with lexical and syntactic expansion) of Sūrah al-Kahf of the Holy Qur’ān. The researcher traced and analyzed the instances of pragmatic losses in these three English translations employing comparative pragmalinguistic model which has been tailored for this study. The findings reveal significant similarities as well as differences in these three translations entailing clear manifestations of pragmatic losses. These pragmatic losses occur in the forms of loss of tense, loss of texture, loss of grammatical category, loss of gender, loss of textual meaning, loss of culture-specific terms etc. Finally, certain recommendations have been made for the contemporary and future translators of the Holy Qur’ān in particular and other religious or non-religious Arabic texts in general.