Privacy in Islam: A Sacred Human Right

‘Right to Privacy’ or the’ Privacy of an individual’ is considered as the most important and the most basic of all the fundamental rights and liberties. It is the concern of all legal systems, civilizations, cultures and religions. In the modern Western and legal perspectives, the right to privacy has emerged from the concept of right to life, which is considered as the basic right from which all the other rights are derived. Islam, on the other hand, considers as an independent and separate human right. The present study is an attempt to briefly reflect and accumulate all the aspects and dimensions of the Privacy right in Islam. It is mainly concerned with the privacy of one’s home, confidential correspondence investigating someone’s financial, private and family affairs, and other such violations, Its punishment prescribed by Islam and its implications on an human society, arising out of doubts, suspicions, accusations and mistrust, in the teachings of Quran and Sunnah of the Messenger ﷺ in particular and of the Islamic jurists in general.

Translation as an Act of Manipulation: Kiernan's Translation of Iqbal

Translation as an Act of Manipulation: Kiernan's Translation of Iqbal The present research aims to explore the translated text as an incident or site of manipulative literature. Manipulation is reflected as an intention in Translation Studies. Translation Studies have been recognized as a flourishing and successful field of knowledge by scholars of linguistics, literary study, history, anthropology, psychology and the like. These fields contribute theoretically to Translation Studies. The researcher has selected translation/s of the indigenous text as Source Language text created by Doctor Muhammad Iqbal in Urdu rendered into English (as Target Language text) by Victor Gordon Kiernan. These literary translations in the poetic form as test cases illustrate the manipulation ideologies dictated by translation theory and/or translatology. The focus is on the linguistic elements that are partially translated and are left un-translated during the act of translation. Such linguistic items appear as borrowings, calque, modulation and adaptation. These linguistic elements serve as tools and become yardstick for manipulation analysis of the translated text. The analysis is brought about with the help of textual and critical discourse analysis of the sample poems. The translated text serves as a premise to draw attention to the apparent lacuna or breach in passing on the (original) meanings during the act of translation. The translation norms as well as the translator’s language are influential in dictating the meaning within a text. A host of indigenous translators who have also done the poetry of Iqbal in English have also been included to explore the aporias, if any, created by the foreign translator (Kiernan). As meaning in a language is always context-bound and situation relevant, there exist a linguistic distance between the source and target languages. Similarly, a cultural distance between the two language communities also exists. That is why, the central function of translation as a powerful shaping force in a socio-cultural political set up is highlighted. The act becomes manipulative yet creative. Manipulation cannot be taken as a bias to condemn the translated literature. It comes up as the evolution of creation of new meanings in distant linguistic and cultural set ups.