It was twelve or thirteen years ago in Montreal when a Jewish friend of mine asked me to clarify something for him. I liked it when this friend in particular asked me for a favor, and I liked it even more when the favor had to do with the languages I spoke and he did not.
He was a lawyer and we were close enough to address each other by our first names. He knew the French words and expressions he needed to know to carry on with his job as a lawyer in the French province of Quebec but he conducted the trials in English which is allowed in the bilingual provinces of Canada including Quebec.
Most of the time when my friend asked me to translate something it would be a complicated passage written in French. This time, however, what puzzled him was one word and it was not French. He was not certain if the word was Arabic, Persian or Urdu because the French article in which the word appeared was about Afghanistan where all those languages are interwoven into the culture. The word was "HARAM".
If my memory serves me correctly, the publication was a magazine called l' Actualité which is affiliated with the Ontario media company that owns Maclean’s Magazine. The article described an encounter that took place between a Western journalist and a Taliban commander when the Talibans were in power in Afghanistan. The journalist wanted to take the picture of a woman but the commander refused to let him because he said it was haram.
The article railed against the commander explaining that haram means dirty. On the surface it appeared that the railing was directed against the Taliban but the insinuation was that Islam was calling women a dirty thing, something my Jewish friend knew was a lie. He knew it because he and his wife were friends with several Muslim and Christian Arab families as well as people of other nationalities from the Middle East and the Far East. And my friend clearly saw that all these cultures treated women with utmost respect.
Confused about the whole thing he turned to me for clarification. Without showing me the article, he asked if the word haram meant something to me. I said yes but I learned to be cautious with this man because the Arabs he knew were of many dialects. And sometimes a word in one dialect does not mean the exact same thing in another dialect, so I asked for a context.
My friend was intrigued enough to excuse himself, go to the lobby of a travel agency situated on another floor in the building, grab the magazine in question and come back with it. I read the article and saw in it an elaborate scheme of deception deliberately cooked up by a mischievous writer or a devilish translator or both.
I explained to my friend that the word haram is the antonym of HALAL. And halal was a word he knew well because he saw signs in the marketplaces of Montreal that said "Halal meat sold here." He knew that halal was the Arabic equivalent of the Jewish word kosher. But instead of clarifying things, my explanation confused him even more because he could not understand why the Taliban commander wanted women to be koshered … or what it meant for a woman to be kosher in the first place.
I decided to quiz my friend by asking him to explain the origin of the word kosher. He said he did not know because he spoke neither Yiddish nor Hebrew. Well, I said, the word halal means permitted in Arabic, and the word haram means forbidden. For example, it is halal (permitted) to consume the meat of an animal that has been killed humanely and whose carcass was handled in a prescribed manner. By contrast, some things in life are haram (forbidden) because they are precious and it would be sacrilegious to violate them. Women fall into this category.
Speaking as a Christian Arab who has some knowledge of Islam and the various cultures in the Middle and Far East, I ventured to explain further that women are so special in those cultures, some men become overprotective of them. Such men feel obligated to protect the women to the point where they render them untouchable even unseen. For better or for worse, these men consider the women to be so precious as to believe it is haram to do as much as photograph them.
Then I enjoyed explaining something to my friend whose hobby I knew was to watch the girls go by, something he did in the presence of his wife who did not mind her aging man do some "window shopping". And the livelier the girls were, the more the man liked them. I said to him that the Arabic word haram has entered the European languages and is frequently used in English. I elaborated saying that a derivative of the word haram is the word HAREEM which in the European languages, including English, came to be pronounced harem. And I still remember the delighted astonishment on my friend’s face as I talked about the subject.
However, I said, the difference between the two uses of the word is that in Arabic hareem refers to all the women in a clan or a tribe. It happened that in antiquity the women of the losing side in a war or a skirmish were so badly treated by the victorious armies, it was decided to make them a protected class and to forbid violating or harming them in any way. Thus, they became the hareem. And this is in contrast to the European usage of the word harem which refers to the wives, concubines and playmates of a wealthy ruler.
At this point my friend mulled over the explanation for a short moment then said: "I don’t think a wealthy ruler would consider his harem to be a dirty thing, do you?" And I replied: "No, I don’t think so." And my friend who would have liked a harem of his own looked relieved.
We both got curious by now and wanted to know where the confusion originated. I did some research of my own as did he and we compared notes. We discovered that kosher is a Hebrew word which means food permitted to eat. Such food is so designated when the animal is said to be clean and is killed according to a prescribed ritual. In this sense kosher would be the exact Hebrew translation of the Arabic word halal.
The Hebrew antonym of kosher is the word NEVELA which means unclean or dirty. This designation is utilized to refer to meat, such as pork, which is forbidden to consume in Judaism as well as in Islam because pigs eat everything and are thus considered to be unclean animals.
TREFF is the Yiddish equivalent but not an exact translation of the Hebrew nevela. It refers to an animal that has not been killed properly even though it might be a kosher animal in the first place. But the fact that the killing was not handled according to the proper ritual renders the meat unclean or dirty to consume. Thus, the Hebrew nevela and the Yiddish treff can be considered rough translations of the Arabic haram. The trouble is that unlike the Arabic word which is commonly used, the two Jewish words are almost never used. Instead, Jews refer to the forbidden foods as non-kosher.
This brings us back to the magazine article and the saying of the Taliban commander. There is no doubt that a transposition of meanings was done here using the word haram as a false nexus. The notion that some meat is haram to consume because it is unclean was falsely associated with women who are haram to violate because they are protected. Thus, it was made to sound that the Taliban commander was saying women are not worthy of being photographed because they are a dirty thing. And then the whole fabrication was attributed to Islam.
This fabrication is so ingenious and so elaborate, it could not have been an honest mistake. Those who translate from one language to another understand the meaning and the uses of the words they translate. They know enough to avoid making a mistake of this kind or to commit a fraud if and when it suits them. And the sad part is that most of the time they get away with committing a deliberate mistake because nobody checks after them. It happened in this case because someone decided to be more than mischievous and be outright fraudulent.