Orientalist Discourses And The Politics Of Representation: The Decontextualization Of Sale’s ‘A Preliminary Discourse’ On His Quran Translation

Abstract

This paper analyses ‘A Preliminary Discourse’ added to George Sale’s English translation of
the Quran. The preliminary discourses contextualize the Quran translation to fit in the
orientalist view of the Quran as a human authored book and not a divine testament. The
research takes Gumperz’s (1982, 1992) concept of ‘contextualization’, Goffman’s concept of
frames (Goffman 1974), and the concept of entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990;
Silverstein and Urban 1996) as the perspectives for the analysis. Through the critical analysis
research shows that in ‘A Preliminary Discourse’ Sale has contextualized the Quran in a
particular way to disapprove the Quran as divine revelation. In the backdrop of orientalist
discourses this representation is political and biased.