Philosophy East and West

Is translation of a particular concept from one religious-linguistic tradition into another possible? If so, how much precision and nuance is possible in translation? Even if the problem of translating between religious-linguistic traditions is removed, we are still confronted with the question of how a particular concept is understood differently across vast stretches of time and space within a particular tradition. Atif Khalil's Repentance and the Return to God: Tawba in Early Sufism addresses these fundamental questions in a particularly salient manner. Khalil's object of analysis is the commonplace human experience of contrition, repentance and atonement and the consequences of transgression. More specifically, he examines the concept of tawba in the Islamic, and especially early Sufi¸ tradition and the way in which the term "repentance" is an inadequate translation to capture the full range of meanings of "tawba", though in the final analysis "repentance" does capture the essence of it. The notion of tawba is so commonplace that scholars of Islam have perhaps taken it for granted such that, according to Khalil (p. 2), prior to his book no book-length academic treatment of it has been published. Whereas the notion of repentance is commonplace, especially in the Abrahamic religions, Khalil's analysis is anything but commonplace.

The book is divided into two parts. Part I (Chs. 1-2) provides a lexical and semantic analysis of tawba as used in the Quran. Part II (Chs. 3-7) delves into how the early Sufis from the late-7th c. to the 11th c. CE approached tawba as a practical and necessary component of a spiritual path. Through an internal analysis of Quranic references to tawba, Part I provides a detailed and meticulous lexical and semantic survey of how tawba connects the human being to God and vice versa. Readers familiar with the work of the Japanese Islamicist and philosopher of language Toshihiko Izutsu (d. 1993) will find Khalil's application of Izutsu's method insightful for Sufism's conceptualization of the Divine-human relationship. Khalil convincingly demonstrates that when the Quran instructs human beings to engage in tawba it is not only referring to [End Page 1] feelings of contrition and remorse, as the term "repentance" denotes. Instead, the Quran is instructing human beings to turn to God and to turn away from the sinning act. But that is not all. Khalil's analysis really comes into its own when he points out that the Quran uses the same root (t-w-b) and its cognates of the word for tawba to refer to God as turning to human beings. Khalil argues that clearly God's tawba refers not to His repentance, for God is without sin, but to His always already turning toward the human being (i.e. God as al-tawwab, The One Who Turns [to human beings]). The interplay between Divine tawba and human tawba leads to a mutual relation between the Divine and human beings. Thus, it is possible to speak about Divine and human tawba in the Quran, but not to Divine and human repentance, for repentance as remorse, contrition and acts of expiation apply only to the human being. In this sense, repentance is an inadequate translation of the Quranic notion of tawba since repentance is restricted to a one-sided act by the sinful human being. By contrast, the dual usage of the same root of tawba leads later Sufi writers and theoreticians to emphasize the co-creation of human destiny: human beings partake as cocreators in Divine activity. In a particularly salient passage, Khalil eloquently describes this dialectical relationship as depicted in different verses in the Quran in which God and the human being jointly partake of a process of turning and re/turning to one another: "God turns to the human being in tawba, after he falls, through an act of mercy; the human being responds...