The Language of the Law

Sometimes, the way that Islamic rulings are presented will depend on the language that they are written in. Here’s a fun example:

In the English translation of Sayyid Sistani’s rulings, we find the ruling: “Dogs and pigs are impure” [Source]. This ruling is simple, to the point, and clear.

In the Persian edition of Sayyid Sistani’s rulings, however, from which the English rulings are extracted and translated, the wording of the same ruling states: “Dogs and pigs that live on land are impure” (emphasis mine) [Source]. 

Wait. Why did it have to specify the ones that live on land? Why did the English translation omit this key point? What kind of dogs and pigs don’t live on land, anyway?

It turns out that, in the Persian language, the phrases that literally translate into English as “sea dog” and “sea pig” are used to refer to the animals that, in English, we know of as “seals” and “walruses” (By the way, we have something similar in English, too: sea horses!).

Now, if the Persian-language ruling said that all animals known as dogs and pigs are impure, then that would mean seals and walruses would be included. So, in order to distinguish between the kind of dogs and pigs that truly are impure and the ones that are not (i.e. the seals and walruses), in Persian, the clarifier “that live on land” (as opposed to the sea) becomes necessary.

Fun, right? Now let’s take a look at another example of a language-specific ruling, one with some interesting consequences. This case is a little more involved, so we will need a little bit of background first…

Ownership in Language

Let’s start with the concept of ownership, or in particular, how it is indicated in different languages. In English, the most common way to express ownership, or the fact that an object is owned by an individual, is to use the apostrophe-with-s notation. For example, to say that the book is owned by Ali, we can call it Ali’s book. The owner, the owned, and the relationship between the two is pretty clear.

But there’s another way to express ownership in English, and that’s using an “of” construct, like by saying that the book owned by Ali is the book of Ali. This phrasing is a little clunkier than when using the apostrophe-with-s approach, but it has its advantages: it avoids messy situations for words that end with s; it doesn’t resemble pluralization; and it works well for phrases like “the meaning of life” where the alternative (“life’s meaning”) doesn’t carry quite the same gravity.

Anyway, in languages like Arabic and Persian, there is no option to have an apostrophe to use in indicating ownership. Instead, the “of” construct carries over directly into these two languages. Well, almost directly: they don’t use a helper word like “of” (well, not explicitly¹, anyway), so instead the two words are simply stacked next to each other side-by-side, with the word for the owned object coming first and the word for the owner coming second. So the phrase meaning “Ali’s book” in Arabic would actually be “book Ali” if it were translated to English literally. 

This act of representing ownership in the Arabic language is called iḍāfah, which roughly translates to “addition”: the two words are “added” together to make a compound phrase. The owned object (that is mentioned first) is called muḍāf, which literally means “the thing that was added”, and the owner (that is mentioned second) is called muḍāf ilayhi, which translates as “the thing that was added to it”.

With that grammar lesson out of the way, let’s go back to the Islamic rulings.

The Types of Water

In the section of purity and purifying agents, the English translation of Sayyid Sistani’s rulings states:

Ruling 13. Water is either ‘unmixed’ or ‘mixed’. ‘Mixed’ water is either water obtained from something, such as watermelon juice or rose water; or it is water that has been mixed with something else, such as water that has been mixed with some mud etc., such that it can no longer be called ‘water’. If water is not of the above type, it is ‘unmixed’… [Source]

The point seems clear from the names: mixed water is water that was mixed with something, and unmixed water is water that was not. But the way the ruling was worded raises some questions:

Why is water that is “obtained from something” considered “mixed”? What if you obtain pure, distilled water from something — is that still considered “mixed”? Who decides when something can “no longer be called water”? And, for good measure: who has ever thought of watermelon juice as “water that was obtained from something”?

The Persian version of this ruling is more or less equivalent to its English translation. It’s only when we look back at the original source language, Arabic, where Sayyid Sistani’s interpretation of this ruling becomes more clear.

The Ruling in Arabic

In his book of laws Minhāj al-Ṣāliḥīn, Sayyid Sistani writes:

:ينقسم ما يستعمل فيه لفظ الماء إلى قسمين
الأوّل: ماء مطلق، وهو: ما يصحّ استعمال لفظ الماء فيه بلا مضاف إليه، كالماء الذي يكون في البحر أو النهر أو البئر أو غير ذلك، فإنّه يصحّ أن يقال له: ماء، وإضافته إلى البحر مثلاً للتعيين لا لتصحيح الاستعمال
الثاني: ماء مضاف، وهو: ما لا يصحّ استعمال لفظ الماء فيه بلا مضاف إليه، كماء الرمّان، وماء الورد، فإنّه لا يقال له (ماء) إلّا مجازاً، ولذا يصحّ سلب الماء عنه

Roughly translated:

The word “water” is divided into two categories:

The first is absolute water, which is: that for which the word “water” can be used without something added to it, such as water in the sea, river, well, etc. It is correct to call it “water,” and its being added to “the sea”, for example, is for specification, not [necessary] for correct usage.

The second is mixed water, which is: that for which the word “water” cannot be used without something added to it, such as pomegranate water and rose water. It is not called “water” except figuratively, and therefore it is correct to deny that it can be referenced using the [single] word “water.”

Do you see it? Here’s what the ruling is saying if we make use of the grammatical terminology we introduced earlier:

According to Sayyid Sistani, there are two types of objects known by the word “water” in the Arabic language, distinguished by how they are referenced. More specifically, the distinguishing factor is how the word “water” is used when referring to the object.

In the first case, the word “water” can be used on its own to refer to the object, without another word added to it: literally, with no muḍāf ilayhi. In this case, we call it “muṭlaq water”, where “muṭlaq” means absolute, or pure, or unmixed.

In the second case, the word “water” cannot correctly be used on its own to refer to the object. It can only be used in conjunction with something added to it: literally, with a muḍāf ilayhi. In this case, we call it “muḍāf water”, where muḍāf means something that was added, or mixed. 

Making Sense of the Ruling

The point is this: the English translation makes it seem like the words “unmixed” and “mixed” are referring to the physical quality of the liquid itself. However, the Arabic ruling reveals that this was never the intention of Sayyid Sistani. Rather, the words “unmixed” and “mixed” are referring to the conventional name of the liquid. Is it a name where the word “water” appears only as a muḍāf for a muḍāf ilayhi, or is it a name where “water” can appear in a muṭlaq, stand-alone sense?

Here’s where the difference in meaning matters. In Arabic, there are a number of liquids that can be called “water of …” if translated literally. For example, pomegranate juice and watermelon juice, as mentioned in the examples from the rulings, can be called “water of pomegranate” and “water of watermelon”, respectively, in Arabic. Malt beverages like beer can be called “water of malt”. In old alchemical Arabic, some kinds of powerful acids can be referred to as “water of fire”. And in some narrations, we can even find the euphemistic phrase “water of man”.

In English, none of these would be called water in any sense, so we wouldn’t have thought of them as even options when trying to come up with candidates for what might be called “unmixed water”. But just like in the case of the dogs and pigs of the sea, sometimes other languages are more colourfully expressive than English, and the ruling needs to mention this distinction in order to clarify this point: none of the “waters” mentioned in the above paragraph are considered as “unmixed water” in Islamic Law.

In other words: the whole concept of “mixed water” and “unmixed water” was designed to bring clarity for a language where liquids other than water might possibly have the word “water” in their name. In English, this doesn’t really happen: either the liquid is called water, or it’s not. And anything that can be called “water” is automatically unmixed.

As a consequence, a lot of things that English-speakers think might qualify as “mixed water”, by virtue of the fact of them being water mixed with something else, are not actually counted as “mixed” in the sense that the ruling intends. Water from the sea has plenty of salt dissolved into it, but it’s not wrong to call it “water”, so from a jurisprudential perspective, it’s officially “unmixed”. Sure, we can say “seawater”, but that’s just being descriptive: it’s still water.

Examples are numerous. The cloudy water saturated with minerals from some old taps, the surface of a grimy puddle that isn’t yet correctly identified as “mud”, the contents of a highly chlorinated swimming pool, and even bright red water as a result of mixing tap water with food colouring — all of these are still called “water”, and are unmixed as far as the Islamic ruling is concerned. 

On the other hand, liquids like soup, vinegar, and rose water will never be considered “unmixed”, no matter how dilute they are, until the concentration is so low that they would now be referred to as simply “water” instead of those other words.

It really is all in the name, not the actual physical composition!

I wonder what Islamic Laws would look like if it were developed and written primarily in English, instead of translated over. The discussion on mixed and unmixed water might never need to come up, or it might be presented very differently. I wonder what other cases there are where the presentation of the ruling is affected by the language it is written in.

1. So, technically, there is a prepositional word that is the equivalent of ‘of’ in Arabic: ل. The type of iḍāfah described above is therefore called ma’nawi, as there’s a hidden letter in taqdir. ↩︎