[I’ve jumped a head to part 3 since several commentors have asked about translations and secondary material.] I’ve done one post already on the vagaries of Qur’anic Arabic. Learning Arabic does not really help in learning to read the Qur’an in the sense of its interpretive history, but it does help you appreciate the large semantic range of each word in the Qur’an. (A really good secondary source for this discussion, although somewhat technical, is The Qur’an’s Self-Image.) As a result, when I look up passages, I don’t rely on just one translation, but rather several. I also use languages…
