"Yes," Farid replied. "And therefore, honest."
Layla frowned. "It sounds broken."
He turned to the first chapter, Al-Fatihah .
In the dim light of his study, surrounded by leather-bound lexicons and stacks of parchment, old Farid embarked on a task that had been whispered about in scholarly circles for decades: a word-for-word English translation of the Quran.
Layla looked at the thousands of parentheses, the awkward word orders, the missing 'the's. She smiled. "It's ugly," she said.
For three years they worked.
One evening, his young apprentice, Layla, entered with a pot of tea. "Master," she said, watching him write "Alhamdulillah" as "The praise (belongs) to Allah." "Why does it look so strange? It is not beautiful English."
One night, Layla grew frustrated. "Master, this is not English. English needs 'the,' 'to be,' flow. You have words hanging in space."