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What is Islamiqate's policy on transliterating foreign terms?

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Official Islamiqate account
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Foreign words can often be transliterated in multiple ways.

Islamiqate uses a simplified style of transliteration without dialectical marks. The reason for this is that a fully accurate transliteration system would require special learning, something most people lack, just to actually pronounce names correctly.

Furthermore with a lack of a universal romanization system, such words will not be pronounced correctly by non-native speakers anyway.

For the purposes of standardisation, the following non-exhaustive list has been adopted for Arabic transliterations:

  • the definite article in Arabic is to ignore assimilation with sun letters and uses "al-" e.g., the light annur is al-nur, the sun asshams is al-shams,
  • the closed ta (ta marbutah, ة) should be rendered as "a" e.g., prayer salat is salah, letter risalat is risalah,
  • two adjacent consonants are separate by the prime or apostrophe ' when they do not form a digraph e.g., أَكْرَمَتْها akramatʹha ('she honored her'), in which the t and h are two distinct consonantal sounds,
  • for groups, movements or sects, the term used by said organisations is retained e.g., Jamaat-e-Islami, Tolu-e-Islam, Huzb t-Tahrir and so on,
  • personal names are used as they have been spelt by the individuals themselves,
  • dates are written in both the Hijri and Gregorian calender where relevant e.g., (d. 587 AH/1191)
  • for purposes of consistency, Persian words are transliterated as they are pronounced in Urdu.
  • well-known place-names, such as Mecca, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Damascus and Yemen, should be cited using their English spellings. Less common place-names should be transliterated.
  • Biblical figures appear in the accepted English spelling.


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