This excerpt from Ibn Muqaffaʿ’s Kalila wa-Dimnaprovides insight into his approach to the issue of translation in early Islamic courts. One subplot of the text’s narrative emphasizes the centrality and sensitivity of the role of the translator given his capacity to impact the fate of the accused. In the case at hand, a falconer surreptitiously plants false testimony in his parrots about his master’s wife’s infidelity in revenge for her refusal of his sexual advances. The master hears the parrots chirping the false testimony but fails to understand their meaning because they chirp in a foreign tongue. When he summons his guests to translate the content of the parrots’ song and understands its libelous content he becomes furious, calling the falconer before him and demanding that he, too, translate the parrots’ song. As soon as the falconer does so, a hawk gouges his eyes out as punishment for the false testimony.
In his chapter in Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts, Mahmood Kooria analyzes this fable as a representation of the figures in a courtroom: the wife is theaccused; the nobleman is the inquisitorial judge; the parrots are “foreign” plaintiffs with an accusation; the friends are translators; and the falconer is a witness—who later becomes the culprit. In the anecdote, the role of the translator is more that of a mediator than that of a witness. Kooria points out that this depiction of the translator’s role accords with Juwaynī’s argument in his Nihāyat al-maṭlab fī dirāyat al-madhhab.
This source is part of the Online Companion to the book Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts, ed. Intisar A. Rabb and Abigail Krasner Balbale(ILSP/HUP 2017)—a collection of sources and other material used in and related to the book.