Is it Osama bin Laden? Or is it Usama bin Ladin? Or perhaps
Usama bin Ledin? Who knows? As we can see from the world press, just about
anything is permissible. But for some
thoughts on why any spelling is probably good enough for a contemporary
magazine story, a newspaper article, or even an international death warrant, we
can refer to a famous writer of years gone by, none other than T. E. Lawrence,
a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia, for a brief and humorous ditty on the spelling of
Arabic proper names. The following is from the preface to his Seven Pillars
of Wisdom with a slight variation from the same story’s derivative, Revolt
in the Desert:
The spelling of Arabic names varies greatly, and I have made
no alterations. It should be explained that only three vowels are recognized in
Arabic, and that some of the consonants have no equivalents in English. The
general practice of orientalists in recent years has been to adopt one of the
various sets of conventional signs for the letters and vowel marks of the Arabic
alphabet, transliterating Mohamed as Muhammad, muezzin as mu’edhdhin, and Koran
as Qur’an or Kur’an. This method is useful to those who know what that means,
but this book follows the old fashion of writing the best phonetic
approximations according to ordinary English spelling. The same place-name will
be found spelt in several different ways, not only because the sound of many
Arabic words can legitimately be represented in English in a variety of ways,
but also because the natives of a district often differ as to pronunciation of
any place-name which has not already become famous or fixed by literary usage.
(For example a locality near Akaba is called Abu Lissan, Aba el Lissan or Abu
Lissal.) I reprint here a series of questions by the publisher and answers by
the author concerning the printing of Revolt in the Desert.