“Turkish” migrants , in fact Ottoman Arab who entered the American continent with identity documents issued by the Ottoman authorities and traveled with their languages or dialects, arrived at the end of the 19th century and in the first decades of the 20th century. However, the migratory wave extended almost until the middle of the 20th century after going through a complex political, social, and cultural process that substantially modified various aspects of the migrants’ lives. Their religious lives were progressively hampered in terms of ritual practice because their faith of origin was in the minority with no adequate spaces for collective prayer. They encountered the increasingly pressing need to translate their Islamic sources, on the one hand because of the gradual loss of the Arabic language in some communities and on the other because of the need to maintain it—not only through translation but also by teaching the language in mosques and community centers. The arrival of Iranian migrants to different destinations in Latin America starting in the 1980s enriched this process of translation and dissemination of Islamic texts (Arabic and Persian) in Latin America.
The Muslim diaspora was the first group who, for various reasons, left their homeland while maintaining a close relationship with their language and culture of origin, and later, Muslim converts devoted themselves to the task of translating (inversely, directly, and indirectly) the Islamic theological texts from Arabic to Spanish or Portuguese. The very possibility of translation is a type of migration—a transfer that modifies a source language into a target language. One’s own language is poured into a foreign language. Translating is the disposition of language from the “I” that leads the reader to meet the “you” of otherness. This migratory process is also the inner journey made by the Latin American convert to the Islamic faith: their effort to first learn a language that is not their own in order to translate it into their own in the act of translating. Translation is a form of migration that has become an essential tool for mediation, conversion, knowledge, and dissemination. Both Muslim Arabs and converts devoted themselves to this task: for Muslim Arabs because of the progressive loss in the use of the language of their ancestors, and for converts, out of a pious duty to learn Arabic, the language in which the Qur’an was revealed in the Scripture that guides their new faith and to benefit those who do not know the language.
