Deafening Faith: Sign Language and Translational Ethics among Deaf American Muslims

This paper examines the challenges and stakes of American Sign Language translation among Deaf Muslims. Drawing on the public archives of Global Deaf Muslim (GDM), a Washington, D.C.-based educational and advocacy organization, the paper considers such translational work within a broader ethic of ta'arruf, which rejects deficiency-driven concepts of deafness in favor of one that incorporates Deafness within Islam's overall cultural, linguistic, ethnic diversity. What are the stakes of "thinking" Deafness this way, and what are the technologies and translational techniques required to carry out this work? Examining GDM's video translations of Qur'anic verses into ASL, as well as interpretation techniques in other educational materials, I demonstrate how the semantic and sensory challenges of this work also implicate theological problems of divine "voicing." I argue that by meeting such challenges, GDM interpreters are “deafening” their faith, defining it in ways that enrich its ethics of ta‘arruf through Deaf epistemologies.