A lengthy post by Kal on The Moor Next Door blog delves into the thorny question of how best to represent Arabic words and names in the Roman alphabet.

This has been controversial territory since 1926 (if not before) whenT E Lawrence's manuscript for Revolt in the Desert was sent to the typesetters and a sharp-eyed proofreader spotted some inconsistent spelling in the 130,000-word text.

Lawrence's reponse was amusing but unhelpful, and he explained: "Arabic names won't go into English, exactly, for their consonants are not the same as ours, and their vowels, like ours, vary from district to district." 

It is a problem with no perfect solution, though that has never stopped people trying to find one. There are two basic approaches: one is phonetic – trying to approximate the sound of the original – while the other tries to represent the letters of the word as it is written in Arabic. Both methods work up to a point but ultimately both are doomed to failure.

The trouble with phonetic spelling is that it doesn't produce consistent results. There are regional variations in the way Arabic words are pronounced (J becomes G in Egypt, for example, and Q becomes G in Saudi Arabia). Foreigners also have inconsistent ways of representing the sounds they hear and spellings are often shaped by colonial history: the surname Shaheen, for instance, is likely to be spelt as Chahine where there is French influence. 

Some people take this too far, of course – as happened when 
Sky News and the Daily Mail transformed Hassan Abedin of the Oxford Islamic Centre into "Hassan Aberdeen". 

Letter-for-letter transliteration might seem more scientific than the phonetic approach – except that only eight letters in Arabic (B, F, K, L, M, N, R, and Z) have an indisputable equivalent in the Roman alphabet. There have been several attempts to devise a standard system of transliteration (as I discussed here) but none has emerged as a clear winner.

On the whole, I share Kal's view that there are more important things to bother about. It's not a problem if you have a working knowledge of Arabic because you can normally work out, even from bad attempts at transliteration, what the word is supposed to be.

It can be confusing, though, if you don't know any Arabic because you won't necessarily realise that words or names spelt in two different ways may actually represent the same thing. 
Alternative spellings of names – Mohammed, Mohamed, Muhammad, etc – became a particular problem for intelligence agencies after the 9/11 attacks when trying to identify terror suspects. But you can't really expect all the world's Mohammeds to standardise their names; it's something the keepers of databases will have to learn to cope with.

Some people say that whatever spelling you adopt it's important to be consistent. But these days, I'm not even sure about that. Here on this blog, I sometimes vary the spelling of names deliberately to help the search engines.

Kal concludes that in the end it all boils down to utility and personal preference. Ah yes, preference. Don't get me started on that. I do have my preferences. One that still irritates me is the Guardian's switch, a year or so ago, from "Hizbullah" to "Hezbollah". Ugh!