Qur’an translation of the week

Qur’an translation of the week #204: The Qur’an, clear and easy: Three recent English translations

Gone seem to be the days in which it was the state of the art for a Muslim translator to name their work something along the lines of ‘A Probably Failed Attempt at Translating Some of the Approximate Meanings of the Verses of the Holy Qur’an into English’. Instead, when one browses websites or Islamic […]

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Qur’an translation of the week #203: Script Changes: The Conversion of a Madurese Latin-Script Qur’an Translation into Carakan Script

A guest contribution by Masyithah Mardhatillah & Moh. Hafid Effendy, IAIN Madura, Pamekasan, Indonesia No less than four translations of the Qur’an into Madurese, a native language of the island of Madura in the Java Sea, off the northeastern coast of Java, have been produced in the last twenty years. One of these is now

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Qur’an translation of the week #202: The Majestic Qur’an by Ali Özek and his team: an early Turkish translation of the Qur’an into English from the 1990s

Prof. Ali Özek (1932–2021) was a leading Turkish scholar in religious studies, and for much of his career was affiliated with the theological faculty of Turkey’s most renowned educational institution, Marmara University in Istanbul. As early as in 1982, he published a translation of the Qur’an into Turkish, ‘Kur’an-ı Kerim ve Türkçe Açıklamalı Meali’ (which he undertook

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Qur’an translation of the week #201: Mullah Muhammad Jalizadah and his ‘Kurdish Interpretation of the Word of God’

Mullah Muhammad Jalizadah (1876–1943, also known as Mullah Gewre, ‘Great Mullah’, in Kurdish) was a renowned Islamic scholar from South Kurdistan in Iraq. He was born and raised in a prominent scholarly family, and his father and grandfather (Mullah Abdullah and Mullah Asa’d Jalizadah) were both also high ranking scholars in the region. Born in

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Qur’an translation of the week #200: The Brave New World of machine translation

There is no reason to assume that the field of Qur’an translation remains untouched by the commercial opportunities inherent in machine translation and the predatory use of online content. And, indeed, if you search Amazon.com for English Qur’an translations, one of the many options offered to you is a prime example of both phenomena: The

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Qur’an translation of the week #199: Koran Sudrϊn: A New Translation of the Qur’an into Mongolian

With around seven million speakers, Mongolian is the official language of Mongolia, and is also used in some parts of China. Mongolian Muslims, the majority of whom are of Kazakh origin, constitute a small percentage (around five percent) of the country’s total population of 3.5 million, and predominantly live in the western province of Bayan-Ölgii.

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Qur’an translation of the week #198: The Indonesian Sign Language Qur’an: Form, Method and Contestation

A guest contribution by Moh. Azwar Hairul (IAIN Sultan Amai Gorontalo, Indonesia) The Ministry of Religious Affairs of Indonesia (henceforth MoRA) has played a crucial role in the mass production of Qur’an translations into the country’s official language, Bahasa Indonesia, and, more recently, into several local languages. Now it has taken the next step. In

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Qur’an translation of the week #197: The Devotional Qur’an by Shawkat Toorawa

This brand-new translation of selected suras and verses of the Qur’an into English does something new and unusual: the translator, Shawkat Toorawa, aims to present those segments of the Qur’an that are most commonly used by Muslims in prayer and ritual around the world, roughly in the order in which Muslims encounter and memorise them

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Qur’an translation of the week #196: The Qur’an in Latvian by Uldis Bērziņš: a literary translation

In its 2010 first edition, The Muslim 500: The World’s 500 Most Influential Muslims, a popular reference book that is published by annually by the Jordan based Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre, included an entry for the Latvian scholar Uldis Bērziņš (1944–2021). Bērziņš’ entry mentions that ‘he is known for spending fifteen years on the

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Qur’an translation of the week #195: The Thorny Path of a Russian Arabist: From Historian to Gulag Prisoner and Qur’an Translator

This week we are looking at the poetic Qur’an translation by Theodor Adamovich Shumovskii (1913–2012). Not only is this translation a very unusual piece of work, but the translator’s life is also worthy of a book in itself. Luckily, Shumovskii left behind not only remarkable academic scholarship, works on popular humanities, poetry, and his Qur’an

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