Qur’an translation of the week

Qur’an translation of the week #149: ‘God’s command’: A milestone in early Turkish Republican Qur’an translation

In 1934, the Islamic scholar, writer and journalist Ömer Rıza published a pioneering Turkish Qur’an translation-cum-commentary entitled Tanrı Buyruğu (‘God’s Command’) in Istanbul. Appearing five years after the Turkish Republic’s script reform, which abolished the use of the Arabic script, Tanrı Buyruğu was probably the first Turkish Qur’an translation to be printed in Latin script …

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Qur’an translation of the week #148: Koranas (literatūrinių prasmių vertimas): a scandalous translation into Lithuanian language

Although Lithuania, which has around three million native speakers of Lithuanian, has an indigenous Muslim population (known as ‘Lithuanian Tatars’) with a well-developed textual tradition of Islamic learning, this group mostly uses Polish instead of Lithuanian. Because of this, the first translation of the Qur’an into Lithuanian has only been published recently, in 2008: 1,000 …

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Qur’an translation of the week #147: The universal Qur’an and the ‘world language:’ Translating the Qur’an into Volapük

In 1890, in the Southern German city of Konstanz, a booklet comprising a collection of excerpts from the Qur’an into the ‘world language’ Volapük was published. It is a fascinating document that gives us insight into the position of the Qur’an in nineteenth-century Europe, and also of contemporaneous perspectives on language, language planning, literature and …

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Qur’an translation of the week #146: Noor International: An emerging Saudi Arabian publisher of Qur’an translations

In around 2018, another publisher that specializes in ‘translating the meanings of the Holy Quran into international languages’ emerged in Riyadh, registered as ‘Noor International.’ During its first four years of operation, this publishing house has produced English, French, European Spanish and Latin American Spanish translations of the Qur’an. For its English translation, it simply …

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Qur’an translation of the week #145: A meeting of languages and cultures: A French Qur’an translation from colonial Mauritius

In 1949, Zainul Abedin Rajabalee, a schoolmaster living on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, published the first part of his Qur’an translation. In the introduction, he wrote ‘If we are not mistaken, this is the first work of this kind in French’ – by which he meant the first to be written by a …

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Qur’an translation of the week #144: Darussalam International as a Multilanguage Publisher

While QTOTW#140 covered Darussalam’s main publishing projects in English, and QTOTW#138 their translation into French, this post goes further in presenting their Qur’an translations into other languages. A Saudi-based multilingual international publishing house, Darussalam now operates in more than thirty countries and is positioned as one of largest publishers of translations of the Qur’an in …

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Qur’an translation of the week #143: Qur’an translation into Esperanto

How does one go about translating the Qur’an into a constructed language? This week we will be looking at Abdul Hadi Italo Chiussi’s translation of the Qur’an into Esperanto. Esperanto ranks as the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language in the world. It was created by the Warsaw ophthalmologist L.L. Zamenhof in 1887 with …

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Qur’an translation of the week #142: An Emblem of an Epoch: The Russian Qur’an Translation by the Azerbaijani Scholar Elmir Quliyev

If an ordinary Muslim for whom Russian is the mother tongue were asked today to recite Sūrat al-Fātiḥa from memory, it is very likely that their recitation would be based on Elmir Quliyev’s translation of the Qur’an. The ubiquitous presence of this Qur’an translation in print and online apps, and on peoples’ tongues, reflects the …

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Qur’an translation of the week #141: Global publishers of Qur’an translations 4: the Saudi Arabian Tafsīr al-ʿUshr al-Akhīr project

            In contrast to other Saudi publishers, Tafsīr al-ʿ‘Ushr al-Akhīr project is dedicated solely to publishing Qur’an interpretations in a variety of languages, using a rather more ‘centralized’ exegetical approach than is the norm. Established by the Communities Awareness Society (al-Jamaʿaiyyah li-Taʾwiyyah al-Jāliyyāt)  in the Old Industrial City of the Saudi capital, Riyadh, the idea …

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Qur’an translation of the week #140: Anglo-Islamic Publishers Going Global: Darussalam International

A guest contribution by Azhar Majothi, University of Nottingham (azhar.majothi@nottingham.ac.uk) Darussalam International is one of the Muslim Anglosphere’s most recognisable brands in Islamic book publishing today. Since its establishment in Riyadh in 1986, the publisher claims to have printed more than 1,400 ‘authentic’ Islamic titles in various world languages. Despite the publisher’s achievements, little is …

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