Qur’an translation of the week

Qur’an translation of the week #80: A Tunisian translator’s Qur’an with a French artist’s illuminations- Ameur Ghedira’s Le Coran (Lyon 1957)

In 1957, Ameur Ghedira (1926–?), Lecturer of Arabic at the University of Lyon, France, published a new Qur’an translation with illuminations by the French painter and illustrator Jean Gradassi (1907–1981). The edition was printed by a local publisher on vellum paper with a print run of 607 copies, including a number of particularly prestigious collectors’ …

Qur’an translation of the week #80: A Tunisian translator’s Qur’an with a French artist’s illuminations- Ameur Ghedira’s Le Coran (Lyon 1957) Read More »

Qur’an translation of the week #79: The Qur’an in Czech- Muslim Orientalist translation

Can a Qur’an translation be both ‘Muslim’ and ‘Orientalist’ at the same time? The history of Ivan Hrbek’s translation of the Qur’an into Czech is an interesting case that provides some useful insights. Although the number of Muslims living in the Czech Republic has never exceeded 0.1% of the overall population (of around ten million), …

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Qur’an translation of the week #78: Tafsīr al-Qur’ān wa-huwa al-Hudā wa ‘l-Furqān’- Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s exegesis and Urdu translation of the Qur’an

What role does modern science play in our understanding of the Qur’an? This week we will look at the Urdu translation/exegesis of Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898), who tried to bridge the gap between ancient Islamic tradition and modern science. Sayyid Ahmad Khan was born in Delhi in 1817 into an Ashraf family. After the …

Qur’an translation of the week #78: Tafsīr al-Qur’ān wa-huwa al-Hudā wa ‘l-Furqān’- Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s exegesis and Urdu translation of the Qur’an Read More »

Qur’an translation of the week #77: A time of experimentation – A chronological Qur’an translation in early twentieth-century British India

In 1911 and 1912, an Indian Muslim academic called Mirza Abu’l-Fadl published a work entitled The Qur’ân: Arabic Text and English Translation: Arranged Chronologically: With an Abstract in his home town of Allahabad. This was only the second Qur’an translation into English, or any other Western European language, by a Muslim. While Qur’an translations into …

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Qur’an translation of the week #76: Not Poetry but Rhyming Prose- Koran: Perevod s Arabskogo i kommentarii by Betsy Shidfar (1928-1993)

Qur’an translations tend to be categorized in various different ways, but one of the most common means of categorization relates to perceptions of the translator and the style of the translation. Accordingly, Qur’an translations can be put into several categories, such as academic or confessional, humanistic or ‘fundamentalist’, poetic or non-poetic, or ‘traditional’ or ‘modernist’. …

Qur’an translation of the week #76: Not Poetry but Rhyming Prose- Koran: Perevod s Arabskogo i kommentarii by Betsy Shidfar (1928-1993) Read More »

Qur’an translation of the week #75: The Qur’an in Kazakh – The First Saudi Qur’an translation for the Central Asia

With a population of around nineteen million people, Kazakhstan is the largest Central Asian state. Its official language, Kazakh, is the native language of some fifteen million people living both within Kazakhstan and beyond. Kazakh belongs to a Turkic language group of the Kipchak branch and is thus closely related to Kyrgyz, Karakalpak and Nogai. …

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Qur’an translation of the week #74: A French law professor and a native interpreter: a Qur’an translation from colonial-era France

Le Coran by Octave Pesle and Ahmed Tidjani, first published in Paris in 1936, was a product of the colonial era when France held sway over much of the Maghreb. One of the authors of this Qur’an translation, Tidjani (1875–1982), was an Algerian Muslim legal scholar who first worked as a qadi in Algiers and …

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Qur’an translation of the week #73: De Edele Koran: A Qur’an Translation from the Indonesian Diaspora in the Netherlands

Interest in Islam and the Qur’an in the Netherlands has led to the publication of several translations of the Qur’an into Dutch, including ‘De Koran’ (1860) by a Jewish Orientalist from Leiden, Solomon Keyzer; ‘De Koran’ (1956) by the Arabic linguist Johannes Hendrik Kramers; and ‘De Koran’ (1989) by another Arabic linguist, Fred Leemhuis. In …

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Qur’an translation of the week #72: The Qur’an in Kyrgyz: Between Hanafism and Salafism

The Kyrgyz language belongs to the Turkic language family, and is currently spoken by five million people in the Kyrgyz Republic (Kyrgyzstan) and beyond. Still using the Cyrillic alphabet (after the Soviet reforms of 1940), this language has much in common with Kazakh (most notably in terms of grammar). As with other Central Asian countries …

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Qur’an translation of the week #71: Al-mathani and the gigantic Qur’aan: Strategies of translating Arabic terminology in Amir Zaidan’s At-tafsiir

At the time it was first published in 2000, Amir Zaidan’s At-tafsiir, an annotated translation of the Qur’an into German, stood apart from all other German translations due to its deliberate and extensive use of Arabic terminology. It contained phrases such as ‘In it are clear ayat, [including] maqamu-Ibrahim’ (‘In ihm sind deutliche Ayat, [davon] …

Qur’an translation of the week #71: Al-mathani and the gigantic Qur’aan: Strategies of translating Arabic terminology in Amir Zaidan’s At-tafsiir Read More »

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