In 2020, a nondescript self-publisher in Turkey issued a colour-coded interlinear word-for-word translation of the Qur’an into German with the (not very idiomatic) title Quran Wort zu Wort Übersetzung. Since it was the first of its kind, and still remains unique, it seems to have gained a certain popularity among German-speaking Muslims, especially those who …
Rachid Maach’s Le Coran is the most recent French Qur’an translation to appear in print. It is pioneering because it is probably the very first Qur’an translation to be published in two different versions which conform to two different reading traditions (qirāʾāt), those of Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim and Warsh ʿan Nāfiʿ. Maach, a former journalist …
Qur’an translation of the week #119: Rachid Maach’s “Le Coran” and its two versions Read More »
This week we look at the Urdu translation by the famous scholar and writer Abul Kalam Azad, who left a lasting impact on the Indian subcontinent through both his journalistic and political careers. Abul Kalam Azad (d. 1958) was descended from a family that had long served the Mughals in India and that emigrated to …
Qur’an translation of the week #118: Tarjumān-i Qurʾan Read More »
While the issue of Qur’anic translatability was still a subject of debate during the 1930s in the Middle East, some European Muslims did not regard this as a problem to be discussed at all (even for the English language). Jakub Szynkiewicz (1884–1966), a Muslim and Orientalist scholar who served as mufti of Poland is a …
This week we present one of the very first tafsīr translations into Russian to be published after the official collapse of the USSR. ‘Tafsīr Hilal’ (Hilol), by Shaykh Muhammad Sodiq Muhammad Yusuf (d. 2015), was originally written in Uzbek and has been both partially and fully translated into some of the languages of the region. …
‘De Korte Hoofdstukken van de Koran’ (2002) is a translation and commentary of short Qur’anic verses by a Dutch Indonesianist and Islamologue, Karel Steenbrink, who built lasting personal relationships with many Indonesian Muslim scholars in both the Netherlands and Indonesia. At a time when many studies of Islamology emerging from Western universities focused their attention …
In 1916, Mirza Hairat Dihlavi (d. 1928), an intellectual and journalist from British India, printed an English Qur’an translation in three volumes. At the time, this was a pioneering endeavor. Mirza Hairat was the editor of a newspaper and had published on a wide range of subjects in Urdu before, including an introduction to Qur’anic …
by Lenni Lestari (IAIN Langsa, Aceh) A number of studies on the various works of Qur’an exegesis and translation produced in Aceh have been published, but so far researchers do not seem to have paid much attention to Tengku Mahjiddin Jusuf’s translation of the Qur’an. Produced in 1955, this work is significant because it constitutes …
Usually Qur’an translations into the Polish language are associated with the legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian Tatars, but in recent years significant new developments have taken place in other communities. For example, in 2021, ‘Koran’ (‘The Qur’an’) was published by ‘the Society of Muslim Unity’ (‘Stowarzyszenie jedności muzułmańskiej’, henceforth SJM). The translator was Rafał Berger (b. …
Bisri Musthofa’s (1915–1977) al-Ibrīz li-maʿrifat al-Qurʾān al-ʿazīz, a Javanese translation-cum-tafsīr of the Qur’an, provides an excellent example of how Qur’an translation practices have developed in Muslim societies in a wide variety of ways that go far beyond the modern European model. It also provokes the question of what a ‘faithful translation’ could (or should)_look like: …
