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. Much of this Muslim-minority population can trace their roots to the mass migration from the neighboring Xinjiang region that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially following the conquests of the Chinese Qing dynasty. This Kazakh minority have not only preserved their language and religion, but also continued to use the Arabic script in their written traditions, despite the fact that, after 1941, when the Mongol government introduced the Cyrillic script for Mongolian, many Kazakhs also switched to the Cyrillic alphabet. Hence, in addition to older texts written in the Arabic alphabet (such as the Qur’an translation into Kazakh published in 1990 in Beijing, China), local Muslims also use more recent Cyrillic texts. For example, after publishing its new translation into Kazakh, by Muxammed Şıñğıs qajı and Ermek Muxammedqalï in 2015, the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs (TDRA) distributed it not only in Kazakhstan, but in Mongolia as well. Unsurprisingly, the relatively recent idea of producing Koran Sudrϊn, a translation of the holy book of Islam into Mongolian, emerged from the Kazakh minority living in Mongolia. This was not, however, the first ever work of its kind: in 2008 the local politician and writer Tserenpiliyn Gombosüren published his own translation, as a part of the new politics of intercultural dialogue promoted by President Nambaryn Enkhbayar. However, Gombosüren’s translation mainly relied on secondary sources and had a limited print run.
The TDRA published Koran Sudrϊn in 2020, and it constitutes probably the first Mongolian translation ever published outside Mongolia by a famous Muslim institution. The translation itself was carried out by Marhabagayin Salih, who has an MA in religious studies and is a teacher of Arabic language; the team also included Bezhzhegiyin Battogtoh (who is cited as ‘Islamic proofreader’) and an editor, Taukein Sultan. Sultan is quite a famous figure of Kazakh background, who is active in the cultural life of Mongolia: for years he was a member of Parliament, and he is also known as a writer and translator. For example, he published a quite lengthy (at around 900 pages) encyclopedia of Bayan-Ölgii Province (Bayan-Ölgii Aimgiin nevterkhii toil) in 2010, which deals with both the preservation of Kazakh culture and its active role in the Mongolian state.
What does this new Qur’an translation look like? A short introductory note states that this work is a ‘“gift” (beleg) to the people of Mongolia’ from the Turkish state, and also asserts that the translation is based on the Arabic original, and that the Arabic text also guided the revision process. Unfortunately, there are no footnotes or any other type of commentary provided to accompany the translation, although the actual text has some simple exegetical interventions such as the use of ‘Ayaa, Mukhammyed!’ (O Muhammad!) to provide a hint of who the addressee of speech might be in places. The only existing study of this translation (Abbasbeyli, 2024) notes some explanatory features of those insertions: for example, for Q 1:4, māliki yawmi l-dīn (which might be rendered literally as ‘Master of the Day of Judgement’), the translation is given as ‘Ter ünemshliin ödriin (yertöntsiin tögsgöliin) ezen’ (‘He is the Lord of the Day of Belief (the end of the world)’). This explanation seems to be a kind of cross-cultural bridge intended to explain the eschatological idea of the Qur’an in language familiar to the Buddhist community, perhaps reflecting the very limited number of Muslim religious texts available in Mongol. Some of the insertions reveal usage of the tafsīr tradition: for instance, for aṣḥāb al-qarya (‘people of the city’, ‘irsen khotyn irgediig’) in Q 36:13, the word ‘Antakya’ is added in brackets, and in the index of terms attached to the translation ‘Antakya’ is explained as ‘the city where the messengers of the holy Prophet ʿĪsā were sent to educate his disciples in religion.’ This is significant because most tafsīrs from al-Ṭabarī onwards assert that this verse refers to this place (Anṭākiyā). Some unique Qur’anic terms, however, are translated in a very simplistic fashion: for example, for the phrase Allahu l-ṣamadu in Q 112:2, the Mongolian text has ‘Allah ashid mönkh’ (‘Allah is eternal’). Interestingly, some of the names of the prophets and scriptures are also given in their Christian variants (e.g., ʿĪsā is Esus; Tawrāt is Tora), using terminology that developed in Mongolian under the influence of neighboring Russia.
Four years after its publication, it is still hard to evaluate how popular this translation is in Mongolia. However, because it is the result of a joint initiative by local Muslims and the TDRA, it has been published in significant numbers and distributed free of charge, which means that it will probably have quite a notable place in the history of Islam in Mongolia in the coming years.
Mykhaylo Yakubovych