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 in cooperation with other scholars). This was initially approved for publication by the Muslim World League and, later, by the King Fahd Glorious Qur’an Printing Complex and the Turkish Diyanet Foundation (see: https://gloqur.de/quran-translation-of-the-week-49-kuran-i-kerim-ve-turkce-aciklamali-meali-a-saudi-edition-of-a-popular-translation-into-turkish/). However, this was not Ali Özek’s only venture into Qur’an translation: some ten years later he published an English translation, The Holy Qur’an with English Translation (Istanbul: İlmî Neşriyat, 1992). This was, again, a team project, co-authored with Nureddin Uzunoğlu, Tevfik Rüştü Topuzoğlu, and Mehmet Maksutoğlu, also scholars affiliated with Turkish universities. The team members were all more or less fluent in English: Ali Özek himself had spent a year in England in the mid-1980s, while some of the other team members had relationships with various English-speaking academic societies. A scholar in political studies, Nurettin Uzunoğlu (1939–2013) obtained his MA degree from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in the US, while Mehmet Maksutoğlu (b. 1939), one of the greatest Turkish scholars of Crimean Tatar origin, was affiliated with the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Cambridge University in the late 1960s, where he worked as a lecturer in Turkish.

In 2000, The Holy Qur’an with English Translation (which appears to be one of the first English translations to be produced in Turkey) was republished as a joint project by the Nawawi Foundation (Burr Ridge, Illinois) and the Ibn Khaldun Foundation  (London, UK), this time under the title The Majestic Qur’an: An English Rendition of Its Meanings. Published with Arabic parallel text (using the Cairo edition), this breathed new life into the largely neglected work, as did the fact that a number of native speakers of English were brought in to review the target text: the well-known convert to Islam and academic scholar Abdal Hakim Murad (Timothy Winter), the popular writer of Islamic pamphlets Uthman Hutchinson, and, finally, Mostafa al-Badawi, a UK-based Sufi scholar and translator. A short preface from the Al-Nawawi Foundation explains the reason for carrying out one more English interpretation as being ‘to produce a special translation in a clear, easily understood modern English language, immediately accessible to the majority of English-speakers today’. This goal actually can hardly be described as innovative: ever since the late 1970s (when the famous Hilali-Khan translation first appeared), most Muslim translators have introduced their translations as aiming to provide a clear and easily understandable rendition of the text, although not all of them have really succeeded in doing so. Another preface, authored by the ‘Translation Committee’ claims that ‘the translations most commonly reprinted are written in an archaic, Biblical style …’ and asserts that ‘the growing number of conversions to Islam in the English-speaking worlds … has created an urgent need for a wider range of translations, to suit all orientations and educational levels’. Following this, the committee criticises certain translations ‘by members of sectarian groupings’ (though without mentioning their names) and alleges that existing translations are usually ‘bereft of commentary or explanation’. For this last reason, the team decided ‘to include some explanations from a number of classical commentaries in Arabic and Turkish, as well as the English-language commentary of Abdullah Yusuf Ali’. This actually raises the question of why Yusuf Ali’s translation, which dates from the 1930s, has been used for reference, given that even though it is possibly the most popular and enduring English translation of the Qur’an, its vocabulary can definitely be described as somewhat archaic (which is precisely why it was revised by both the KFQPC and Amana Publications in the mid-1980s). The introduction, by Ali Özek, says little about translation approaches and mostly provides an outline of what the Qur’an and Sunna are. The overall impression given by the prefaces and introduction is that the translation aims to be a comprehensive modern text in English, designed to be read by a wide audience.

In answer to the question of how much the translators actually succeeded in their goals, a few points can be noted. First of all, the commentary consists of some 809 footnotes that provide additional interpretation to the text itself in a very simple form, and which often really resembles that found in Yusuf Ali. Specific tafsīrs are rarely mentioned. Not all of the explanatory commentary provides the reader with a solid basis for understanding: for example, commenting on the translation of the end of Q 2:129 (innaka anta l-ʿazīzu l-ḥakīm) as ‘You are the August, the Wise’, a footnote states that ‘Al-Aziz, is He Who is August, Eminent, the Unreachable, the Important, with infinite importance’. Usually this divine name is associated with the concept of power (al-‘izza) or uniqueness, so one might expect a translation like ‘the Mighty’ or ‘the Most Esteemed’, but the translation choice here of ‘the August’ is somewhat inaccessible even to many native speakers. Most of the suras (especially the longer ones) also contain short introductions, which reflects the translation tradition as found in most works published in Turkey. The commentary also tends to include comparative references that, as so often is the case in such endeavors, overgeneralise the meaning. For instance, while explaining Q. 4:24 (in which the mahr of husband to his wife is mentioned), the commentary says: ‘Among some religions and cultures, the custom exists of giving a dowry to the husband, not to the wife. This practice is known among the Hindus, Armenians, Jews and Greeks’. Though something like this was practiced by European Jews, the Tanakh (Gen. 24:53–61) mentions a contrary practice, similar to the Muslim one, usually known as mohar among Jews living in the Muslim world.

If the commentary (even though it shows clear signs of Yusuf Ali’s influence) remains more or less original, how much does this also hold true of the translated text itself? Much of the translation is in fact somewhat innovative. For example, this is the only translation which renders laylat al-qadr (Q 97:1–3) as ‘the Night of Influence’ rather than ‘Decree’, ‘Power’, or ‘Predestination’, as other translations usually do. The question however remains how the reader understands the meaning of ‘influence’ here given that there is no additional commentary provided; most probably, the essence of that verse will remain obscure. Another case is the use of ‘By the afternoon!’ for al-ʿaṣr in Q 103:1, although this is also found in Arberry’s The Koran Interpreted (1955). There are other occasions on which The Majestic Qur’an echoes earlier translations, such as its rendition of the phrase fī ʿamadin mumaddadat in Q 104:9 as ‘in outstretched columns’, which also appears in Pickthall’s translation, as does the rendition of al-takāthur in Q 102:1 as ‘rivalry in worldly increase’. In some ways it is hard to disagree with Abdur Raheem Kidwai who, in his bibliography of English translations (Medina: KFQPC, 2004), accuses this work of ‘many generous, unacknowledged borrowings from the earlier Qur’an translation of Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall’. Even if there are still many instances of original translation choices, there are undoubtedly borrowings from other translations published more than forty years earlier, such as those of Yusuf Ali, Pickthall, and even Arberry, that seriously hamper the translators’ goal of making a target text in ‘modern’ English: this can hardly be done using evidently archaic words and phrasing.

Still, The Majestic Qur’an translation has made its way to a modern readership: the 2000 edition is often cited in English-language Muslim literature, probably due to good distribution networks in both the USA and UK, as well as to the fact that Abdul Hakim Murad is attributed as an editor, as he is quite a popular figure among Muslims living in the West. A more recent edition (published under the intriguing name The Human User Manual: The Glorious Qur’an) was published by a small Turkish publisher named Server Yayınları in 2018. Furthermore, one of the translation team members, Nurettin Uzunoğlu, published his own individual translation in 1998 (İstanbul: Acar Basım). Obviously influenced by the earliest versions of The Majestic Qur’an, as some of the verses are completely identical in both texts, this translation was the basis for a recent Japanese interpretation of the Qur’an (by Kyoko Nishida, 2022). Through not so popular as twenty years ago, The Majestic Qur’an reflects the growing trend of Turkish religious missionarism that emerged in the 1990s: with the rising role of religion in the secular state, local intellectual elites tried to propose their own narrative of a universally simple, comprehensive, and non-contradictory Muslim interpretation, primarily to compete with Ahmadi, Salafi, Shii, and other approaches. This led to a growth in interest in the translation of the Qur’an into foreign languages, with dozens of translations printed by the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs as well as private publishers since the late 2000s.

Mykhaylo Yakubovych

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