In 1995, two preachers from Port Louis, the capital city of the island of Mauritius, published a Qur’an translation into Mauritian Creole. Le Saint Qur’aan did not actually claim to be a direct translation of the Arabic Qur’an, however, but was rather presented as a rendition of an Urdu Qur’an translation, the Kanz-ul-Īmān by Ahmad Reza Khan Barelwi (1856–1921). It was produced against a background of intense competition between different Islamic movements, and as a reaction to the publication of other Creole Qur’an translations. To understand why this was the case, we need to take into consideration the particular local context, characterised by struggles over the national language and intracommunal rivalries among Muslims, as well as global dynamics that tie Mauritian Muslims to religious trends from India and Saudi Arabia.
The vast majority of Muslims in Mauritius are descendants of indentured labourers from India who arrived on the island in the nineteenth century, during the period of British colonial rule. They mostly hailed from the Northeast of India and spoke Bhojpuri. A smaller, but much wealthier and therefore influential group consisted of merchants from Gujarat who, too, settled in Mauritius in the nineteenth century, and who spoke Gujarati or Kutchi. It was this latter group who had the means to build mosques and invest in the institutionalisation of Muslim religious communities. Over the course of the twentieth century, the communal, intercommunal and political dynamics of Mauritius as well as its ties with India led to an increasing emphasis on religious over ethnic identity and Indo-Mauritians came to identify predominantly as either Hindu or Muslim. At the same time, the Muslim community diversified as different revivalist trends from India took root on the island, starting with the Ahmadiyya movement, which has had a continuous presence in Mauritius since 1913.
In the 1920s the Kutchi Memons, a wealthy Gujarati trader community, invited to the island representatives of a revivalist movement from India that is usually called Barelwi by outsiders, but calls itself Ahl al-Sunna wa’l-Jamāʿa, or Ahl-e Sunnat wa-Jamāʿat. In Mauritius it is known as Sunnat Jama’at. Founded by Ahmad Reza Khan (1856–1921) from the Bareilly district in North India, the Sunnat Jama’at promotes adherence to the tradition of Sunni legal scholarship and theology, combined with rituals and practices connected to Sufism. This includes adherence to a number of beliefs that came to be heavily contested during the nineteenth century, such as that of the primordial existence of Muḥammad and his intercession on behalf of the believers, as well as equally contested practices such as the celebration of Muḥammad’s birthday, the veneration of Muḥammad and of Sufi saints (walīs), and the custom of visiting their graves. The Sunnat Jama’at gained hegemony over Mauritian Islam because its sponsors, the Kutchi Memons, had won control of the central mosque of the capital city Port Louis, the Jummah Mosque, over their rivals, the Sunni Surtee trading community, as early as 1908.
This was not to be a permanent state of affairs, however, because between the 1950s and 1970, several rival movements appeared on the scene. First, the Sunni Surtees invited missionaries from the Deobandi movement, which came to be locally known as Tableeghi, to visit Mauritius, and then a Salafi movement, known as Tawheedi in Mauritius, emerged from the daʿwa activities of the descendants of indentured labourers, some of whom went to study in Saudi Arabia. Both movements opposed the Sunnat Jama’at, and this struggle was expressed not only in terms of belief and religious practice but also in their choices of language usage. The Sunnat Jama’at heavily favoured the use of Urdu in its mosques, and this tied in with the Mauritian school system, which continued the colonial practice of teaching ‘ancestral languages’. Lessons in ancestral languages had been introduced in order to allow diaspora communities to connect to their roots and uphold their ancestral traditions. However, the languages offered to Muslim students never included Bhojpuri, Gujarati or Kutchi. Instead, they were offered lessons in Urdu at the behest of the Sunnat Jama’at, who saw the teaching of Urdu and the use of this language in mosques as an integral part of their attempt to promote the authenticity of Indian traditions of Islamic worship. This was contested by the Tableeghis, who managed to achieve the introduction of Arabic into the school curriculum as an alternative ancestral language, a move that was later also supported by the Tawheedis. Intracommunal divides were thus also expressed through the choice of ancestral language in school, although students rarely attained any level of skill in either Arabic or Urdu.
Interestingly, while the official discourse of ancestry, identity and language was clearly and primarily tied to religion through this focus on Arabic and Urdu, Muslims went further than any other Mauritian religious community in their use of Creole, the language spoken at home by the vast majority of the population, incorporating it into their religious practice. Mauritian Muslims were also trailblazers in the written use of Mauritian Creole, being among the very first to use Creole in any kind of printed texts. The first published Islamic texts in Creole date back to 1976; by 1977 the first parts of a Creole Qur’an translation had been published by a Muslim student association, and by 2004 there were four full Qur’an translations into Mauritian Creole. This is all the more remarkable when one considers that in 2022 only around 18% of the population of Mauritius, which numbered around 1.23 million people, were Muslim. Although 32.3% of the population, a much larger proportion, were Christian, efforts to translate the Bible into Creole have so far not progressed significantly beyond the New Testament; they incorporate translations of the gospels done by a British missionary in the late nineteenth century.
Creole Qur’an translation emerged in a setting in which both religion and language were heavily politicized. Mauritius gained its independence in 1968 and while nearly all Mauritians use Creole, a language derived from French, at home and for oral communication, French and English still dominate the media, publishing sector, and political and legal systems, as well as educational institutions. A leftist nationalist movement that was especially popular with Muslims tried to promote the elevation of Creole to the status of a national language in the 1970s and 1980s, both out of national pride and as a means to achieving social equality, but this failed. Only in 2012, after decades of struggle, was Creole introduced as an optional subject in Mauritian schools, but this was largely targeted at the segment of the population that is designated ‘Creole’, that is, the descendants of African slaves, and it is practically never chosen by Muslim students over Arabic or Urdu.
And yet, despite this, from an early time Mauritian Muslims have been remarkably active at using Creole to spread their beliefs, targeting those parts of the population that are not fluent in either French or English. By the beginning of the 1990s, the Sunnat Jama’at must have realized that the lack of a Qur’an translation that reflected their beliefs in a language that all Mauritians could read was threatening their hegemony. The moderate Tawheedi Houssein Nahaboo had published a full Creole Qur’an translation in 1982, while the local Ahmadiyya came up with a Creole translation of selected verses from the Qur’an in 1988, and the radical Tawheedi Abu Bakar Bahemia Ariff, head of the ZamZam foundation and anathema to the Sunnat Jama’at, was in the process of producing his own Creole Qur’an translation, the first part of which was printed in 1993. Moreover, a range of English and French Qur’an translations were widely available and popular in Mauritius, especially those by Muhammad Hamidullah and Abdullah Yusuf Ali, neither of which were Barelvis. Meanwhile, the Friday sermons and authoritative literature of the Sunnat Jama’at were all in Urdu, with the writings of Ahmad Reza Khan at the center. These include the Kanz ul-Īmān, an explanatory translation of the Qur’an into Urdu published in 1911 that is hugely popular among followers of his movement and has been translated into numerous languages for use in Ahl-e Sunnat wa Jama’at diasporas (https://gloqur.de/quran-translation-of-the-week-179-ahmad-riza-khans-kanzul-iman/). In the words of its Mauritian translator Naguib Jeeawody: ‘It’s the most popular and well-accepted translation among Muslims following the school of Ahl-e Sunnat wa Jamaat from India and Pakistan’.
It was against this backdrop that Naguib Jeeawody (c. 1957–2024), a traditionalist preacher and member of the Sunnat Jama’at, rendered the Kanz-ul-Īmān into Creole with the help of Ashabuddin Lalla-saib, better known as Qari Mansoor, a high-profile opponent of the Tablighis and Tawheedis. This translation project was an attempt to reclaim religious authority from rival movements and the fact that it was written in reaction to other translations is obvious from the apologetic and polemical tone of the introduction. Jeeawody first emphasises the superiority of the Kanz-ul-Īmān to other Qur’an translations, claiming that it leaves no room for contradiction between different verses, that it renders the Qur’an in such a way that no word can possibly express the slightest disrespect for the Prophet Muḥammad, and that its explanatory style prevents misunderstandings that might derive from a literal translation.
He then presents at length examples of verses that previous translators have misrepresented, in his opinion, and that only Ahmad Reza Khan rendered correctly, into Urdu. His first and most prominent example is Q 93:7:
وَوَجَدَكَ ضَآلًّۭا فَهَدَىٰ
The verse is often translated along the lines of ‘Did He not find you lost/erring/wandering (ḍāllan) and guide you?,’ and it is understood that God is addressing Muḥammad here. Jeeawody cites eight English translations as well as a French and a Creole rendition (Nahaboo’s) that adopt this interpretation, which is irreconcilable with the Sunnat Jama’at’s veneration of the Prophet Muḥammad. From Ahmad Reza Khan’s point of view, Muḥammad was sinless and infallible and could not possibly have been ‘lost’ or ‘erring’. Accordingly, Jeeawody translates the verse as follows, based on the Urdu Kanz-ul-Īmān:
‘Et Li finn trouve Toi absorbé dans So l’amour, alors Li finn guide (Toi vers Li).’
(‘And He has found you absorbed in His love, thus He has guided you [towards Him].’)
Similarly, Jeeawody condemns previous translations of the first part of Q 48:2, another verse that is understood as addressing Muḥammad:
لِّيَغْفِرَ لَكَ ٱللَّهُ مَا تَقَدَّمَ مِن ذَنۢبِكَ وَمَا تَأَخَّرَ
M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, for example, has translated this as ‘so that God may forgive you your past and future sins’. According to the Sunnat Jama’at, Muḥammad could not possibly have sinned, which precludes translations such as Abdel Haleem’s, so Jeeawaody translates the phrase as follows:
‘Afin ki Allaah pardonne acause Toi, pechés de To bann auparavant et de To bann après …’
(‘So that Allah forgives through you the sins of those of yours before and those of yours after you …’)
As can be seen from this example, Jeeawaody’s translation is not exactly straightforward and requires him to extensively justify the rendition of laka as acause Toi (‘through you’/’because of you’). Regardless of whether or not one finds this interpretation convincing, the style of the Creole Kanz-ul-Īmān suffers somewhat from the fact that it is a second-degree translation of an explanatory translation into Urdu that attempts to accommodate the Sunnat Jama’at’s specific understanding of the Qur’an.
Compare, for example, the Creole translation of Q 99:1 by Houssein Nahaboo, published in 1982, to that of Jeeawody:
إِذَا زُلْزِلَتِ ٱلْأَرْضُ زِلْزَالَهَا
Nahaboo: ‘Quand la terre pou trembler avec so sécousse’ (‘When the earth will shake with its convulsion’)
Jeeawody: ‘Quand pou faire la terre tremblé couma so tremblement finn decidé’ (When the earth will be shaken like its earthquake has been decided’)
Jeeawody’s attempt to closely follow the Urdu original has produced a somewhat convoluted and confusing result here.
That being said, Jeeawody did not slavishly follow his Urdu template. He directly consulted the Arabic Qur’an and sometimes decided to disregard Ahmad Reza Khan’s exegetical additions to his Urdu rendition, most notably the addition of the salutation ‘o beloved one’ whenever Muḥammad is addressed.
In terms of language, Jeeawody’s translation is noteworthy because, based on a categorisation by Philip Baker who has distinguished between ‘ordinary Creole’, ‘refined Creole’ and ‘French-influenced Creole’, of all existing Qur’an translations into Creole, his is the one that uses the most French-influenced variety of that language. Baker has argued that Mauritians tend to use the latter two registers because they consider French more socially desirable than Creole, and this use of French-influenced Creole is certainly visible in Jeeawody’s work. For a start, his spelling is largely based on French orthography. To a certain extent, this is true of most Creole Islamic literature because Muslims who have learned to read and write in French find French spelling easier to process. For example, they often write ‘quand’ rather than the phonemic ‘kan’ or ‘aujourd’hui’ rather than ‘azordi’. However, some Creole translations, especially those by the Ahmadiyya, make far more concessions to the sound of spoken Creole than Jeeawody does. Moreover, Jeeawody often uses French grammatical structures and words that are not part of spoken Creole. For example, he uses the French word ‘maison’, rather than the Creole ‘lakaz’, to translate the Arabic bayt (‘house’). In another instance,he renders the phrase ʿadhāb yawm al-qiyāma (‘punishment of the Day of Resurrection’) as ‘punition du Jour de la Résurrection’, which is pure French. In contrast, the 2004 Ahmadiyya translation has ‘pinition Zour Rézirection’, which reflects the Creole way of combining nouns without the preposition ‘de’ and also uses a spelling that is based on Creole pronunciation.
While a small number of Creole purists might reject Jeeawody’s choice of French-influenced Creole, many Mauritian Muslims consider it entirely appropriate for translating the word of God since French holds much more prestige than Creole and, because of this, French-influenced Creole is used in many oral and written religious texts. Jeeawody’s translation has proved fairly successful, at least within the Sunnat Jama’at circles that, while losing ground to Tawheedis, still have a substantial following in Mauritius. A sixth edition was printed in 2021 and, according to the staff of the Jummah mosque, it sold 30,000 copies. His translation is also used in a great number of madrassa textbooks as a source for Qur’anic quotations. Tableeghis and Tawheedis, however, completely shun it because they consider Ahmad Reza Khan’s translation untrustworthy and accuse the Sunnat Jama’at of valuing their authoritative texts in Urdu over the authentic Arabic sources of Islam.
When one studies its Qur’an translations, Mauritius emerges as a microcosm of global Islam, with major revivalist trends and international networks reflected in the intra-Muslim polemics of the island. At the same time, the struggles over the role of languages that is part and parcel of any attempt to translate into Creole issituated in a specific history of empire, migration and decolonisation.
Johanna Pink