Qur’an translation of the week #210: Korani Kerim by Mohammed Shemsuddin: an illegal Bulgarian translation of the Qur’an composed during the communist era

The question of Qur’an translation into Bulgarian has historically mainly been associated with the Turkish-speaking minority living in the south of the country, on the border between Turkey and Greece. This community survived many challenges during the course of the twentieth century, including concerted endeavors by Christian missionaries to convert the population, and the Bulgarian communism party’s attempts to assimilate it, especially during the 1980s. The first translations of the Qur’an into Bulgarian were produced by Christian missionaries in 1902 (partial) and 1930 (complete) from existing English translations. Interestingly, according to  recently discovered archival data, in the early 1980s the Bulgarian Committee for State Security (Bulgarian ‘Komitet za Derzhavna Sigurnost’, KDS) was also interested in undertaking a prospective translation of the Qur’an into Bulgarian, based on the Marxist approach. Although this was never realized, it was motivated by a desire to promote a Bulgarian-speaking identity among Bulgarian Muslims in order to ‘de-Turkify’ them in both language and religion. In this context, it is also worth mentioning that the Islamic leadership in Bulgaria has been strictly controlled by (and usually cooperated with) the KDS in the same way as the Bulgarian Orthodox Church has been.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first modern Bulgarian translation of the Qur’an was authored by a member of the Bulgarian Turkish-speaking community, known as Mohammad Shemsuddin (Mehmed Tabakov, 1937–2010). Born in a small village in Pazardzhik Province, he received an unofficial Muslim education from local imams and started a career as religious preacher (‘hodhzata’): it is also reported that he was once arrested for carrying out illegal religious activities. In the mid 1980s, he started to work on a translation of the Qur’an into Bulgarian, motivated by his belief in the importance of preserving a sense of religious identity among the younger generations of Bulgarian Muslims who were already using the Bulgarian language. The first edition appeared as a typewritten autograph in 1986, and circulated unofficially in a limited number of copies. A second ‘revised’ edition (produced in the same form) with new introductory texts was printed at the end of 1990, shortly before the communist regime in Bulgaria finally collapsed. 

Luckily, this second edition has survived and is available in a number of Bulgarian libraries as well as on the e-archive Bgislam.com. The text contains some introductory materials, also written by Mohammad Shemsuddin. The title page bears the title Korani Kerim (sic), which can be translated as ‘The Honorable Qur’an’, followed by the phrase ‘Translated from Arabic into Bulgarian by Shaykh Mohammed Shemsuddin’. However, the following page also provides another title, ‘Budilnik na Muslimanite’ (‘Awakener of the Muslims’), followed by ‘translated from Arabic and Turkish.’ It is said that this second title was, in fact, the title of the first 1986 edition, which avoided direct mention of the Qur’an from fear of anti-religious Bulgarian politics. 

 The short foreword to the reader says that the Qur’an, as the direct word of God, ‘cannot be translated by the unbeliever, as once happened before 1944, at the hands of some Christians-Atheists (sic!)’. It seems probable that the author is referring here to the Christian missionary translation produced by S. Tomov and S. Skulev and published in the city of Rust in 1930. He is similarly critical of an ‘incompetent’ translation published in 1990, presumably meaning the Ahmadiyya translation. In contrast to these two works, Shemsuddin says, for his translation he consulted a number of other ‘Muslim interpretations,’ although none of these are mentioned by name. This raises the question of what sources the translator did actually call on to inform his translation, since while living under communist rule he obviously had very limited opportunity to access any other translations or commentaries. 

It is clear that, as well as being fluent in Bulgarian and Turkish, Shemsuddin was able to read and understand Arabic. The actual text of the translation looks like that of many other Turkish translations: the sura titles propose some variation of Arabic sura titles, and he includes short introductions to every sura. There is no additional commentary, and no evidence of clearly signposted insertions, but there are frequent typos and mistakes of the kind that are hard to avoid in a self-published work. However, a comparison of the first two suras with the Arabic originals shows clear exegetical interventions. For example, for Q. 2:32 one finds ‘tespih pravim’ (‘we do tasbīḥ’) for the Arabic subḥānaka. Next, in Q. 2.53 in his translation of ‘… al-kitāb wa l-furqān …,’  which refers to the gifts given by God to Moses, only the word ‘Tevrat’ is mentioned; while for Q. 2:58, udkhulū hādhihi l-qaryata (‘enter into this city’) the translation gives ‘… grad Yerusalim’ (‘… the city of Jerusalem’) and ‘napravite sejjde (‘you do sajjada’). Interestingly, he renders the phrase wa-ʿamila ṣāliḥan (lit. ‘doing righteous deeds’) in Q. 2:62, as ‘I se dvizhy po Sheriata na Mohammed a.s.’ (‘and moves by the Shariah of Muhammad, peace be upon him’). This reading is obviously based on some other text than the Qur’an, but is is not immediately clear what that text is. These are only some of the most significant and evident exegetical interventions – there are many others.

At the very beginning of Shemsuddin’s translation of Sūrat al-Baqara, one may note that the Arabic allā(‘So’, ‘Verily’, ‘Truely’, an emphatic expression) is translated as ‘no znaite dobre’ (‘and know well’). This replicates many twentieth-century Turkish translations, in which this Qur’anic word is translated as ‘İyi bilin ki’. However, comparison of the aforementioned verse with Turkish interpretations that appeared before 1983 reveals that one particular work adopts many of the same translation choices as those used by Mohammed Shemsuddin: for example, in Q. 2:58, both refer to ‘Kudüs şehrine’ (‘the city of Quds’, i.e. Jerusalem) in the main text, and both also use the word ‘secde’ in the same verse. ;To give another example, Shemsuddin’s translation of Q. 2:62 reads: ‘Hazreti Peygamberin şeriatı üzerine salih bir âmel işlerse’ (‘If he does a righteous deed in accordance with the Sharia of the Prophet Muhammad’). The Qur’an makes no mention of any word like sharīʿa in Q. 2:62, but one other translator does use it, in contrast to other Turkish interpretations. From comparison of these two translations, it is easy to conclude that the main source for Shemsuddin’s Bulgarian translation was a Turkish commentary translation by Ali Fikri Yavuz (1924–1992), first published in 1967 in Istanbul by Sönmez Publishing House under the title Kur’an-ı Kerim ve İzahlı Meal-i Alisi (‘The Noble Qur’an and Its Explanatory Commentary’). This work was quite popular in the 1970s and 1980s, and it seems likely that Shemsuddin simply obtained it when someone brought it in from neighboring Turkey. This does not mean that this was the only source for Mohammed Shemsuddin’s translation, but it does seem that he used it as a kind of authoritative interpretation. 

Korani Kerim by Mohammed Shemsuddin is one of a group of unique works produced illegally in the communist bloc. Through hardly as popular as recent translations into Bulgarian from the original Arabic, it remains a very illustrious example of the struggle by religious leaders to maintain and express their religious beliefs and identity during the Cold War era. 

Mykhaylo Yakubovych

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