In the final ever instalment of ‘Qur’an translation of the week’, we present an ambitious ongoing project to translate the Qur’an into the language of the Rohingya, an oppressed and persecuted Muslim community from Myanmar, which has an added significance because it demonstrates the role that Qur’an translations can play in the preservation of endangered cultures.
‘Rohingya’ is today the most common umbrella term for the Muslims of Rakhine state, a province in Western Myanmar. Before 1989, the province was known as Arakan, the historical name for a region that stretches along the northeastern coast of the Bay of Bengal and which also includes present-day Bangladesh. The military junta that took power in 1988 renamed the province as part of its effort to dissociate Myanmar from its Muslim-majority neighbour, deliberately choosing the name of a predominantly Buddhist ethnic group, the Rakhine. This was part and parcel of a racist nation-building project and a further step in a long history of attempts to erase the Rohingya from Myanmar’s history and society. Ever since the first military junta took power in 1962, the Rohingya have been systematically denied civil and political rights on the grounds that they are, allegedly, not really Burmese, but rather Bangladeshi nationals and illegal immigrants to Myanmar. They have suffered from a lack of education, infrastructure, health care, and economic development, all of which have been deliberately withheld from them. A first wave of violent persecution drove hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in Bangladesh in 1978, most of whom were later allowed to return after a repatriation agreement brokered by the UN. However, in 1982, the nationality law of Burma, as the country was then called, restricted citizenship to only those ‘national races’ that were explicitly listed in the bill, which did not include the Rohingya, rendering them stateless. Further state-inflicted violence against the Rohingya occurred in 1991–1992 and, finally, in the largest and most systematic attempt to rid Myanmar of its Muslim inhabitants, from 2012 onwards, culminating in the ‘Rohingya crisis’ of 2015. This concerted campaign against the Rohingya was classified by the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights as ‘genocide’ and ‘crimes against humanity.’ Prior to the Rohingya crisis, the Rohingya population in Myanmar numbered around 1.2 million. Today at least 900,000 live as refugees in Bangladesh, 100,000 in camps for internally displaced persons in Myanmar, and many more in other countries.
The Rohingya language is closely related to Chittagonian Bengali, which is spoken in Eastern Bangladesh, and is more distantly related to standard Bengali. Since the Rohingya are largely a rural community with low social status, their language is more commonly spoken than written. During the colonial period, written communication was typically conducted in English or Urdu, and since independence, in Burmese. When Rohingya was written, non-standardised varieties of the Perso-Arabic script were used, and this was also the script on which, in 1975, the first attempt to propose a standardised Rohingya orthography was based. In 1985, a Rohingya Islamic scholar and teacher called Mohammad Hanif developed an independent script, vaguely inspired by Arabic, called the Hanifi Rohingya script. In a further development, an adaptation of the Latin script specifically geared towards writing Rohingya was proposed in 1999. The addition of the Hanifi script to the Unicode standard in 2018 was a huge milestone for those Rohingya who were fighting against the erasure of their culture. Since 2019, there is now also a virtual keyboard for the Hanifi script, and Google has developed a Rohingya Noto font. It is noteworthy that the Hanifi script only came into existence because Hanif lived in Bangladesh when he developed it, as the written use of Rohingya is forbidden in Myanmar. Viewing this as an attempt to erase the Rohingya language, Hanif was determined to fight back. ‘If a people do not have a written language of their own, it is easier to say that as an ethnic group you don’t exist,’ he has said. ‘It is easier to repress them.’ The fact that most Rohingya living in Myanmar, as well as those living in refugee camps in precarious circumstances, are denied formal education means that many turn to primary Islamic education instead. However, few Rohingya advance beyond the most basic religious knowledge and a refined scholarly tradition has never had a chance to emerge.
The project of producing a Rohingya Qur’an translation aims to remedy both the lack of knowledge about Islam and the repression of the Rohingya language. It was probably initiated by Qutub Shah, an ethnic Rohingya who is pursuing a PhD in comparative religion at the International Islamic University of Malaysia. He joined forces with Dakwah Corner Bookstore, a missionary publisher based in Petaling Jaya, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, that specialises in Islamic literature in English. Since the Rohingya language has rarely been used in written form, and consequently few Rohingya have learned how to read it, no matter in which script, the team decided on an unusual course of action, which was to first deliver a spoken rendition of the Qur’an into Rohingya before embarking on the production of a written translation. The translation team thus started by producing audio and video materials. In doing so, they drew on a number of Qur’an commentaries and on the English, Urdu, Bengali, and Burmese translations published by the King Fahd Complex in Medina. Dakwah Corner Bookstore has a branch office in Mecca and close ties to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is reflected in this choice of sources.
Work on the spoken rendition of the Qur’an started in early 2021 and was completed in August 2023. Users can choose between professionally produced audio and video files that combine the recitation of the Arabic Qur’an with its spoken Rohingya translation. The project team used the Arabic recitation of the Islamic scholar Muhammad Ayyoub, who was born in Mecca to Rohingya refugee parents and later became an imam at the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. Thus, even for the Arabic recitation, they aimed to create a connection to the Rohingya community. The translation is read by Qutub Shah, who was also the main translator. The audio and video files are available in the Rohingya Qur’an app, which was created for iOS and Android, as well as on the project website (https://rohingyaquran.com), YouTube, and various social media sites.
Based on the oral translation, a written version is currently being produced in the Hanifi script that so far covers the first five suras. The translation team have mentioned that they have faced a number of challenges in implementing the project, the first of which is the history of oppression of the Rohingya language:
Though the writing system evolved in late 70s, its popularity is halted by the exposure of its speakers to a systematic genocide. Hence there are no literature nor intellectual works in this language until it has become almost a half-dead language. The usage of the language is to expressing the needs of their daily life only. The writing was banned in their homeland and those in the lands of migration were also struggling to survive and were influenced by the local languages. Many terms disappeared, while many others are replaced by terms from other languages.
The translation of the Quran into this target language was perhaps the first attempt to translate such a highly eloquent text to Rohingya. This difficulty is comprising of three aspects: translation of words, sentences and eloquence. In this regard, several individuals with linguistic, cultural, geographical and religious expertise are consulted. Sometimes, to translate certain words, several words, a phrase, or even a sentence is needed. It was tough but finally successful. It just took longer than expected time.
The translation is explanatory, containing exegetical insertions, both for the linguistic reasons mentioned above and because of the translation team’s dogmatic approach to Qur’an translation. They have invested much energy into developing the technical infrastructure needed to typeset a Rohingya Qur’an translation, such as keyboard layouts and font designs. Dakwah Corner Bookstore is currently collecting donations to complete the project, and the plan is to print 2,000 copies and distribute them in Malaysia, Bangladesh, and Saudi Arabia. The production of such a limited print run is typical of Qur’an translations into languages that are predominantly used orally, and this makes the project team’s decision to produce professional audio and video files all the more innovative and important.
In marginalised Muslim-majority communities such as the Rohingya, there is the potential for a symbiotic relationship between language activism, cultural preservation campaigns, and efforts to preach and teach Islam. The Rohingya Qur’an project is only the latest example of this, but it is certainly among the most impressive, due to the care and professionalism with which it is being conducted. Its use of up-to-date technology not only contributes to the distribution of the Qur’an translation itself, but also helps foster the development and standardisation of the Rohingya language. It is an excellent example of how the current trend of translating the Qur’an into an ever-growing number of languages also plays an important part in the preservation of the world’s linguistic diversity.
Johanna Pink