On the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, a dentist called Houssein Nahaboo (1920–2000) published Qur’an translations in no less than three languages – Mauritian Creole, French and English – during the 1980s. Through the lens of the small Muslim community of Mauritius in general, and Nahaboo’s work in particular, we can observe both the local …
This week we will take a closer look at ‘The Qur’an: The Eternal Revelation Vouchsafed to Muhammad,’ an English Qur’an translation authored by Sir Zafarullah Khan (d. 1985), who served as Pakistan’s first Foreign Minister. Sir Zafarullah Khan was born in 1893 in Sialkot where he attended primary school at the American Mission School. Receiving …
In 1934, the Islamic scholar, writer and journalist Ömer Rıza published a pioneering Turkish Qur’an translation-cum-commentary entitled Tanrı Buyruğu (‘God’s Command’) in Istanbul. Appearing five years after the Turkish Republic’s script reform, which abolished the use of the Arabic script, Tanrı Buyruğu was probably the first Turkish Qur’an translation to be printed in Latin script …
In 1949, Zainul Abedin Rajabalee, a schoolmaster living on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, published the first part of his Qur’an translation. In the introduction, he wrote ‘If we are not mistaken, this is the first work of this kind in French’ – by which he meant the first to be written by a …
How does one go about translating the Qur’an into a constructed language? This week we will be looking at Abdul Hadi Italo Chiussi’s translation of the Qur’an into Esperanto. Esperanto ranks as the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language in the world. It was created by the Warsaw ophthalmologist L.L. Zamenhof in 1887 with …
Qur’an translation of the week #143: Qur’an translation into Esperanto Read More »
This week we look at the first Muslim-authored translation into German, which was published during World War II by Maulana Sadr-ud-Din (d. 1981), a missionary of the Lahore branch of the Ahmadiyya movement, and caused much controversy within his community. Sadr-ud-Din, who had previously worked as a missionary in Woking in the United Kingdom, arrived …
In 1915, the Ahmadiyya Movement published the first part of The Holy Qur-ān with English Translation and Explanatory Notes, the first Ahmadi translation to be published in a European language. The Ahmadiyya Movement was the first Islamic group to begin translating the Qur’an into European languages, a project they initiated at the beginning of the …
Qur’an translation of the week #127: The First Ahmadi English Qur’an translation Read More »
In 1931, the Indian Shi’i activist A.F. Badshah Husain started publishing an English Qur’an translation ‘according to Shia traditions and principles.’ In this translation, which has to the best of our knowledge never been completed, Husain aimed to defend both the Qur’an and Imami Shi’i doctrines against British Orientalists, Islamic modernists and, in particular, the …
This week we will look at Muhammad Ali’s influential English translation, entitled The Holy Qur-án, which was first published in 1917. Muhammad Ali (d. 1951) was a renowned Ahmadi scholar who was born in 1874 in Murar, in the state of Kapurthala in India. Ali studied mathematics, law and English at university, after which he …
Indonesia has experienced approximately 350 years of colonization, first by the Portuguese and Dutch following the arrival of the Dutch VOC (Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie) in the 1600s and, more recently, with three years of Japanese occupation from 1942 to 1945. The country’s struggle to achieve independence was not easy, especially given the diversity of …
