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
One of the most populous Muslim areas of Europe, former Yugoslavia played quite a significant role in the development of Muslim revivalism and activism in the Eastern European context. This is reflected in the fact that one of the first Muslim translations of the Qur’an into the local language, ‘Kur’an Časni’ (‘The Holy Qur’an’), appeared
This week we take a close look at Abdul Hakim Khan’s (d. 1917?) ‘The Holy Qurʾan with a commentary’, which was published in 1905 and is the first English translation of the Qurʾan to be authored by a Muslim. As this post coincides with Christmas, we will focus on the way Khan treats the conception
The history of the first Afrikaans Qur’an translation throws a spotlight on the afterlives of slavery and colonialism, the international movement of texts and ideas in the twentieth century, and the disruption of modern South African history. ‘Die Heilige Qur’ān’ by Imam Mohammed Armien Baker (1910–1982) was first published in 1961 by Nasionale Boekhandel, in
