The most recent French Qur’an translation, published in 2022, is also the first to be published in Algeria since the country became independent from France in 1962, or actually since the publication of the very first French Qur’an translation undertaken by Muslim authors, which appeared in 1931. This is probably at least partly due to […]
This week, we present the first Muslim Qur’an translation into French, after having discussed its English equivalent last week. Both efforts had their origin in the colonial period, but there were notable differences between the contexts of the French-ruled Maghreb and British India. Before addressing them, let us take a closer look at ‘Le Coran,’
Le Coran by Octave Pesle and Ahmed Tidjani, first published in Paris in 1936, was a product of the colonial era when France held sway over much of the Maghreb. One of the authors of this Qur’an translation, Tidjani (1875–1982), was an Algerian Muslim legal scholar who first worked as a qadi in Algiers and
