‘The Qur’ân is untranslatable. It is. We can approach its meaning, but a literal translation never comes even close to the original experience of qirât al-Qur’ân. The transfer of the metaphorical is almost impossible. The recitation of the Qur’ân in the Mihrab by the Imam, or as pure recitation brings emotion into the souls of …
The field of Qur’an translation has expanded rapidly in the Netherlands since the late twentieth century. Like other European countries, the Netherlands has experienced various waves of migration since the 1960s and seen an influx of Muslims, whose numbers have been intensified by recent political instability and war in various Muslim-majority countries. As a new …
The Netherlands has a long history of engagement with Islam, due not least to the fact that for some 300 years the Dutch ruled over Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. However, Muslim translations of the Qur’an into Dutch only began to emerge following the onset of the modern, global trend of Muslim migration to …
Johannes Hendrik Kramers (also known as J.H. Kramers or Jan Kramers, 1891–1951) was born in Rotterdam on 26th February as the eldest son to Hendrik Kramers, a physician, and Jeanne Suzanne Breukelman. Kramers had a brother named Hendrik Anthony Kramers, a physicist who made important contributions to quantum mechanics and statistical physics. Unlike his father …
‘De Korte Hoofdstukken van de Koran’ (2002) is a translation and commentary of short Qur’anic verses by a Dutch Indonesianist and Islamologue, Karel Steenbrink, who built lasting personal relationships with many Indonesian Muslim scholars in both the Netherlands and Indonesia. At a time when many studies of Islamology emerging from Western universities focused their attention …
‘Finally, a good translation of the Qur’an,’ declared a reviewer in ‘Volkskrant,’ a well-known newspaper in the Netherlands, on the publication of Eduard Verhoef’s translation of the Qur’an. A number of notable Dutch-speaking Muslims have likewise written positive comments on Verhoef’s translation, such as, for example, Tidjani Boulaouali, a member of the teaching staff at …
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 …
Interest in Islam and the Qur’an in the Netherlands has led to the publication of several translations of the Qur’an into Dutch, including ‘De Koran’ (1860) by a Jewish Orientalist from Leiden, Solomon Keyzer; ‘De Koran’ (1956) by the Arabic linguist Johannes Hendrik Kramers; and ‘De Koran’ (1989) by another Arabic linguist, Fred Leemhuis. In …
Is the translation of the Qur’an by a non-Muslim justifiable? And what authority do non-Muslims have to translate the Qur’an? These are the kind of debates that arose in the Netherlands following the publication of the first edition of Fred Leemhuis’s Dutch translation of the Qur’an in 1989. Leemhuis chose the word ‘weergave’ (‘rendering’/‘representation’) for …
In celebration of the one-year anniversary of ‘Qur’an Translation of the Week’, the GloQur team today jointly looks at modern translations of a contested verse. We will discuss Q 5:51, a verse that pertains to the relations between Muslims, on the one hand, and Christians and Jews, on the other hand. How is it rendered in …
