A guest contribution by Sheam Abdul Aziz Khan, Cardiff University Although Muḥammad al-ʿĀṣī’s translation, The Ascendant Qur’an: An English Translation of the Meanings of the Qur’an, is relatively new on the translation scene, having been published only in late 2023, some iteration of its previous incarnation, as a constitutive element of al-ʿĀṣī’s tafsīr (also published […]
The history of one of the most popular English translations of the Qur’an, that of the Indian-British scholar Abdullah Yusuf Ali (1872–1953), is also a story about editorial changes to published works, in this case leading to at least three revised editions. The 1946 edition of Yusuf Ali’s, which was reprinted up until the 1980s,
On April 17, 2023, a new British publisher called ‘Quwa’ (the Arabic word for ‘strength’) launched a book titled The Quran as Revealed. The launch was accompanied by intense advertising on social media, and the book was endorsed by the popular, if not entirely uncontroversial, Mufti Menk from Zimbabwe (he has 10 million followers on
Gone seem to be the days in which it was the state of the art for a Muslim translator to name their work something along the lines of ‘A Probably Failed Attempt at Translating Some of the Approximate Meanings of the Verses of the Holy Qur’an into English’. Instead, when one browses websites or Islamic
Prof. Ali Özek (1932–2021) was a leading Turkish scholar in religious studies, and for much of his career was affiliated with the theological faculty of Turkey’s most renowned educational institution, Marmara University in Istanbul. As early as in 1982, he published a translation of the Qur’an into Turkish, ‘Kur’an-ı Kerim ve Türkçe Açıklamalı Meali’ (which he undertook
There is no reason to assume that the field of Qur’an translation remains untouched by the commercial opportunities inherent in machine translation and the predatory use of online content. And, indeed, if you search Amazon.com for English Qur’an translations, one of the many options offered to you is a prime example of both phenomena: The
Qur’an translation of the week #200: The Brave New World of machine translation Read More »
This brand-new translation of selected suras and verses of the Qur’an into English does something new and unusual: the translator, Shawkat Toorawa, aims to present those segments of the Qur’an that are most commonly used by Muslims in prayer and ritual around the world, roughly in the order in which Muslims encounter and memorise them
Qur’an translation of the week #197: The Devotional Qur’an by Shawkat Toorawa Read More »
It would be hard to dispute that ‘Saheeh International’ (first published in 1997) is one of the most popular modern interpretations of the Qur’an in English. This work has a few notable aspects that distinguish it from other works in the genre. First of all, it is the product of teamwork, rather than an individually-authored
When a translator entitles his work The Textual Translation For The Qur’an The Supreme in an attempt to render the Arabic phrase al-tarjama al-naṣṣiyya li-l-Qurʾān al-Majīd into English, this is a clear indication that he is taking the concept of ‘literal translation’ to the extreme. And indeed, this is the explicit aim of Abdulaziz F.
In 1985, T.B. (Thomas Ballantyne) Irving, also known as al-Hajj Ta‘lim ‘Ali (1914–2002), published a book entitled The Qur’an: The First American Version. Printed with funding from global donors, including a major halal food business that Levantine Muslim migrants had founded in the American Midwest, its publication was part of a globalizing trend that has
Qur’an translation of the week #188: The first ‘American Qur’an’ Read More »
