English

Qur’an translation of the week #202: The Majestic Qur’an by Ali Özek and his team: an early Turkish translation of the Qur’an into English from the 1990s

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 […]

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Qur’an translation of the week #200: The Brave New World of machine translation

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

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Qur’an translation of the week #197: The Devotional Qur’an by Shawkat Toorawa

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

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Qur’an translation of the week #192: The ‘Saheeh International’: A ‘Saudi’ Team Translation into English

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

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Qur’an translation of the week #189: The Qur’aan The Supreme, or: how literal can one get?

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.

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Qur’an translation of the week #188: The first ‘American Qur’an’

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

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Qur’an translation of the week #187: What is in the Quran? Message of the Quran in Simple English by Abdur Raheem Kidwai

Abdur Raheem Kidwai (b. 1956), currently director of the K.A. Nazmi Qur’anic Centre at Aligarh Muslim University in India is not only a well-known reviewer of other people’s Qur’an translations into English, but also a translator himself. His own translation, What is in the Quran? Message of the Quran in Simple English (first published in

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Qur’an translation of the week #184: Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani’s The Meanings of the Noble Qur’an with Explanatory Notes

The Meanings of the Noble Qur’an with Explanatory Notes by Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani (b. 1943), first published in 2007, is rooted in the Deobandi movement which originated in India in the nineteenth century and promotes a conservative brand of Islamic revivalism that upholds the authority of traditional Hanafi scholarship. As a result of the

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Qur’an translation of the week #181: My First Qur’an with Pictures: Juz’ Amma Part 1 by Shereen Sharief

The provision of Qur’ans aimed at children is a niche market, and there are not many Qur’an publishers that cater to this need. Furthermore, many of those that do exist do not facilitate teaching the Qur’an in an easy-to-understand, child-friendly way. As discussed in a previous thread, the Indonesian publisher Syaamil tried to fill this

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Qur’an translation of the week #180: Australian Edition of Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s The Holy Qur’ān

Despite its nearly ninety-year history (with the first volume appearing in 1934), Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s translation of the Qur’an continues to outperform many other translations in terms of the frequency with which it is reprinted and the number of different publishers who reprint it, not to mention citations. What is sometimes not as frequently discussed

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