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Qur’an translation of the week #165: The Rowad Translation Center – A Saudi Charity

Over the last few years, the Saudi-based Rowad Translation Center (Markaz Rawwād al-Tarjama) has grown to become one of the biggest private publishers of Qur’an translations. It publishes translations into a number of languages and is the main caretaker of the multilingual website QuranEnc.com, one of the biggest sources of Qur’anic interpretations on the web. …

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Qur’an translation of the week #164: From The Great Tiding to The Awesome News: Mahmoud Ayoub’s Translation and Exegesis between Lebanon, Libya and the United States

Despite the fact that Mahmoud Ayoub (1935–2021) was a fairly renowned member of the Muslim community in North America, his translation of the Juzʾ ʿamma, the last of the thirty parts of the Qur’an, is virtually unknown and hard to obtain. It is a fascinating source for at least two reasons: first, because of its …

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Qur’an translation of the week #157: Feminist? Qur’anist? Perennialist? Aḥmadi? Or Sufi Mystic? Harmonizing the Multiple Identities of Laleh Bakhtiar in her Translation of The Sublime Quran

A guest contribution by Sheam Khan, University of Leicester Identifying the ideology of a Qur’an translator has rarely been more complex than in the case of The Sublime Quran and its translator, Laleh Bakhtiar, whose ideological positions are often paradoxical. There is a wealth of information available regarding her life and works, but the polarities …

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Qur’an translation of the week #152: Between Mauritius and Saudi Arabia: The trilingual Qur’an translations of Houssein Nahaboo

On the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, a dentist called Houssein Nahaboo (1920–2000) published Qur’an translations in no less than three languages – Mauritian Creole, French and English – during the 1980s. Through the lens of the small Muslim community of Mauritius in general, and Nahaboo’s work in particular, we can observe both the local …

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Qur’an translation of the week #151: ‘The Qur’an’ – a Qur’an translation by Pakistan’s Foreign Minister

This week we will take a closer look at ‘The Qur’an: The Eternal Revelation Vouchsafed to Muhammad,’ an English Qur’an translation authored by Sir Zafarullah Khan (d. 1985), who served as Pakistan’s first Foreign Minister. Sir Zafarullah Khan was born in 1893 in Sialkot where he attended primary school at the American Mission School. Receiving …

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Qur’an translation of the week #149: ‘God’s command’: A milestone in early Turkish Republican Qur’an translation

In 1934, the Islamic scholar, writer and journalist Ömer Rıza published a pioneering Turkish Qur’an translation-cum-commentary entitled Tanrı Buyruğu (‘God’s Command’) in Istanbul. Appearing five years after the Turkish Republic’s script reform, which abolished the use of the Arabic script, Tanrı Buyruğu was probably the first Turkish Qur’an translation to be printed in Latin script …

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Qur’an translation of the week #146: Noor International: An emerging Saudi Arabian publisher of Qur’an translations

In around 2018, another publisher that specializes in ‘translating the meanings of the Holy Quran into international languages’ emerged in Riyadh, registered as ‘Noor International.’ During its first four years of operation, this publishing house has produced English, French, European Spanish and Latin American Spanish translations of the Qur’an. For its English translation, it simply …

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Qur’an translation of the week #145: A meeting of languages and cultures: A French Qur’an translation from colonial Mauritius

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 …

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Qur’an translation of the week #140: Anglo-Islamic Publishers Going Global: Darussalam International

A guest contribution by Azhar Majothi, University of Nottingham (azhar.majothi@nottingham.ac.uk) Darussalam International is one of the Muslim Anglosphere’s most recognisable brands in Islamic book publishing today. Since its establishment in Riyadh in 1986, the publisher claims to have printed more than 1,400 ‘authentic’ Islamic titles in various world languages. Despite the publisher’s achievements, little is …

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