In 1890, in the Southern German city of Konstanz, a booklet comprising a collection of excerpts from the Qur’an into the ‘world language’ Volapük was published. It is a fascinating document that gives us insight into the position of the Qur’an in nineteenth-century Europe, and also of contemporaneous perspectives on language, language planning, literature and …
How does one go about translating the Qur’an into a constructed language? This week we will be looking at Abdul Hadi Italo Chiussi’s translation of the Qur’an into Esperanto. Esperanto ranks as the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language in the world. It was created by the Warsaw ophthalmologist L.L. Zamenhof in 1887 with …
Qur’an translation of the week #143: Qur’an translation into Esperanto Read More »
In 1999, al-Azhar University in Egypt published the German version of its project to standardize Qur’an translation. Like the versions in other languages (for English and Russian, see Al-Montakhab and Al-Muntakhab In Russian- Egyptian Daʿwa In The Post-Soviet Space), this German Qur’an translation was based on the concise Qur’an commentary al-Muntakhab (‘The Select’) which purports …
In 2020, a nondescript self-publisher in Turkey issued a colour-coded interlinear word-for-word translation of the Qur’an into German with the (not very idiomatic) title Quran Wort zu Wort Übersetzung. Since it was the first of its kind, and still remains unique, it seems to have gained a certain popularity among German-speaking Muslims, especially those who …
Qur’an translation as propaganda: war alliances and nation-building (1/3) When the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in November 1914 on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary, pro-Ottoman circles in Germany were eager to sell this new alliance to a German-speaking public that was under the influence of decades of discourses on Oriental despotism …
In 1911 and 1912, an Indian Muslim academic called Mirza Abu’l-Fadl published a work entitled The Qur’ân: Arabic Text and English Translation: Arranged Chronologically: With an Abstract in his home town of Allahabad. This was only the second Qur’an translation into English, or any other Western European language, by a Muslim. While Qur’an translations into …
At the time it was first published in 2000, Amir Zaidan’s At-tafsiir, an annotated translation of the Qur’an into German, stood apart from all other German translations due to its deliberate and extensive use of Arabic terminology. It contained phrases such as ‘In it are clear ayat, [including] maqamu-Ibrahim’ (‘In ihm sind deutliche Ayat, [davon] …
Recently, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat has published a new revised German translation of the Qur’an. In this post, I will take a close look at this new edition and discuss some of the things that have been changed. The Ahmadiyya Movement has been translating the Qur’an into different languages for more than 100 years, with …
The three revised editions of Max Henning’s German Qur’an translation (“Der Koran”, Reclam: Leipzig, 1901) introduced last week illustrate the role of editors in shaping existing translations. The extent of interference with the text may range from the modernization of spelling to a complete rewriting, and even in the latter case, the result may still …
One of the most widely-sold Qur’an translations on the German market is “Der Koran” by Max Henning (1861–1927), an autodidactic Orientalist. First published in 1901 by Reclam in Leipzig, it was one of the few available German Qur’an translations at the time, and was generally considered to be the most reliable one, an assessment that …
