India

Qur’an translation of the week #211: A new genre of Qurʾan translations

Today, we will look at Urdu Quran, the first Urdu translation authored by a Christian scholar, Imad-ud-Din Lahiz, who converted from Islam to Christianity. During the nineteenth century, British India was a melting pot of various peoples and faiths where Muslims, Hindus, and Christians engaged in polemical debates as part of their missionary endeavors, each seeking […]

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Qur’an translation of the week #209: ‘The Qurán’: A Christian version of a Muslim-authored Qur’an Translation

In this post, we will examine what is likely the first Urdu translation produced within a Christian missionary context: ‘The Qurán’. Published in 1844 by the Presbyterian Mission Press of Allahabad, it features Shāh ʿAbd al-Qādir’s very prominent and influential Urdu translation transcribed into Latin script. Shāh ʿAbd al-Qādir’s rendition was completed at the end of the eighteenth century and originally

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Qur’an translation of the week #207: Creolised Urdu, imported revivalism: The Kanz-ul-Īmān in Mauritian Creole 

In 1995, two preachers from Port Louis, the capital city of the island of Mauritius, published a Qur’an translation into Mauritian Creole. Le Saint Qur’aan did not actually claim to be a direct translation of the Arabic Qur’an, however, but was rather presented as a rendition of an Urdu Qur’an translation, the Kanz-ul-Īmān by Ahmad Reza Khan Barelwi (1856–1921).

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Qur’an translation of the week #191: A Malayalam Qur’an translation by Bahauddeen Muhammed Nadwi

A guest contribution by Suhair Thottupurath, Necmettin Erbakan University, Konya Non-Arab Muslims have been actively translating the Qur’an for centuries, despite bouts of ideological opposition to the concept of the translatability of the Qur’an in various times and places. The Mappila communities that live in the South Indian state of Kerala accordingly have a rich

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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 #169: Qur’an translation into every language: Goodword Books and its recent projects

When browsing any Muslim missionary bookstand in Europe today, it is hard to miss a particular series of Qur’an translations by a company named as Goodword. Almost all of them are printed in pocket format and feature the same blue and white cover adorned with stylized tulip flowers, reminiscent of Ottoman non-figurative illumination. These small

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Qur’an translation of the week #168: The Turkish afterlife of a global scholar: Muhammad Hamidullah’s French Qur’an translation in Turkish

Aziz Kur’an is a Turkish Qur’an translation based on Le Saint Coran by Muhammad Hamidullah. Producing such a translation of a translation is an unusual decision given that there are already dozens of Qur’an translations on the Turkish market from the original Arabic. It speaks to the renown and appeal of this illustrious and prolific

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