The Muslim World League (‘Rābiṭat al-ʿĀlam al-Islāmī’, MWL) officially came into being on December 15, 1962. This global Muslim organization, which has its headquarters in Mecca, remains one of the most influential transnational Islamic institutions and has realized many different goals, from the cultural and religious to the political. Fifty years on from its establishment, …
Albanian, one of the ‘Islamic languages’ of southern Europe, has some eight million native speakers, a predominant share of whom are Muslims, especially in Albania and Kosovo. These two regions are connected by ethnic and cultural ties, however when it comes to the Islamic religious tradition their recent political realities are very different. While Kosovo, …
In 1422/2002, the Saudi King Fahd Qur’an Printing Complex (KFQPC) advertised the publication of the first ever (partial) translation of the Qur’an into the language of the most marginalized community in Europe: the Roma, whose language, Romani, is spoken across Europe in many different varieties. This event throws a spotlight on two important modern developments …
How does the early 1977 edition of the Hilali-Khan translation differs from later revisions? First of all, the English text of 1977 is almost completely free from the inclusion of Arabic glosses, i.e. transliterated Arabic words inserted in brackets, with only very few exceptions. Consider, for example, Q 2:43. In both the 1977 and 1978 …
This popular translation of the Qur’an into English, widely known as ‘Hilali-Khan,’ is one of the most influential Islamic texts in the world. Published in numerous editions, it gained much of its fame in the late 1990s and early 2000s, while recently it has been criticized on various grounds, some more controversial than others. Criticisms …
In contrast to most previous threads, this week’s post shares a translator’s vision of his own work, in this case ‘Preslavnyi Koran: Pereklad smysliv Ukrains’koju movoju’ (‘The Glorious Qur’an: A Translation of its Meanings into Ukrainian’), first published in 2013 by the King Fahd Qur’an Printing Complex. Unlike many of the other translations recently published …
With a population of around nineteen million people, Kazakhstan is the largest Central Asian state. Its official language, Kazakh, is the native language of some fifteen million people living both within Kazakhstan and beyond. Kazakh belongs to a Turkic language group of the Kipchak branch and is thus closely related to Kyrgyz, Karakalpak and Nogai. …
The history of Qur’an interpretation in Eastern Turkic areas has its roots in the medieval era while Qur’an translations, in the modern sense of independent books containing the translated text of the Qur’an, have appeared only recently. The few twentieth-century Qur’an translations that have been published in the area were more like tafsīrs than translations. …
Qur’an translation of the week #70: The Qur’an in Uyghur Read More »
Today’s post discusses a Lebanese publisher’s attempt to bridge the divide between non-Muslim and Muslim French Qur’an translations by editing and repackaging the Qur’an translation by Denise Masson (1902–1994) for a Muslim audience. That such a divide exists is true of most European book markets. On one side of the divide, we find mainstream publishers …
What factors determine the success of a Qur’an translations, or lack thereof? Why are some translations widely sold in bookstores, distributed in mosques, used in university courses, or ubiquitous on the internet, while others are hardly known and out of print? Zeinab Abdelaziz’s Le Qur’an: Traduction du sens de ses Versets probably belongs to the …
