Morocco

Qur’an translation of the week #74: A French law professor and a native interpreter: a Qur’an translation from colonial-era France

Le Coran by Octave Pesle and Ahmed Tidjani, first published in Paris in 1936, was a product of the colonial era when France held sway over much of the Maghreb. One of the authors of this Qur’an translation, Tidjani (1875–1982), was an Algerian Muslim legal scholar who first worked as a qadi in Algiers and …

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Qur’an translation of the week #64: Polemics and da’wa between Egypt, France and Libya: Zeinab Abdelaziz’s Le Qur’an: Traduction du sens de ses Versets

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 …

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Qur’an translation of the week #62: The quest for a Western European language of Islam: Mohammed Chiadmi’s Le noble Coran: Nouvelle traduction française du sens de ses versets

How does one translate the Qur’an into a language that has developed in a predominantly Christian context, and whose religious vocabulary has been shaped by that context? This is a question that all translators of the Qur’an into Western European languages grapple with. This is even more the case when Muslim translators are addressing a …

Qur’an translation of the week #62: The quest for a Western European language of Islam: Mohammed Chiadmi’s Le noble Coran: Nouvelle traduction française du sens de ses versets Read More »

Qur’an translation of the week #50: A Spanish Qur’an translation based on the reading of Warsh

‘Del Noble Coran: Traducción Comentada’ is an intriguing work for a number of reasons, not least its use of a minority reading (qirāʾa) of the Qur’an and its link to the Murabitun World Movement. The first modern Spanish Qur’an translation by a Muslim, it was reprinted by the Saudi King Fahd Qur’an Printing Complex (KFQPC), …

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Qur’an translation of the week #06: “The Message of the Qur’an” by Muhammad Asad

This week we look at the highly original and influential work by the rationally-inclined Muhammad Asad: “The Message of the Qur’an”. Born Leopold Weiss in 1900 in Austria-Hungary (modern-day Lviv, Ukraine), he became Muslim in 1926. As he recounts in his autobiography “The Road to Mecca”, a Qur’an translation played an important role in his …

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