While QTOTW#140 covered Darussalam’s main publishing projects in English, and QTOTW#138 their translation into French, this post goes further in presenting their Qur’an translations into other languages. A Saudi-based multilingual international publishing house, Darussalam now operates in more than thirty countries and is positioned as one of largest publishers of translations of the Qur’an in …
If an ordinary Muslim for whom Russian is the mother tongue were asked today to recite Sūrat al-Fātiḥa from memory, it is very likely that their recitation would be based on Elmir Quliyev’s translation of the Qur’an. The ubiquitous presence of this Qur’an translation in print and online apps, and on peoples’ tongues, reflects the …
In contrast to other Saudi publishers, Tafsīr al-ʿ‘Ushr al-Akhīr project is dedicated solely to publishing Qur’an interpretations in a variety of languages, using a rather more ‘centralized’ exegetical approach than is the norm. Established by the Communities Awareness Society (al-Jamaʿaiyyah li-Taʾwiyyah al-Jāliyyāt) in the Old Industrial City of the Saudi capital, Riyadh, the idea …
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 …
Since 1990, a large number of Arabic religious texts have been translated into Bosnian. When it comes to exegetical texts specifically, the appearance of a shortened version of Ibn Kathīr’s commentary in Bosnian in the mid-1990s was quite significant, and can be considered a mark of the rise of Salafism in the country which was, …
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 Kyrgyz language belongs to the Turkic language family, and is currently spoken by five million people in the Kyrgyz Republic (Kyrgyzstan) and beyond. Still using the Cyrillic alphabet (after the Soviet reforms of 1940), this language has much in common with Kazakh (most notably in terms of grammar). As with other Central Asian countries …
Qur’an translation of the week #72: The Qur’an in Kyrgyz: Between Hanafism and Salafism Read More »
This week’s post addresses Ozarenie ot znayuschego, sveduyuschego [Озарение от Знающего, Сведующего], a Russian translation of Fatḥ al ʿalīm al khabīr bi-tafsīr ‘al-juzʾ al-akhīr’, a tafsīr on the last juzʾ of the Qur’an by the Yemeni preacher Muḥammad ibn ʿAbdallāh Bājammāl. The translation is by a prolific Tatar preacher and translator known by the teknonymic name …
The Avar language (originally known as ‘Magarul mac’) belongs to the subgroup of Avar–Andic languages and is currently spoken by more than a million people in Russia (in western Dagestan), Azerbaijan (in the Zaqatala region), and Georgia. The oldest texts written in Avar date back to the fifteenth century and the language has survived a …
