Saudi Arabia

Qur’an translation of the week #63: Word for word translations in English

This week’s post concerns the phenomenon of “word for word” translations in English, with a look at some examples along with the translators’ introductions. Interlinear verbatim translations have a long history, and work more naturally in languages with shared vocabulary and structure with Arabic. A three-volume work first published in 1995 by the Islamic Book …

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Qur’an translation of the week #52: Friends, helpers, leaders, allies? Muslims, interreligious relations, and the translation of Q 5:51

In celebration of the one-year anniversary of ‘Qur’an Translation of the Week’, the GloQur team today jointly looks at modern translations of a contested verse. We will discuss Q 5:51, a verse that pertains to the relations between Muslims, on the one hand, and Christians and Jews, on the other hand. How is it rendered in …

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Qur’an translation of the week #51: Following the Saudi Trend: A Translation of the Meaning of the Qur’an, Accompanied by Concise Interpretation, by Abu Adel.

This week we turn our attention to Koran: Perevod Smysla Ayatov i ih Kratkoe Tolkovanie (‘The Qur’an: A Translation of the Meaning of its Verses, Accompanied by Concise Interpretation’), a Russian Qur’an translation by a Tatar translator known by the teknonymic name Abu Adel. First published in 2008, it is already on its fourth edition. …

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Qur’an translation of the week #49: “Kur’an-ı Kerim ve Türkçe Açıklamalı Meali”: A Saudi Edition of a Popular Translation into Turkish

Although there are many translations of the Qur’an into modern Turkish, Kur’an-ı Kerim ve Türkçe Açıklamalı Meali is of special interest. Prepared by a team of scholars on the initiative of the Muslim World League (MWL) and first published in 1982, this is a collective work rather than the more traditional individually-authored translation that comprise …

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Qur’an translation of the week #44: “Το Ιερό Κοράνιο”: The “Al-Azhar” translation of the Qur’an into Greek

There has been a history of close interaction between the Byzantine and Arab cultures in the Mediterranean and Middle East ever since the Arab conquests in the seventh century CE. This, and the concomitant rise of Christian-Muslim polemics, resulted in the production of the first complete translation of the Qur’an into Greek before the end …

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Qur’an translation of the week #35: Translation of the Qur’an into Macedonian by Dr. Hasan Dzilo

The 1997 translation of the Qur’an into Macedonian (since republished twice) comprises the first, and so far only, translation of the Qur’an into a Balkan language to be published by the King Fahd Glorious Qur’an Printing Complex (two others, into Bosnian and Albanian, were published independently before this). Its author, Dr. Hasan Dzilo, is a …

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Qur’an translation of the week #20: KFQPC’s Azerbaijanian translation

Due to the rich tradition of representing Islam in Azerbaijanian (the language spoken by 25 million people), there are a number of modern translations of the Qur’an. For example, translations by Ziya Bunyadov and Vasim Mammadaliyev (1991), Nariman Gasimzade (1994), Memmedhasan Ganioğlu and Tariyel Rilaloğlu (2000) and Aladdin Sultanov (2011) were all made directly from …

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Qur’an translation of the week #07: ‘Le Saint Coran‘ and its convoluted publication history

This book, which I purchased in a bookstore in Tunis, was published in Homs, Syria, in 2011 and claims to contain a French Qur’an translation produced by the Mauritanian scholar Mohamed El-Moktar Ould Bah (b. 1924) for the King Fahd Complex in Medina – evidence of the longstanding presence and importance of Mauritanian scholars in …

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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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