Shi‘a

Qur’an translation of the week #153: A Shii Qur’an translation into Ukrainian

The story of the most recently published Qur’an translation into Ukrainian has its origins in the activities of the Ukrainian Shii Twelver community, specifically the Ahli-bayt Center of Islamic Culture in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Primarily comprising members of the Azerbaijani and Iranian diasporas in Ukraine, local Shii organizations are especially active in Kyiv, Kharkiv …

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Qur’an translation of the week #122: In defence of miracles- Badshah Husain’s Shi’i English Qur’an translation

In 1931, the Indian Shi’i activist A.F. Badshah Husain started publishing an English Qur’an translation ‘according to Shia traditions and principles.’ In this translation, which has to the best of our knowledge never been completed, Husain aimed to defend both the Qur’an and Imami Shi’i doctrines against British Orientalists, Islamic modernists and, in particular, the …

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Qur’an translation of the week #114: Pioneering or “well-meaning but incompetent”?- Mirza Hairat Dihlavi’s 1916 English Qur’an translation

In 1916, Mirza Hairat Dihlavi (d. 1928), an intellectual and journalist from British India, printed an English Qur’an translation in three volumes. At the time, this was a pioneering endeavor. Mirza Hairat was the editor of a newspaper and had published on a wide range of subjects in Urdu before, including an introduction to Qur’anic …

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Qur’an translation of the week #112: Qur’an translation of the week- Muslim converts and the first Shii Qur’an translation into Polish

Usually Qur’an translations into the Polish language are associated with the legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian Tatars, but in recent years significant new developments have taken place in other communities. For example, in 2021, ‘Koran’ (‘The Qur’an’) was published by ‘the Society of Muslim Unity’ (‘Stowarzyszenie jedności muzułmańskiej’, henceforth SJM). The translator was Rafał Berger (b. …

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Qur’an translation of the week #77: A time of experimentation – A chronological Qur’an translation in early twentieth-century British India

In 1911 and 1912, an Indian Muslim academic called Mirza Abu’l-Fadl published a work entitled The Qur’ân: Arabic Text and English Translation: Arranged Chronologically: With an Abstract in his home town of Allahabad. This was only the second Qur’an translation into English, or any other Western European language, by a Muslim. While Qur’an translations into …

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Qur’an translation of the week #58: One Translation, Three Scripts: Rasul Ismail-Zade Duzal’s Azerbaijani Translation of the Qur’an

One of ten modern translations of the Qur’an into the Azerbaijani language, Rasul Ismail-Zade Duzal’s Qur’an translation has a number of notable features. It is the first “institutional” translation to be published in Azerbaijani, and was produced under the aegis of the Centre for Qur’an Translations into World Languages in Qum, Iran (est. 1994). Prior …

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Qur’an translation of the week #45: Qur’an Translation as an Identity Marker: ‘Sviashchennyi Qur’an: Perevod i Kommentariii’, A Shiite Translation by Nazim Zeynalov

This week’s thread focuses on a Shiite foray into Qur’an translation into the Russian language. While the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Russia are Sunnis, there is also a sizeable number of Shiite Muslim communities scattered across the Russian Federation. These communities are mostly made up of ethnic Azerbaijanis and Lezgins and are scattered in …

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