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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
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 …
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 …
