Abdur Raheem Kidwai (b. 1956), currently director of the K.A. Nazmi Qur’anic Centre at Aligarh Muslim University in India is not only a well-known reviewer of other people’s Qur’an translations into English, but also a translator himself. His own translation, What is in the Quran? Message of the Quran in Simple English (first published in …
Although most of the relatively tiny Muslim population of the Republic of Korea (around 150,000 out of a total population of some 51 million) are foreigners, for example foreign students or migrants, there are already three full translations of the Qur’an into Korean. The most recent (and probably the most popular) is the translation by …
Esad Duraković (born 1948) is a leading Bosnian scholar of Arabic and Islamic Studies. After graduating from the University of Belgrade in then Yugoslavia (now Serbia) in 1972, Duraković embarked on his academic career in Belgrad and Priština (nowadays Kosovo), with a doctoral dissertation on Arabic literature. Since 1991 Duraković has been affiliated with various …
Usually, the history of Muhammad Asad’s (1900–1992) translation is dated back to the publication of the complete edition in 1980, while the first, partial version (comprising the first nine suras) which was printed in 1964 has become a bibliographical rarity. The 1964 edition was published by the Islamic Center of Geneva, which was based in …
In 2003, the Libya-based World Islamic Call Society (WICS) published a new translation of the Qur’an into Wolof, authored by Assane Sylla (also known as Asan Silla), a scholar from Senegal. This was quite a significant cultural milestone for the Wolof people, a West African ethnic group who live in Senegal, Gambia and Mauritania. Senegal, …
Qur’an translation of the week #176: Alxuraan: A translation into Wolof by Assane Sylla Read More »
Earlier this year, The Egyptian Ministry of Awqaf published a Hebrew translation of the work known as al-Muntakhab fī tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-karīm (‘Selections of Commentary on the Glorious Qur’an’). This was the latest step in their project to promote this work at a global level – it has already been translated into various languages including …
There are over ten complete translations of the Qur’an into Italian, however Islamic publishers such as the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs and the King Fahd Qur’an Printing Complex usually rely on Hamza Roberto Piccardo’s interpretation, which was first published in 1994. Relatively recently, however, a new Muslim-authored translation into Italian has been published, by …
Qur’an translation of the week #166: Generoso Corano by Sheikh Othman Read More »
The Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı, usually known simply as the Diyanet) was established in 1924 by the nationalist government of the newly emerged Turkish Republic. Initially a secular institution of, it has undergone a continual process of transformation throughout the almost one hundred years of its operation as it adapts to …
Turkmenistan, a landlocked country located in Central Asia with a population of around six million people, is one of the world’s most closed off and authoritarian states. With many limitations on religious freedom in place, the country imposes a kind of secular personality on its domestic politics, in contrast to its neighboring Central Asian states, …
Although Lithuania, which has around three million native speakers of Lithuanian, has an indigenous Muslim population (known as ‘Lithuanian Tatars’) with a well-developed textual tradition of Islamic learning, this group mostly uses Polish instead of Lithuanian. Because of this, the first translation of the Qur’an into Lithuanian has only been published recently, in 2008: 1,000 …
