When browsing any Muslim missionary bookstand in Europe today, it is hard to miss a particular series of Qur’an translations by a company named as Goodword. Almost all of them are printed in pocket format and feature the same blue and white cover adorned with stylized tulip flowers, reminiscent of Ottoman non-figurative illumination. These small …
Aziz Kur’an is a Turkish Qur’an translation based on Le Saint Coran by Muhammad Hamidullah. Producing such a translation of a translation is an unusual decision given that there are already dozens of Qur’an translations on the Turkish market from the original Arabic. It speaks to the renown and appeal of this illustrious and prolific …
In February 2023, a court in Istanbul ruled that the distribution and sale of the Turkish translation of the Qur’an authored by Recep İhsan Eliaçık (b. 1961) would no longer be permitted. The case was brought by Diyanet, the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs, on the basis of legal powers it acquired in 2019 to …
In 1934, the Islamic scholar, writer and journalist Ömer Rıza published a pioneering Turkish Qur’an translation-cum-commentary entitled Tanrı Buyruğu (‘God’s Command’) in Istanbul. Appearing five years after the Turkish Republic’s script reform, which abolished the use of the Arabic script, Tanrı Buyruğu was probably the first Turkish Qur’an translation to be printed in Latin script …
In 1935, the Orientalist publishing house Paul Geuthner in Paris published posthumously the last oeuvre of an exiled Turkish Muslim who had only just died of a heart attack en route from Alexandria to Europe. This work, a partial Qur’an translation titled La sagesse coranique (‘The Wisdom of the Qur’an’), was printed at the behest …
In 2020, a nondescript self-publisher in Turkey issued a colour-coded interlinear word-for-word translation of the Qur’an into German with the (not very idiomatic) title Quran Wort zu Wort Übersetzung. Since it was the first of its kind, and still remains unique, it seems to have gained a certain popularity among German-speaking Muslims, especially those who …
The Indian scholar Maulana Wahiduddin Khan (1925–2021) was the founder of a global da’wah enterprise that focuses on the distribution of Qur’an translations. We discussed his English Qur’an translation (which was co-authored with, and probably mostly produced by, his daughter Farida Khanam on the basis of his Urdu translation) last week. Khan was a madrasa-trained …
Qur’an translation as propaganda: war alliances and nation-building (2/3) In the period between the two world wars, Nejmi Sagib Bodamialisade (1897–1964), a Muslim in Cyprus, an oft-forgotten corner of the British Empire, started translating the Qur’an into English verse in order to gain British support for Muslim Cypriot interests. His translations of segments of the …
Qur’an translation as propaganda: war alliances and nation-building (1/3) When the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in November 1914 on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary, pro-Ottoman circles in Germany were eager to sell this new alliance to a German-speaking public that was under the influence of decades of discourses on Oriental despotism …
Belarusian, which is spoken by around seven million people in Belarus and beyond, is probably the last official, state language in Europe into which the Qur’an has been translated. Belarus has a small Muslim population (of around 30,000, or 0.3 percent of the total population), consisting of an indigenous Tatar community, a newly arrived immigrant …
