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
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
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
This Turkish Qur’an translation has been successfully – and incorrectly – marketed as the work of a famous, long-dead scholar. It has also been demonized as constituting an attempt by a terrorist organization to subvert Islam in Turkey. For both reasons, it is an intriguing case study in the economics and politics of contemporary Qur’an
The three revised editions of Max Henning’s German Qur’an translation (“Der Koran”, Reclam: Leipzig, 1901) introduced last week illustrate the role of editors in shaping existing translations. The extent of interference with the text may range from the modernization of spelling to a complete rewriting, and even in the latter case, the result may still
One of the most widely-sold Qur’an translations on the German market is “Der Koran” by Max Henning (1861–1927), an autodidactic Orientalist. First published in 1901 by Reclam in Leipzig, it was one of the few available German Qur’an translations at the time, and was generally considered to be the most reliable one, an assessment that
According to conservative estimates, at least 160 complete translations (Kur’an mealleri) of the Qur’an into Turkish have appeared between 1914 and 2020, in addition to numerous commentaries (tefsirler). With the exception of translations into Persian and Urdu, this comprises the highest number of published translations of the Qur’an into another language. Furthermore, some of these
The most recent translation of the Qur’an into Russian, produced by the Kazan Muftiyat in 2019, can tell us much about Muslim theological polemics in contemporary Russia. Widely discussed on social media, the Kalam Sharif translation claims to be the only Sunni “orthodox” translation of Qur’anic meanings corresponding to Maturidi/Ashari theology. As well as the
Among nearly a dozen modern translations of the Qur’an into Italian, the one by Hamza Roberto Piccardo (born 1952) plays an important role for the Islamic community in the country. First of all, it seems to be the first complete Muslim translation of the Qur’an from Arabic. The Ahmadi translation into Italian (London, 1986) is
Qur’an translation of the week #27: The Qur’an in Italian Read More »
