Turkish

Qur’an translation of the week #48: Hijacking a translator, demonizing a translation: the ‘new Elmalı’lı translation’ in Turkey

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 […]

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Qur’an translation of the week #23: The Qur’an in Crimean Tatar

With around 600,000 native speakers in present-day Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Turkey and Romania, the Crimean Tatar language is among the world’s endangered languages. With at least half of its speakers living in Crimea, any news of religious translations draws great attention and tends to be seen by Crimean Tatars as a step towards the preservation

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Qur’an translation of the week #13: Turkish rhyming translation by Ali Adil Atalay “Vaktidolu”

This fascinating work by a Turkish Alevi intellectual, Ali Adil Atalay a.k.a. Vaktidolu, renders the entire Qur’an into Turkish verse, complete with metre and rhyme. It has first been brought to the attention of researchers in Qur’anic studies by M. Brett Wilson, who discusses it in his seminal article on Alevi-Bektashi interpretations and translations of

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Qur’an translation of the week #11: ‘Koran: Perevod’ by Fazil Karaogly

The first appearance of “Koran: Perevod” (“The Qur’an: Translation”) by the Azerbaijani scholar Fazil Karaogly was at the beginning of the 90’s. This seems to be the second Russian translation published in Baku; the rendition by Kračkovskij was released there in 1991. After a decade, the translation received recognition from the Turkish Directorate of Religious

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