Despite its nearly ninety-year history (with the first volume appearing in 1934), Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s translation of the Qur’an continues to outperform many other translations in terms of the frequency with which it is reprinted and the number of different publishers who reprint it, not to mention citations. What is sometimes not as frequently discussed …
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 »
Despite the fact that Mahmoud Ayoub (1935–2021) was a fairly renowned member of the Muslim community in North America, his translation of the Juzʾ ʿamma, the last of the thirty parts of the Qur’an, is virtually unknown and hard to obtain. It is a fascinating source for at least two reasons: first, because of its …
Italian translations of the Qur’an are relatively plentiful, and during the second half of the twentieth century in particular new translations were produced based on the original Arabic text by translators such as A. Bausani (1955), M. Moreno (1967), F. Peirone (1979) and H. Piccardo (1996). The World Islamic Call Society (WICS, founded in 1972 …
The Maltese language, with its half-million speakers, belongs to the Semitic language family. Although most of the Muslim minority population in Malta (which totaled around 30,000 people in 2020) have various migrant backgrounds, the community primarily uses two Maltese translations of the Qur’an. The first was prepared in the 1990s by a Catholic theologian, Edmund …
The World Islamic Call Society (WICS, est. 1972) is one of the most active institutions engaged in global Muslim missionary activities. Part of the ideological strategy developed by Muammar al-Gaddafi (1942–2011) to use the Islamic religious network as a tool of leadership in Africa and beyond, WICS continues to operate even after the Libyan revolution …
