A World of Qur’an Translations

GloQur – The Global Qur’an

GloQur looks at Qur’an translations as a central medium through which Muslims across the globe today approach their faith. We study the historical, exegetical, socio-political and linguistic dimensions of this genre throughout the modern period, which has been characterized by globalizing forces as well as the rise of print and new media. GloQur thus bridges the gap between philological, historical and anthropological approaches to modern and contemporary Muslim engagement with the Qur’an.
Since the early 20th century, individuals and institutions have produced Qur’an translations into nearly all languages read by Muslims across nation-state borders. We examine the conditions in which translations were and still are commissioned and produced, the literary history and ideological backdrop of translations, the translators’ decisions as they become manifest in the texts and the use of these texts by local audiences. By studying the role of Qur’an translations in specific Muslim communities, as well as their use in social media, we shed light on the linguistic, cultural and religious significance that is attributed to them and on the processes through which specific translations are elevated to a position of authority.
Our team members conduct research on the translation activities of government-funded agencies such as Saudi Arabias King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Qur’an and similar institutions in Iran, Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia and other countries. They also look at the impact of transnational missionary movements, such as the Ahmadiyya movements, and the Qur’an translation they produce and distribute. Furthermore, we are interested in he complex centre-periphery structures created by the spread of imperial European languages such as English, French and Russian. These languages have long-standing traditions of Biblical translation as well as Orientalist Qur’an translation. At the same time, they have become the languages of large Muslim populations and, therefore, languages of Islam. The study of Qur’an translations will help us map this process and thereby to transcend simple dichotomies between Arabic and ‘vernacular’ or ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ languages. A comparative analysis across languages and regions will allow us to describe how a shared exegetical heritage is negotiated and reconstructed in various linguistic, social and ideological settings.

*funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

A nation state as an actor in the religious field

The Indonesian Ministry of Religion (Kementerian Agama) and the quest for interpretive authority over the Qur’an

The Indonesian Ministry of Religion is an active participant in the country’s Muslim religious discourse by means of publishing an official translation of the Qur’an and an equally official Qur’anic commentary. These works originated in the 1960s and have since been revised repeatedly in ways that reflect the changing political circumstances. Both the translation and the commentary were produced and revised by large committees of scholars which makes Indonesia the first Muslim country to publish authoritative exegetical works that are no longer discernible as the writings of individual scholars. The Qur’an translation by the Ministry of Religion has an extremely broad reach and dominates the market. The printed copies of the Qur’an that are distributed for free by Saudi Arabia also follow this translation, albeit with slight modifications that reflect dogmatic differences.
This project, by analysing the Qur’an translations and commentaries published by the Indonesian Ministry of Religion, aims at contributing to a better understanding of nation states’ quest for gaining interpretive predominance in the field of Muslim exegesis of the Qur’an. Recent research has increasingly acknowledged the fact that nation states and their institutions do not limit themselves to controlling the budgets, structures and staff of religious institutions, but also aim at directly influencing Islamic religious discourses; it is this influence that the project wants to elucidate.
Based on a case study of an official, collectively produced Qur’an translation, the project wants to shed light on the process through which a Muslim-majority state, despite its self-conception as religiously neutral, actively participates in religious discourse; it furthermore looks closely at the contents that this participation produces. By focussing on works that cannot be ascribed to individual scholars any longer, but must rather be seen as products of institutional collective action, it helps to better understand the changing circumstances under which religious authority is constructed in the context of modern nation states.
At the same time, the project wants to contribute, both with respect to content and methodology, to the study of Muslim Qur’an translations in the 20th and 21st centuries, by using the Indonesian case in order to analyse mechanisms of exegetical decision-making. It seeks to determine at which places these decisions become obvious, why this is the case and what impact they have on the understanding of the text. This, in turn, enables us to find out whether, or where, the Ministry of Religion favours specific interpretations, currents of thought or opinions while marginalising others and to what extent, in contrast, it strove to maintain an ostensibly balanced, harmonising or neutral position.

*funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)

Modernist Qur’anic exegesis in an age of transformation

Apologetics, translation and the movement of ideas in the early 20th century

This project connects two fields of research: First, the history of Muslim exegesis of the Qur’an, and second, the transregional history of Muslim modernism in the early 20th century with a focus on Egypt and the Malay-Indonesian world.
Its goal is to understand modernist Qur’anic exegesis as it emerged around the turn of the century. Modernism, here, is understood as a transregional intellectual discourse that was concerned with reforming Islam in a way that equipped Muslims to overcome their perceived backwardness. Modernist Qur’anic exegesis was a global phenomenon whose reception, appropriation and translation was facilitated and guided by the availability of print media. The project is going to look at the dispersion of modernist ideas in Egypt and the Malay world during the first third of the 20th century. In doing so, it will seek to identify the specific local circumstances in which modernist exegesis was produced and published.
The project is interested in studying these developments as part of the history of Qur’anic exegesis (tafsir). As such, it pays particular attention to the tension between the established genre of the Qur’anic commentary and the desire or even pressure to develop novel exegetical approaches. It uses tafsir as a lens through which to examine broader developments such as the spread of print media, the reform of educational institutions and the religious response to various forms of Western dominance throughout a period of time that was in itself dynamic and characterised by ruptures.
Since the number and scope of exegetical sources from the first third of the 20th century is vast, the project narrows the focus of inquiry to a specific theme: that of apologetics. We will focus on such topics that are related to an exegetical problem posed by a specific Qur’anic segment of text and that clearly serve the defence of Islamic religious doctrines, scriptures or figures against European and/or Christian critics. The choice of this subject issue is related to the enormous importance that confrontations or engagement with imperial and colonial administrators, Orientalists and Christian missionaries had for Muslim scholars and intellectuals.
By analysing a corpus of Egyptian and Malay-Indonesian exegetical sources and comparing their approach to the above-mentioned exegetical problems, we hope to shed light on the agents and media through which modernist ideas spread, the changes they underwent in the light of political transformations, the ways in which they were selectively adapted to local contexts and the persistence and re-appropriation of exegetical traditions.

*funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)

Men of Disorder

The project “Men of Disorder” scrutinizes configurations of masculinity in modern Middle Eastern and Central Asian societies. The question of how to interpret the term masculinity takes up a great part within this analysis. In this context, one cannot aim at determining what is “genuinely masculine”, but should rather examine which configurations of masculinity are transported by specific historical dispositions.
Based on the assumption, that configurations of masculinity are reflected in specific institutions and their corresponding values and standards, the project attends informal male networks in 20th century Iran and Tajikistan, and their leading heroes in particular. The networks examined here have controlled structures of organized crime in an urban context, but at the same time maintained close contacts to the political and religious elite and played a decisive role in mobilizing the urban subalterns for political incidents.
Thus, the protagonists considered in “Men of Disorder” are men that took over important sociopolitical functions during times of crisis like revolts, revolutions, civil wars or transformation processes. In this context, complex conceptions of masculinity play an important role, because they socially approve the exceeding of cultural norms just as the use of violence and challenge the state´s monopoly of force. These conceptions are to be determined and analyzed from a comparative perspective in a global context.

*funded by Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kultur, Baden-Württemberg