Maria Ulfah

Maria Ulfah (born 21 December 1955) is an Indonesian Qur'an reciter and manager of the central institute for the development of Qur'anic recitation. She won two Indonesian national recitation contests and in 1980 became the first woman to win an international recitation award in Malaysia; academic references describe her as one of the world's master reciters and teachers of recitation and as Southeast Asia's premier woman reciter. ^{1 2}

She was born in Lamongan Regency, East Java, the ninth of twelve children of Haji Mudhoffar and Hajjah Ruminah. Her father introduced her to recitation, taught her that she was equal to any man or woman, and staged recitation contests in their home town to give her experience. She began training at six with her elder sister, and her interest grew at an Islamic boarding school that encouraged her. ¹

Since the 1980s she has been an internationally known and respected figure in recitation. She is a scholar of the history of recitation in the Indonesian archipelago and lectures at the Institute for Qur'anic Studies in Jakarta and at the State Islamic University. ¹

Her recitation appears on the CD that accompanies Michael Sells's 'Approaching the Qur'an' (1999), and she has toured Malaysia, Egypt, Australia, the United States, Canada and several European countries; on her 1999 American tour she was accompanied by the scholar Anne Rasmussen and hosted by the Middle East Studies Association of North America. ¹

In 1981 she married Mukhtar Ikhsan, a pulmonologist and lecturer at the University of Indonesia's medical school; they have three children. ¹

Wikidata listed articles on her in twelve Wikipedia editions on 6 November 2026, among them Arabic, English, Indonesian, Malay, Persian, Urdu and Hausa. ²

• English Wikipedia article, revision of 21 September 2025. ¹

• Wikidata item Q6761640. ²