The Ahmadiyya Russian translation of the Qur'an (Khalid Ahmad and Ravil Bukharaev)

This is the official Russian rendering of the meanings of the Qur'an of the Ahmadiyya (Qadiani) community, first published in 2006, a joint work: Khalid Ahmad translated it from the Arabic with Rustam Khamatvaleev, and Ravil Bukharaev revised and edited it, wrote its preface and translated its commentary. ¹

Bukharaev (1951–2012) graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Kazan State University and did postgraduate study at Moscow State University; he wrote more than thirty books in Russian, Tatar, English and Hungarian, worked for the BBC World Service for over fifteen years, and is regarded as a major Tatar writer of his time. ¹ The author reports that he joined the Ahmadiyya community in the late 1980s and moved to London in the early 1990s. ¹

In Ahmadiyya interpretation, on which this translation openly draws through Mirza Tahir Ahmad's Urdu commentary, the verses on Jesus are read differently from the Sunni majority: mutawaffika is rendered as causing to die and the raising as a raising in rank, and narratives read as miracles are explained otherwise, as Elvira Kulieva describes. ¹ The preface takes a mild polemical stance against Muslims it sees as privileging reports over the text or relying on classical tafsir alone. ¹

The author writes that the Tatar secular intelligentsia saw Bukharaev's Ahmadiyya affiliation as one more layer of a complex personality, while the mainstream clergy and many traditional Sunnis of Tatarstan saw his affiliation and his translation as dangerous. ¹

• Elvira Kulieva, "Qur'an translation of the week #175", The Global Qur'an, 2023. ¹