Aziz Kur'an (Turkish, from Hamidullah's French translation)

Aziz Kur'an is a Turkish rendering of the meanings of the Qur'an made from Muhammad Hamidullah's French translation rather than from the Arabic, an unusual choice given the dozens of Turkish translations from the Arabic, which Johanna Pink attributes to Hamidullah's renown. ¹

Hamidullah's French translation first appeared in Paris in 1959, the first by a Muslim to succeed with Muslim readers; a revised and expanded edition he prepared himself was published in Turkey in 1973 by Hilal Yayınları, others followed in Beirut (1980) and the United States (1985), and in 1989 the King Fahd Complex issued a heavily revised edition he did not approve. ¹

Aziz Kur'an is based on the 1973 edition and was translated from the French by the theologian Abdülaziz Hatip, who studied for a time at the Sorbonne, and Mahmut Kanık, a lecturer in French literature; Bayan Yayınları of Istanbul first published it in 2003 and has reprinted it up to 2022. ¹ The translators say they followed Hamidullah's method of "taking the reader to the text, not the text to the reader". ¹

Johanna Pink observes that, contrary to their stated intent, the translators used many Arabic terms current in Turkish and in places reversed Hamidullah's deliberate exegetical choices in favour of the commonplace term, concluding that the publisher's wish for a marketable translation with a big name outweighed respect for the source text. ¹

• Johanna Pink, "Qur'an translation of the week #168", The Global Qur'an, 2023. ¹