The Majestic Qur'an: An English Rendition of Its Meanings (Ali Özek and team)

This English rendering of the meanings of the Qur'an by a team of Turkish scholars led by Ali Özek appeared in Istanbul in 1992, apparently one of the first English translations produced in Turkey, and was republished in 2000 as The Majestic Qur'an. ¹

Ali Özek (1932–2021) was a leading scholar of religious studies at the theology faculty of Marmara University, and in 1982 published a Turkish translation of the Qur'an with other scholars. ¹ His co-translators were Nureddin Uzunoğlu (1939–2013), who studied at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln; Mehmet Maksutoğlu, a scholar of Crimean Tatar origin who taught Turkish at Cambridge; and Tevfik Rüştü Topuzoğlu. ¹

The Nawawi Foundation of Illinois and the Ibn Khaldun Foundation of London republished it with the Arabic text after Abdal Hakim Murad, Uthman Hutchinson and Mostafa al-Badawi reviewed the English. ¹ Its prefaces aim at clear modern English, and the team added explanations from Arabic and Turkish commentaries and from Abdullah Yusuf Ali's notes, in some 809 footnotes, with short introductions to most suras. ¹

Mykhaylo Yakubovych finds original choices in the translation but agrees with Abdur Raheem Kidwai that it borrows without acknowledgement from Pickthall, and that wording taken from older translations hampers its aim of modern English. ¹ He notes that the 2000 edition is often cited in English-language Muslim writing, helped by its distribution in the US and UK and by Abdal Hakim Murad's name as editor, and that a new Turkish edition appeared in 2018. ¹

• Mykhaylo Yakubovych, "Qur'an translation of the week #202", The Global Qur'an, 2024. ¹