Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 15 – Because more
than a quarter of the 300 million people who speak Russian as first or second
language are Muslims, Russian-language translations play an enormous role in
the religious life of the faithful not only in the Russian Federation but
across the former Soviet space.
In the new issue of “Medina al-Islam,”
Mikhail Yakubovich, who himself has done a translation of the Koran, begins by pointing
to the continuing impact of the Russian-language translation of the Koran
prepared by Ignaty Krachkovsky in 1963, an edition that has since gone through
more than 37 editions totaling at least two million copies (idmedina.ru/medina/?5341).
Krachkovsky’s was neither the first
nor the last such publication in Russia and its neighbors. There were five Russian-language editions of
the Koran issued before the Bolshevik revolution, and there have been 14 since
that time, one in Gorbachev’s time and 13 since the collapse of the communist
system.
Many of the post-Soviet renderings
of the Koran into non-Russian languages have drawn on Krachkovsky’s work – and almost
all the former Soviet republics and formerly occupied Baltic states now have
them in their respective national languages -- even though most present
themselves as translations from the Arabic original, Yakubovich suggests.
Other early Russian translations,
including those by Dmitry Boguslavsky and Gordy Sablukov, have also had a role
in promoting an understanding of Islam, having been republished in Turkey,
Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan. And still
others have been republished as well over the last decade.
Over the last decade, the Russian
translation of the Koran prepared by Elmir Kuliyev, an Azerbaiani scholar, has
also had an impact. Over eight years, it has gone through approximately 20
editions and been published in a variety of post-Soviet countries. In 2013, it was even published in a large
edition in Ukraine.
This continuing role for
Russian-language Korans beyond the borders of the Russian Federation is
interesting in two respects. On the one hand, of course, most Muslims believe
that the Koran exists as an integral document only in Arabic and thus, when
possible, try to read it in that language.
And on the other, with the collapse
of the Soviet Union, the King Faud Center in Saudi Arabia poured money into
translations of the Koran into the languages of the post-Soviet countries,
including Azerbaiani, Kazakh, Kyrgy, and Uzbek. And other sources backed such
translations into Georgian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Taikistan,
Turkmenistan and Ukraine.
But despite this, Yakubovich argues,
“Russian translations of the Koran have retained their popularity” because of
the traditional role of the Russian language and because of the authority of
Russian Islamic scholarship. Indeed, paradoxically,
an intensified interest in Islam in many of these countries helps promote the
retention of the Russian language there.
Moreover, he continues, the
continuing role of Russian translations and the expanding role of non-Russian
ones can help promote the integration of the populations of the post-Soviet
states because the interpretation of the Koran – and any translation is by
definition an interpretation, he notes – must be a combined effort.
As Elmir Kuliyev has said, “there
cannot be a canonical translation of the Koran” because that book exists as
itself only in Arabic, but translations, to the extent they reveal aspects of
that text to a larger audience are important in and of themselves, especially
if they are shared across linguistic lines.
The continuing role of the
Russian-language translations of the Koran helps promote that exchange and thus
it helps overcome the divisions within the Islamic umma and the communication
of the nature of Islam to non-Muslim audiences, “an especially important task which
can contribute to the establishment of religious accord among citizens of the
CIS.”
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