Translating the Qur'ān in Sub-Saharan Africa: Dynamics and Disputes

Abstract

In the last decades, African Muslim societies have experienced multiple processes of modernization, as, for instance, in the sphere of education. As a consequence, the number of African Muslims literate in African languages has grown tremendously and so has the number of texts, including religious texts, published in these languages. At the same time, the Qur'ān has been translated into many African languages, and these translations of the Qur'ān have triggered disputes among religious scholars on the translatability of the Qur'ān as well as the interpretative orientation of these translations. The disputes over the translation and interpretation of the Qur'ān into African languages might contribute to the emergence, in sub-Saharan Africa, of a tradition of scholarly debates that would stress contextualized interpretations of the text.