A translator and scholar of Islamic studies, Dr. Mykhaylo Yakubovych is a postdoctoral researcher with the Global Qurʾān Project at the University of Freiburg. He is the author of The Kingdom and the Qurʾān: Translating the Holy Book of Islam in Saudi Arabia (2024), translator of the first complete translation of the Qurʾān from the original Arabic into modern Ukrainian, and several other works. His doctorate is from the National University of Ostroh Academy in Ukraine.
This interview touches on Dr. Yakubovych’s work at the King Fahd Printing Complex in Medina, Qurʾān translation, al-Azhar, Salafism, and his translation of the Qurʾān into Ukrainian. The interview was conducted with Dr. Matthew Anderson, executive editor for Dialogue Across Borders, on February 9th, 2025.
Excerpt:
MA: You talked a bit in your book about the question of the translatability of the Qurʾān and some of the discussions that happened around that. It seems in some respects like the pragmatic reality of the need for translations sort of won out over this other vision, which says that you can't really understand the Qurʾān unless you are immersed in Arabic. You talked a bit about the role of al-Azhar and some of their scholars. My sense was that the ultimate argument was won not so much by some kind of theological or textual proof, but more that the pragmatic need for translation became so obvious. Does that resonate with you at all?
MY: I strongly agree with that and I will tell you why. We have the start of those discussions in the Arab world in Egypt in the 1920s through the 1940s. We have numerous authors who already discussed it, including al-Azhar scholars, like Grand Imām al-Marāghī (d.1945), talking about whether it's permissible to translate the Qurʾān or not. You had two parties: one is against translation, and one is pro-translation. In the thirties and forties, no one in Saudi Arabia is really interested in any kind of translation. It was still a closed county that only had trade relations and so on. But after the Second World War, a deal with US President Roosevelt, and the establishment of Saudi educational missions abroad in the fifties, and especially the Muslim World League founded in 1962, they inherited all those discussions from Egypt. By that time, for the mainstream Muslim communities, the issue of the translation of the Qurʾān has really been concluded. No one was really saying anymore that it wasn’t permissible, so they came into this reality where there were many translations of the Qurʾān everywhere and asked themselves what their role should be in that. That’s why the first translation published in Saudi Arabia, and really the first translation into a foreign language in a modern sense, was the ʿAbdullāh Yūsuf ʿAlī translation in 1965, published by the Muslim World League. I'm not counting the Muḥammad Assad translation (born Leopold Weiss, 1900-1992) because it had been published in part in Geneva, and there was some controversy around it. One of the Saudis, Secretary General of the Muslim World League at the time, wrote that the Muslim government neglected a very important tool for Islamic missionary activity because there were numerous translations by orientalists whom he considered enemies of Islam, and he advocated for doing the translation work supported by the government. This is the same idea debated in al-Azhar before and that's not really surprising, because most of the Saudi educational structures in the fifties and sixties were developed by scholars moving from al-Azhar, Egypt in general, and Syria. Many of the first teachers were people educated in the West. Most of them were Syrians and Egyptians, people coming to Saudi Arabia from neighboring Arab countries. They brought their own culture, their own understanding of many things, which were really new for the Saudi elite, especially the people who lived in closed religious circles, but they generally welcomed it for political and pragmatic reasons. That's pretty obvious in the case of interest in translation. Even now, we see that both the Salafīs who are state-supported and non-state Salafīs, the people operating on private funding, publish as much translation as possible. We see numerous Qurʾān translation websites with many translations, especially promoted by some Saudi or just generally Salafī institutions.
MA: Is there anybody left that tries to maintain that there's something flawed, that the translation of the Qurʾān in principle is a flawed idea?
MY: There are some movements like that. But as far as we can consult some of the fatwas, especially with people oriented towards the educational institutions like the Islamic University of Medina, Imām Moḥammed Ibn Saʿūd Islamic University, and so on, the educators welcomed foreign students, and they were seeing that it's really impossible to overlook the need for translation. There was a need for that, and apparently they discovered in Ibn Taymiyyah’s (d.1328) work that translation is permissible. Yes, there is still some strong opposition to translation, but coming not from Salafī circles but from Sufi circles in places like Lebanon. They're still based on a Sufi authority, and their concern is that if you are giving Qurʾān translations to someone who is studying the Qurʾān without the authority of a sheikh, the person can misunderstand it. They have an idea of studying Islam under the umbrella of a sheikh. Some Salafīs try to present the idea that everyone can be a religious scholar in some way, and we have this movement, especially in that digital age, where every Muslim should study as many books as possible. Everyone, despite his or her work, should be well versed in ʿaqīdah and fiqh issues and so on. So, it is completely permissible for someone to study a book without referring to any sheikh or authority. In some ways, I would say that this Salafī approach is kind of a pragmatic “Protestant” approach.
MA: I was thinking in a similar way. In a sense, the translation of the Qurʾān into foreign languages is itself something that flows out of the Salafī methodology because the idea is that you can access these sacred texts without all of this training and commitment to certain interpretive principles. Let's talk a little bit about the King Fahd Complex. I think you noted that it was started in the mid-1980s?
MY: Yes, in 1982. I think that by the number of the Qurʾān translations exclusively prepared for this institution, and especially from the Arabic language, this is the biggest publisher of Qurʾān translations in the world. Also, by the number of books printed, just the pure quantity that they produce.
MA: Approximately how many languages do you think the King Fahd Complex has translated the Qurʾān into?
MY: Officially, they now say they have published in 87 languages, but some of them are partial translations, just parts of the Qurʾān and some are audio translations. But I would rather say there are around 60 complete translations. Out of them, maybe around 40 were translated exclusively for the King Fahd Complex, where the complex actually commenced this translation, making an agreement with some translators for them to make it exclusively for them, not just taking the existing translation like ʿAbdullāh Yūsuf ʿAlī and editing it. Around 40 of them then are truly original.
