Muhammad Taqi al-Din al-Hilali

Muhammad Taqi ad-Din al-Hilali ( Arabic محمد تقي الدين الهلالي, DMG Muḥammad Taqī ad-Dīn al-Hilālī ; born 1893 in Rissani , Morocco ; died June 22, 1987 in Casablanca , Morocco) was an Islamic religious scholar . He is known for his English translations of the Saheeh al-Buchari and the Koran , which he translated together with Muhammad Muhsin Khan.

Live and act

Muhammad al-Hilali was born in Rissani, Morocco , near Sidschilmasa . Its name of origin al-Hilali refers to the Tafilalet oasis group in southeastern Morocco. After studying Islamic law at the University of al-Qarawīyīn in Fez , he moved to Cairo in 1922 , where, after a short stay at the Azhar University, he was instructed by Rashid Rida and under his supervision wrote articles in the magazine al-Manar . 1926-1929 he was commissioned by Ibn Saud as an inspector for the higher education in Medina worked and then lived until 1933 in India, where he attended the university in Lucknow simultaneously studied and taught. Sayyid Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi was one of his students there . He then lived in Iraq and obtained Iraqi citizenship in 1934.

In 1936 he moved to Germany , where he got a position as a lecturer for Arabic at the University of Bonn through the mediation of the Lebanese Emir Shakib Arslan . In April 1939 he began studying with Richard Hartmann at the University of Berlin and received his doctorate in 1941 on The Introduction to Al-Birunis Steinbuch . In the Reichsrundfunk he was the spokesman for Arab broadcasts and was head of the cultic department of the Islamic Central Institute in Berlin.

Towards the end of the Second World War , al-Hilali left Germany and moved to French Morocco . In the course of the Moroccan independence movement, he moved to Iraq, where he taught at the University of Baghdad. After the Iraqi military coup in 1958, he moved to the now independent Kingdom of Morocco and in 1959 became a professor at the Mohammed V University in Rabat . In 1968/69 he was a professor at the University of Medina and in 1974 finally returned to his home country, where he lived until his death and died in Casablanca in 1987.

His English translation of the Koran , which he translated together with Muhammad Muhsin Khan (* 1927), is known in English as the Noble Quran . It contains commentaries from at-Tabarī , Ibn Kathīr , al-Qurtubī and from the Saheeh al-Buchari . His work was praised on the one hand by Islamic personalities such as the Algerian Abdelhamid Ben Badis . However, the Noble Quran has received linguistic and stylistic criticism from Arabists and Englishists. It was also criticized that extremely militant Wahhabi interpretations of the Koran were included in the translation without comment. Among the critics is the director of the King Fahd International Center for Translation at King Saud University in Riyadh , A. Al-Muhandis.

Works (selection)

• The introduction to Al-Biruni's stone book . Translated with explanations. Dissertation under the supervision of Richard Hartmann and Hans Heinrich Schaeder . With a dedication to Herbert W. Duda . Leipzig, Harrassowitz Verlag 1941. Digitized
• The castes in Arabia. Article, in: WI, 22 (1940), pp. 102-110.

literature

• Barry M. Rubin, Wolfgang G. Schwanitz : Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East. Yale University Press, New Haven & London 2014. ISBN 978-0-300-14090-3 .
• Henri Lauzière: The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century. Columbia University Press, 2015. ISBN 978-0-231-54017-9 .
• Henri Lauzière: Dissertation at Georgetown University

Web links

• Gerhard Höpp : Texts from abroad. Arab political journalism in Germany, 1896–1945. A bibliography. Center of the Modern Orient . Berlin, Das Arabische Buch, 2000. ISBN 3-86093-276-4 p. 52
• Letter of recommendation from Rashid Rida

Individual evidence

1. ^ Henri Lauzière: The Making of Salafism in the Google Book Search
2. ^ Zaidan Ali Jassem: "The Noble Quran: A Critical Evaluation of Al-Hilali and Khan's Translation". www.academia.edu, International Journal of English and Education. P. 269.