Kurany Kerim. Türkmen dilinde (Directorate of the Mufti of Turkmenistan)

Kurany Kerim. Türkmen dilinde is a Turkmen rendering of the meanings of the Qur'an issued by the Directorate of the Mufti of Turkmenistan, first published in 2006 as an official translation; it now holds a near-monopoly among readers of Turkmen inside the country and beyond. ¹

One of the first Turkmen translations appeared in Ashgabat in 1995 in Cyrillic script, by Atamyrat Atabayev and Devletmyrat Kerimov, based on other translations rather than the Arabic, and never became popular. ¹ In the late 1990s the government sponsored a second, mostly from the Arabic, by the scholar Hojja-Ahmed Orazgilidzhev; it was banned after a remark of his on a public broadcast, and local reports say its 40,000 copies were burned in March 2000. ¹

The Arabic text runs in a parallel column; each sura opens with a short introduction giving its name in local Turkic pronunciation; no translators or editors are named; and the introduction states that the work was prepared on the President's initiative. ¹ The translation works from the Arabic with many interpretive insertions in brackets and simply written explanations that correspond mainly to mainstream Sunni readings, without naming its exegetical sources. ¹

The print run seems very limited; copies are found in the larger mosques and central libraries, and the text reaches readers through Turkmen-language Islamic websites and is cited in Turkmen booklets published abroad. ¹

• Mykhaylo Yakubovych, "Qur'an translation of the week #158", The Global Qur'an, 2023. ¹