The Hebrew translation of al-Muntakhab fi Tafsir al-Qur'an al-Karim

In 2023 the Egyptian Ministry of Awqaf published a Hebrew translation of al-Muntakhab fi Tafsir al-Qur'an al-Karim, part of its project to spread this commentary worldwide after its translation into English, French, Spanish, German, Indonesian, Swahili and Russian; the work took six months. ¹

Al-Muntakhab was written in the 1950s and first published in 1961, lightly re-edited since and constantly in print, presented as a standard, accessible commentary from al-Azhar; some of its notes carry "scientific exegesis". ¹

It was translated by Sa'id Muttawi', chair of Hebrew language and literature at Cairo University with teaching experience at al-Azhar, and his assistant Ali Annan; Muttawi' published a study in 2006 on the problem of synonymy in Hebrew translation of the meanings of the Qur'an. ¹

The volume carries the Arabic text of the Qur'an but not that of the commentary, with al-Muntakhab's footnotes, short sura introductions and an introduction by the minister, Muhammad Mukhtar Gomaa; the Hebrew carries no diacritics. ¹ Names keep their Qur'anic Arabic form, "Allah", Ibrahim, Sulayman and Musa among them, and the name of al-Masjid al-Aqsa is transliterated rather than translated. ¹

The minister called it the first tafsir of the Qur'an in Hebrew, saying that most earlier translations by Jewish Orientalists contained many mistakes. ¹ Israeli media reported that Israel's ambassador to Egypt, Amira Oron, wrote to the ministry calling it a valuable initiative. ¹ Mykhaylo Yakubovych notes that its reach is still unclear given the many Hebrew translations already available, the King Fahd Complex's of 2019 among them, and that it appears to be the first modern Muslim exegetical work translated in full into Hebrew. ¹

• Mykhaylo Yakubovych, "Qur'an translation of the week #174", The Global Qur'an, 2023. ¹