The Rohingya translation of the Qur'an

This is a project to translate the meanings of the Qur'an into Rohingya, the language of the persecuted Muslims of Rakhine, or Arakan, in western Myanmar; it joins a religious aim to the preservation of an endangered language. ¹

The Rohingya were made stateless when Burma's 1982 nationality law restricted citizenship to listed "national races" that did not include them; many fled to Bangladesh in successive waves, and Johanna Pink notes that the campaign against them from 2012 onwards was classified by the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights as genocide and crimes against humanity. ¹ Their language, close to Chittagonian Bengali, was rarely written; in 1985 the teacher Mohammad Hanif created the Hanifi Rohingya script, added to the Unicode standard in 2018. ¹

The project was begun by Qutub Shah, a Rohingya scholar at the International Islamic University Malaysia, with Dakwah Corner Bookstore, a missionary publisher in Petaling Jaya; the team drew on commentaries and on the King Fahd Complex's English, Urdu, Bengali and Burmese translations. ¹ Because few Rohingya can read their language, the team first made a spoken translation, from early 2021 to August 2023, read by Qutub Shah alongside the recitation of Muhammad Ayyub, born in Mecca to Rohingya parents; it was released in a phone app, on a website, on YouTube and on social media. ¹

A written, explanatory translation in the Hanifi script followed, covering the first five suras so far; the team developed keyboard layouts and fonts for it and plans to print 2,000 copies for Malaysia, Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia. ¹ Pink counts it among the most impressive projects of its kind and an example of how Qur'an translation helps preserve the world's linguistic diversity. ¹

• Johanna Pink, "Qur'an translation of the week #217", The Global Qur'an, 2025. ¹