History of Quran Translation in Balkans
However some scholars’ ban on translating the Quran posed a serious challenge on this path.
Muslims in the Balkans (countries like Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia) inherited the Ottomans’ Islamic traditions, including a ban on translating the Quran.
The Mufti of Albania issued a ban in 1924 on Muslims’ reading Quran translations. This was while most of Albanian Muslims did not know Arabic.
This strict atmosphere disappeared little by little and in 1937, the first translation of the Quran in the Balkans was published in Sarajevo by two famous Muslim scholars named Muhamed Pandza and Dzemaludin Causevic.
After that, a new generation of translators produced ten more renderings of the Holy Book.
In Albania, too, a nationalist named Ilo Mitke Qafezezi translated the Quran from an English rendering and published the first part in 1921. He said his aim was to bring Muslim Albanians closer to their Christian brothers. He wanted to provide the Quran to Christians.
In his translation, Qafezezi tried to remain as faithful to the text of the Quran as possible. His rendering was unexpected for Albanian scholars. Toward the end of 1920s and in 1930s producing interpretational translations of the Quran continued until the communist party came into power and prevented Quran translation until 1991.
After the ban on Quran translation was broken in the Balkans, translators and literary figures started producing more renderings of the Holy Book.
What gave an impetus to this trend among the two Muslim-majority ethnic groups in the Balkans (Albanians and Bosnians) was the fact that non-Muslims had translated the Quran with nationalist motivations.
For example, the first Serbian translation of the Quran by Mico Ljubibratic (1829-1889) which was published after his death in 1895 was aimed at attracting Bosnians Muslims, or as he called them “Muhammadans of Serb people”.
