Late Russian Translator of Quran Commemorated
The ceremony was organized by the International Quran News Agency (IQNA) on the sidelines of the Moscow International Book Fair (MIBF).
A number of Iranian and Russian officials and cultural and religious figures were present at the function hosted by the library of Russia’s Iranology Foundation.
They included Iranian Culture Minister Ali Jannati, the country’s ambassador and cultural attaché in Russia, representative of the people of Dagestan in Russia’s Duma, renowned Russian Iranologist Natalia Prigarina, and director of Russia’s largest publications Biblio-Globus.
Addressing the event, the Iranian culture minister thanked IQNA for organizing the commemoration ceremony and said that many experts consider Othmanov’s rendering the best translation of the Quran into the Russian language.
He noted that Othmanov had also embarked on translating the Nahj-ul-Balaqa into Russian.
Ms Zomorrod, Dagestan’s representative in Duma, was another speaker who lauded Iran for organizing the commemoration just a month after the demise of the eminent Quran translator.
Also addressing the function was Hamid Saber Farzam, the managing director of IQNA, who said, “We have gathered here today on the sidelines of the (Moscow) book fair to commemorate the translator of the book of a faith whose miracle is a book.”
He further pointed to the history of Quran translation into Russian, saying that the early renderings were not reliable because they had been translated from English or French rather than from the original Arabic.
Saber Farzam added that even those translated from Arabic later contained many errors because their translators lacked full mastery of Arabic and Islamic sciences.
IQNA’s chief further underlined that Master Othmanov presented a reliable rendering of the Quran into Russia as he had full mastery of the source and target languages as well as Persian, which helped him in the translation.
That is why, he said, Othmanov’s rendering is the most popular Russian translation of the Quran.
Saber Farzam further said that Master Othmanov took utmost care in translating the Quran in order to produce as accurate a translation as possible.
That is why it took him about 23 years to complete the rendering, he stated, noting that the Quran was revealed to the Holy Prophet’s (PBUH) heart in 23 years.
, Nuri Muhammad Othmanov was born in 1924 in Makhachkala, Dagestan. He got his PhD in Persian literature in 1954 from the University of Moscow.
His translation of the Quran was released in 1995. It was reprinted in 1999 and 2007.
Othmanov won the Russian federal award in sciences in 2002 for this grand work.
He also won the first Sa’adi Literary Award presented by the Iranian Cultrual Center in Moscow in 2014.
Othmanov wrote more than 250 works in different scholarly fields, including Quranic sciences.
