Qur’an Translations in the Eastern Bloc and Beyond

Johanna Pink is a Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Her primary research focus is the transregional history of tafsīr and Qur’an translation. She serves as the general editor of the Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān Online and was the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project GloQur. Her publications include Muslim Qur’ānic Interpretation Today: Media, Genealogies, and Interpretive Communities (Sheffield: Equinox, 2019) and Qur’an Translation in Indonesia: Scriptural Politics in a Multilingual State (London: Routledge, 2024). She has worked and published extensively on the study of the global history of modern Muslim Qur’an translation.

Mykhaylo Yakubovych obtained his PhD in 2011 from The National University of Ostroh Academy with a study on interreligous relations in medieval Sunni traditionalism. Currently a member of the research team on the ERC-funded project ‘GloQur—The Global Qur’an’ (University of Freiburg, Germany), he studies Qur’an translations produced by international institutions and publishers, with a focus on Central Asian and Eastern European languages. He is the author of an annotated translation of the Qur’an into  Ukrainian (first published in 2013), along with several books and translations from Arabic, and many research articles published in academic journals from the UK, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Australia. Yakubovych has conducted several academic projects on the Islamic manuscript heritage, including the post-classical intellectual history of the Crimean Khanate (at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, USA) and sixteenth-seventeenth century Qur’an interpretations produced by Lithuanian Tatars (at Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland). Her most recent monograph is entitled The Kingdom and the Qur'an: Translating the Holy Book of Islam in Saudi Arabia (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2024).