5. A ‘Qur’an Race’ in the Cold War

This chapter investigates the publishing history and ideological framing of Max Henning’s revised editions of his Qur’an translation, one of which was produced in the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR), which was part of the Eastern Bloc, and the other in the ‘capitalist’ Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), which was not. The competitive nature of the Cold War extended even to Qur’an translations, as the two branches of the publisher Reclam, located in East and West Germany, respectively, produced different editions, a phenomenon described in this chapter as a ‘Qur’an race’. In this intriguing story of debates on and obstacles to the publication of a religious text in an ideologically fraught, bureaucratic, and academically complex environment, we learn about the impact of censorship and ways to circumvent it, as well as the particular image of Islam and Muhammad that transpires from the GDR edition. The chapter concludes by describing the fate of Henning’s Quran translation in reunified Germany, against the backdrop of new political dynamics and demographic shifts.