They explore a variety of media and modalities that Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa, as elsewhere, use in their engagements with the Qur’an. The book’s twelve case studies use different frameworks and methodological approaches from the academic disciplines of anthropology, art history, historiography and philology. Covering a period from the twelfth/eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century, this multidisciplinary volume examines a variety of geographical locations in sub-Saharan Africa including Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tanzania. This work aims to open up new discourses about Islam in sub-Saharan Africa through the examination of how Muslims in this geographical and socio-cultural context have engaged with the Qur’an. As a direct result of this opening up of a wide field of knowledge for a non-Arabic reading audience, the potential numbers of discussants increases: each new Swahili Qur'an translation reveals more of the enigmatic character of the Qur'an and fuels new debates. Religious learning is no longer primarily transmitted through well-established links of personal authorities, but can increasingly be derived from private study and reading. While authoritative knowledge is still associated with a high command of Arabic, affiliation to a particular school of law or intellectual genealogy is not.

The act of translation from Arabic to the vernacular is no longer attacked, but rather the theological implications of a deficient translation are at the heart of the more recent discussions. The example of these three polemics over the last four decades shows the shifting concerns in the reaction to the translated Qur'an in Swahili. The final Fimbo is a treatise by the Ibāī scholar Juma al-Mazrui from Oman and digitally distributed in 2010 which deals with the doctrine of God's visibility in the hereafter and is an answer to the Salafiyya Tanzanian Kassim Mafuta's 2008 work on this topic. In the second, Nurudin Hussein Shadhuly, head of the Shadhuly/Yashrutiyya Ṣūfī branch in Tanzania examines and condemns the translation efforts by Saidi Musa, a student of al-Farsy. The first Fimbo was written by the Kenyan Ahmad Ahmad Badawy and criticises one of the earliest Swahili Qur'an translations, by Abdullah Saleh al-Farsy. 'This article examines three Swahili books with the same title Fimbo ya Musa (‘The Rod of Moses’), published between 19, each of which critically investigates Qur'an translations and vernacular religious texts in Swahili. Keywords: Swahili Qur’an translation moonsighting Oman Tanzania lunar calendar Ramadan Accepted manuscript in a special on modern Qur'an exegesis edited by Johanna Pink. In all three of these works Qur’anic authority is paramount, but if we want to understand the diverse mediations of the Qur’anic message in a specific milieu we should not only look at the influence of exegetical traditions but also focus on social actors and their very personal, localised experiences. One is the polemical discourse on this subject by an Ibadi intellectual writing in Swahili and the second is the lunar calendar and website produced by a Tanzanian book trader. This paper situates al-Kindy’s translation within the wider field of Swahili Qur’an commentaries, and compares his treatment of these verses to that in two scholarly products from outside the established genre of tafsīr. This discourse revolves about the question of whether to accept a crescent sighting report from anywhere in the world to determine the beginning of the lunar month or to wait for a visible moon from a more restricted locality. 2:189 are often used to endorse particular viewpoints in East African moon sighting debates.

2:189, cannot be understood as the outcome of theological and linguistic considerations only, but rather as a multi-epistemic, socially embedded product. This paper shows how the commentary in a popularising Swahili tafsīr by the preacher Said Moosa al-Kindy on two particular Qur’an verses, Q. Consequently Qur’an translations increasingly exhibit a highly pluralised concept of religious authority, demonstrating an eclectic use of sources as authors respond simultaneously to local and global discourses. As a result of globalisation the public sphere has expanded over the recent decades.

Moon in swahili translator