A.S. Madsen's Danish Translation of the Qur'an and the Ahmadiyya Mission in Scandinavia

This article discusses the publication history and different functions of the first complete translation of the Qur'an into the Danish language. First introduced in 1960 but published in its final form in 1967, Abdus Salam (Svend Åge) Madsen's (1928–2007) translation is also the first Scandinavian translation of the Qur'an with an explicit commitment to the Qur'anic truth claims and message. Embedded in the institutional and doctrinal framework of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama’at (AMJ), Madsen intended this translation to be instrumental to the Islamic, and in particular the Ahmadi, missionary program in Europe, in which converts such as himself had taken on important roles from the 1930s onwards. Madsen took inspiration from a number of sources, but he also exercised individual interpretative agency both in the inscribed interpretation in the translated text and in the discursive interpretation in his commentary, and his translation has been of major significance in the history of Scandinavian translations embedded in the AMJ, as well as the Scandinavian history of Qur'an translation in general.