Allah's and Muhammad's co-author: Kader Abdolah and his 'novelizing' translation of the Qur'an

This chapter focuses on Kader Abdolah’s unconventional Dutch translation of the Qur’an. Abdolah not only abbreviated some of the suras, he also arranged the verses chronologically rather than adhere to the arrangement of the verses in the Uthmanic codex of the Qur’an and added a 115th sura. He also included contextualizing introductory remarks to the verses and small visual tokens, which most would recognize as "cultural icons of the Netherlands" (the cow, the tulip, the windmill, the rain and the wooden clog). Drawing on Bakhtin’s distinction between the epic and the novel (Bakhtin 1981, 3-40), it is argued that Abdolah’s idiosyncratic interventions establish a ‘novelizing dynamic’ and that his translation can be read as a literary translation that is ‘novelizing’ in a Bakhtinian sense. The second part of the analysis focuses on the ambiguities that are generated by the subtitle “een vertaling” (a translation) and other paratextual elements that frame the text.