TALLINN – Islam is taking off in Estonia. The Koran, the holy book which was recently published for the first time in Estonian, has been on the best sellers list for months. The liberalization of immigration policy, meanwhile, is likely to lead to an increase in the number Muslims settling in the country. Three thousand copies of the Koran have been sold since it was first published in December 2007. To put this in the context of a small nation, best selling CDs sell about 5000 copies.
And apparently, Haljand Udam, the man (1936-2005) who translated the Qur’an into Estonian was quite a guy:
Udam had a phenomenal command of languages. He mastered Arabic, Farsi, Tajiki, Hindi, Urdu and Uzbek. He could also speak a number of European languages, including French (which he also translated from), English, Russian and Finnish. It is worthwhile to note that he always translated directly from the original language, not from English.
He has left his mark with a long list of high-profile translated works, along with a number of his own essays, articles and research articles. He original works include “Read and Written” (1998), “Itinerary of the Orient” (2001) and “Magi-cians, Philosophers, Politicians” (2003).. . .
He studied Persian in 1964 at the National University of Tashkent. He continued studying the languages in Moscow, at the Soviet Academy of Sciences at the Institute of the peoples of Asia and did his postgraduate work in Iranian philology. Two years after going to Russia, in 1971, he wrote his thesis on “Semantic features of Sufi terminology in Persian.”
