Egypt to translate Quran into Hebrew to correct 'misinterpreted' versions

CAIRO: Egypt's minister of endowments announced on Wednesday evening that a project had been planned to translate the Quran into Hebrew, to correct earlier "misinterpretation" of the Islamic holy text.

“We realised that earlier versions translated by some Orientalists had been misinterpreted, whether deliberately or as the result of inaccuracy,” Mohamed Mokhtar Gomaa told talk show host Amr Abdel-Hamid during a phone interview broadcast on the TeN satellite TV channel.

“There should be an accurate copy translated by [Egyptian] professors of Hebrew language…that aim to correct misapprehensions or mistakes associated with the Holy Quran….[for] a thinker or a writer who has integrity to follow the right meanings,” Gomaa said.

The selection of a project team is currently underway under the supervision of the al-Azhar University's former dean of languages and translation, Saeid Attiya, who initiated it, according to the minister.

“We had previously translated some [Islamic] books into Hebrew... for the world to know how we think and how our religion is moderate and lenient,” he added.

Hebrew is spoken by approximately 14 million Jews around the world, with nine million of them living in Israel.

Last year, the Saudi Arabia-based King Fahd Complex released a Hebrew translation of the Holy Quran that sent shockwaves across the Muslim World for containing as many as 300 errors, detected by a Palestinian researcher.