Muqeddes Kalam (Uyghur)

The Muqeddes Kalam (مۇقېددېس كالام, the Holy Word) is the whole Bible in Uyghur, the Turkic language of the Uyghur people of Xinjiang in northwest China and of communities across Central Asia. The text is copyright 2010 in the name of the Uyghur Bible Translation Committee, which publishes the same translation in more than one script. This is the Arabic-script edition, the official Uyghur script in Xinjiang, which the Midvash reader displays right to left.

It comes at the end of a long story. The first modern Uyghur Bible grew out of the Swedish mission in Kashgar, begun in the late nineteenth century, and was only finished in exile, published in Cairo in 1950. In between, the reforms of the Uyghur alphabet from the 1930s to the 1950s left the old text hard to read. The Muqeddes Kalam answers that with a translation in today's Uyghur and today's spelling.

For Uyghur readers it is the complete Scripture in current language. The honest limits: the committee does not publish its translators' names, so there is no way to weigh who did the work; and the verse count is lower than usual, a sign that some verses are grouped into blocks, which can shift an isolated reference. For close study, check key passages against another version.

It is free on Midvash because the committee released the text under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0). It can be read, copied and shared without asking, as long as the credit and the same license are kept.