A new version of the Quran in Hebrew has just been added to the nation’s bookshelves, bringing the total number of translations into Hebrew to five. “The Quran in Other Words,” is the name of the latest translation of the holy text into Hebrew. Unlike the previous four translations, which were translated by Jews, this entire project was done by Muslims.

While the anticipated audience for the book is Israeli, the project’s initiator and publisher is Jordanian. The translation was published and released by Bayanat, an independent center for the study of Islam located in Amman.

The work of translating the text was given to Subhi Ali Adawi, an Israeli-Arab educator from the village of Turan in the Galilee. The 60-year-old father of six children, all of them academics, describes himself as a “believer, but apolitical.” He has taught Hebrew and Arabic in schools throughout the Arab sector for the past 40 years. Today, he is the principal of the high school in the village of Reineh.

“Translating is not just replacing some word or other with the equivalent word in the target language. It also means that the spirit of the language is relayed,” Adawi told Al-Monitor. “The Quran has long, winding sentences, but it also has well-formulated ideas. It is incumbent on the translator to maintain the cohesiveness of the text. Not one of my predecessors preserved the original structure consistently. Some of them used biblical language and forced some connection or other with the Bible, even though the Quran stands alone as an independent text. There is no subjective intervention whatsoever in my text. I didn't add a single word and didn’t try to paraphrase anything.”