WAllama Muztar Abbasi was a Pakistani Muslim scholar who belonged to the Dhund Abbasi tribe of Murree Hills in the Rawalpindi District. He was a supporter of the Esperanto language in Pakistan. He was patron in chief of the Pakistan Esperanto Association (PakEsA). He translated the Quran into Esperanto and wrote a biography of Muhammad and several other books in Esperanto and Urdu.
WAhmed Aboutaleb is a Moroccan-Dutch politician of the Labour Party (PvdA) and journalist. He has been the Mayor of Rotterdam since 5 January 2009.
WJohn Ricardo I. "Juan" Cole is an American academic and commentator on the modern Middle East and South Asia. He is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Since 2002, he has written a weblog, Informed Comment (juancole.com).
WElizabeth Anne Finn (1825–1921) was a British writer and the wife of James Finn, British Consul in Jerusalem, in Ottoman Palestine between 1846 and 1863. She and her daughter co-founded the Distressed Gentlefolk's Aid Association, the predecessor of Elizabeth Finn Care.
WAntoine Galland was a French orientalist and archaeologist, most famous as the first European translator of One Thousand and One Nights, which he called Les mille et une nuits. His version of the tales appeared in twelve volumes between 1704 and 1717 and exerted a significant influence on subsequent European literature and attitudes to the Islamic world. Jorge Luis Borges has suggested that Romanticism began when his translation was first read.
WGerard of Cremona was an Italian translator of scientific books from Arabic into Latin. He worked in Toledo, Kingdom of Castile and obtained the Arabic books in the libraries at Toledo. Some of the books had been originally written in Greek and, although well known in Byzantine Constantinople and Greece at the time, were unavailable in Greek or Latin in Western Europe. Gerard of Cremona is the most important translator among the Toledo School of Translators who invigorated Western medieval Europe in the twelfth century by transmitting the Arabs' and ancient Greeks' knowledge in astronomy, medicine and other sciences, by making the knowledge available in Latin. One of Gerard's most famous translations is of Ptolemy's Almagest from Arabic texts found in Toledo.
WYoannis Lahzi Gaid is a Coptic Catholic priest who has served since April 2014 as second personal secretary to Pope Francis. He is the first Eastern Catholic to hold the position.
WEdward William Lane was a British orientalist, translator and lexicographer. He is known for his Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians and the Arabic-English Lexicon, as well as his translations of One Thousand and One Nights and Selections from the Kur-án.
WMuhammad Ma Jian was a Hui-Chinese Islamic scholar and translator, known for translating the Qur'an into Chinese and stressing compatibility between Marxism and Islam.
WDavid Samuel Margoliouth, FBA was an English orientalist. He was briefly active as a priest in the Church of England. He was Laudian Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford from 1889 to 1937.
WUku Masing was an Estonian philosopher. He was a significant figure in Estonian religious philosophy. Masing also wrote poetry, mostly on religious issues. Masing authored one novel, Rapanui vabastamine ehk Kajakad jumalate kalmistul in the late 1930s, which was published posthumously in 1989. As a folklorist, he was a distinguished researcher of fairy tales, contributing to the international Encyclopedia of the Folktale. He was awarded the Righteous Among The Nations by Yad Vashem and the Israeli Supreme Court for his participation during the Holocaust in helping a Jew in Estonia escape capture from 1941 until the end of the war. His actions exposed him to great danger during this period requiring him to meet with his friend as well as lying to the Gestapo.
WGirish Chandra Sen was a Bengali religious scholar and translator. He was a Brahmo Samaj missionary and known for being the first translator of the Qur’an into Bengali language in 1886.
WArseny Aleksandrovich Tarkovsky was a prominent Soviet poet and translator. He is considered one of the great twentieth century Russian poets. He was predeceased by his son, film director Andrei Tarkovsky.
WAnselm Turmeda, later known as Abd-Allah at-Tarjuman, was a Christian priest from Mallorca who converted to Islam and settled in Tunis. He is one of the earliest writers to have written in both Arabic and a Latin language (Catalan). He became a vizier in Hafsid Tunis where he died in 1423 during the reign of Abu Faris Abd al-Aziz II.
WJoanna Wronecka is a Polish diplomat who has been serving as United Nations Special Coordinator for Lebanon since 2021.
WAbraham Shalom Yahuda was a Palestinian Jew, polymath, teacher, writer, researcher, linguist, and collector of rare documents.