English translations of the Quran

Early Translations

The earliest known translation of the Qur'an into the English Language was The Alcoran of Mahomet in 1649 by Alexander Ross, chaplain to King Charles I. This, however, was a translation of the French work L'Alcoran de Mahomet by the Sieur du Ryer, Lord of Malezair. L'Alcoran de Mahomet in French itself being just the third western translation of the Qur'an at the time, preceded by Latin works from Robert of Ketton (Lex Mahumet pseudoprophete, circa 1143) and Mark of Toledo (1210). In his English rendition, Ross' somewhat tainted views of Islam are apparent in the title page, which reads as follows:

"The Alcoran of Mahomet, Translated out of Arabick into French. By the Sieur du Ryer, Lord of Malezair, and Resident for the French King, at ALEXANDRIA. And Newly Englished, for the satisfaction of all that desire to look into the Turkish Vanities. To which is prefixed, the Life of Mahomet, the Prophet of the Turks, and Author of the Alcoran. With a Needful Caveat, or Admonition, for them who desire to know what Use may be made of, or if there be danger in Reading the ALCORAN."

In 1734, George Sale produced the first scholarly translation of the Qur'an, The Al Koran of Mohammed, based primarily on the Latin translation of Louis Maracci (1698). George Sale's translation was to remain the most widely available English translation over the next 200 years, and is still in print today, with release of a recent 2009 edition.

The next major English translation of note was by John Rodwell, Rector of St. Ethelburga, London, released in 1861, entitled The Koran. It was soon followed in 1880 with a 2-Volume edition by E.H. Palmer, a Cambridge scholar, who was entrusted with the preparation of the new translation for Max Muller's Sacred Books of the East series.

Early Modern Translations (1900 - 1980)

• The Qur'an (1910) by Mirza Abul Fazl, Arabic Text and English Translation Arranged Chronologically with an Abstract (Allahabad). Mirza Abul Fazl (1865-1956), was a native of Allahabad, India. Among the contemporary Muslim scholars Dr. Mirza Abul Fazl was a pioneer who took interest in the study of the chronological order of the Qur`an and invited the attention of Muslim scholars towards its importance. He was the first Muslim to present a translation of the Qur'an in to English along with the original Arabic text.

• The Holy Qur'an (1917) by Maulana Muhammad Ali. According to some sources this work is strongly colored by the Lahori-Ahmadi belief of its translator, including disbelief in the miraculous and disdain for Judaism and Christianity. Other orthodox Islamic sources praise it, stating the opposite, "The writer has kept his annotations altogether free from sectarian influence with wonderful impartiality, and has gathered together the wealth of authentic Muslim theology." It has been the basis for many later works, and is notably the version adopted by the Nation of Islam.

• The Qur'an: Translated, with a Critical Re-arrangement of the Surahs in 2 Vols (Edinburgh University Press, 1937-39) by Richard Bell may well have been the first most comprehensive oriental analysis of the Qur'an in the English language. The translation gained immediate notoriety for Bell's attempt at re-arranging the structure of the Qur'an in order of how it was written down originally at the time of the Prophet. Detailed commentary to accompany the translation was too extensive to find its way into print at the time. And yet it managed to get published, 50 odd years later, as a University of Manchester imprint entitled A Commentary of the Qur'an (1991) with significant editorial input from Clifford Edmund Bosworth and M. E. J. Richardson.

• The Meaning of the Glorious Koran (1930) by Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall. Heavily influenced by Muhammad Ali, this version shares that author's bias against descriptions of miracles. Popular in the first half of the twentieth century, it is now in limited demand due to its archaic prose and lack of annotations.

• The Holy Qur'an: Translation and Commentary (1934) by Abdullah Yusuf Ali. Yusuf Ali elegantly conveys the rich style of the Arabic into eloquent English verse, but his translation has been criticized for providing copious medieval exegesis in the footnotes without contextualization. Written in a context of growing anti-Zionism, the commentary is also a polemic against Jews, to the extent that a Saudi-financed 1989 revision was banned from use in Los Angeles schools in 2002. Yusuf Ali's translation was until recently the most popular version used by Muslims, notably due to its subsidization by the Saudi government, but is losing influence due to its dated language.

• The Koran Interpreted (1955) by Arthur Arberry. The title of this first English translation by a bona fide scholar of Arabic and Islam reflects the Muslim belief that the Qur'an cannot be translated, just interpreted. Arberry's translation without prejudice has received wide acclaim by other scholars and remains the academic reference work at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

• The Koran (1956) by N. J. Dawood is a popular English translation in North America, having become part of the Penguin (Classics) imprint. Dawood, a native Arabic speaker from Iraq's now defunct Jewish community, compromised liberally on faithfulness to literalism to yield a narrative that is succinct, fast-paced and perhaps the easiest to read of all the English translations. In the first edition, Dawood even rearranged the chapters (suras) into more-or-less chronological order. Later editions restored the traditional sequence.

• Tafsir-ul-Quran (1957) by well-known Indian scholar Abdul Majid Daryabadi is a translation with commentary on par with Yusuf Ali's work in terms of size and scope. Daryabadi ventures into comparative religion with a thoroughly critical study of the Bible in particular, as also other major world faiths, anthropology and history in general, demonstrating in the process how the Qur'an stands out above other Scriptures which have been tampered with down the ages.

• The Message of the Qur'an : Presented in Perspective (1974) by Dr. Hashim Amir Ali. He translated the Qur`an into English and arranged it according to chronological order. Dr. Hashim Amir-Ali (b.1903-1987) was a native of Salar Jung, Hyderabad, Deccan, India. In 1938 he came under the influence of Dr. Mirza Abul Fazl Allahabadi, and took deep interest in the study of the Qur`an and was aware of the significance of the chronological order of the Qur`an.

Some other lesser known early translations include:

• Hairat Dehlawi, The Koran Prepared (Delhi, 1912)
• Hafiz Ghulam Sarwar, Translation of the Holy Qur'an (Singapore, 1920)
• Ali Ahmad Khan Jullundri, Translation of the Glorious Holy Qur'an with commentary (Lahore, 1962)
• Abdur Rahman Tariq and Ziauddin Gilani, The Holy Qur'an Rendered into English (Lahore, 1966)
• Syed Abdul Latif, Al-Qur'an: Rendered into English (Hyderabad, 1969)
• Muhammad Ahmad Mofassir, The Koran: The First Tafsir in English (London, 1979)
• Mahmud Y. Zayid, The Qur'an: An English Translation of the Meaning of the Qur'an (Beirut, 1980)
• S.M. Sarwar, The Holy Qur'an: Arab Text and English Translation (1981)
• Sher Ali, The Holy Qur'an: Arabic Text with English Translation (1955)
• Zafarullah Khan, The Qur'an: Arabic Text and English Translation (1970)
• Kamaluddin and Nazir Ahmad, A Running Commentary of the Holy Qur'an (London, 1948)
• Salahuddin Peer, The Wonderful Koran (Lahore, 1960)
• Malik Ghulam Farid, The Holy Qur'an (1962)
• Khadim Rahman Nuri, Running Commentary of the Holy Qur'an (1964)
• Firozuddin Ruhi, The Qur'an (Karachi, 1965)

Modern Translations (1980 - )

• The Message of the Qur'an (1980) by Muhammad Asad. Written by a Jewish convert to Islam, this work is banned in Saudi Arabia because of conflicts with the dominant Salafi interpretation of Islam, which has made the book difficult to obtain. It has been acclaimed as "one of the best translations available" on account of the quality of its English and its annotations. However, outside of Saudi Arabia, the Muhammad Asad translation is widely available, reprints in 1984, 1993 and 1997 having been followed by a new edition released in 2005.

• Al-Qur'an, A Contemporary Translation (1984) by Ahmed Ali. This accessible translation, published by the Princeton University Press, has been criticized by many Muslim scholars because of the many liberties it takes with the text.

• The Qur'an: The First American Version (1985) by T. B. Irving. Canadian Muslim convert and Islamic Scholar Dr. Irving's translation is considered the first translation of its kind to use proper American English vernacular and is widely available in outlets across North America. This version, criticized for fundamental flaws in translation, has met with little demand.

• The Holy Qur'an (1988) by Syed V. Mir Ahmed Ali. A widely used Shi'ite translation, criticized as unwieldy and for its "heavy sectarian bias". Mir Ahmed Ali's translation includes expansive commentary notes similar to the Yusuf Ali translation and is published by New York-based publishers Tahirke Tarsile Qur'an.

• The Clarion Call Of The Eternal Qur-aan (1991), English translation by Muhammad Khalilur Rahman, (Dhaka, Bangladesh).

• The Noble Qur'an in the English Language (1996) by Muhammad Taqi al-Din al-Hilali and Muhammad Muhsin Khan. Intended to replace the Abdullah Yusuf Ali translation, this is now the most widely disseminated Qur'an among Sunnis in the English-speaking world in part due to its free distribution by the Saudi government. It has been severely criticized in the West as a "supremacist Muslim, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian polemic" for its reliance on medieval commentary and for its use of parenthetical insertions that reflect contemporary political disputes, such as "Holy Land (Palestine)" instead of just "Holy Land".

• The Holy Qur'an by Saheeh International is the second major modern translation originating from Dar Abul Qasim Publishing House, Saudi Arabia. It has been translated by a team of three women converts to Islam. Umm Muhammad, on of the translators is supposed to be the major contributor. It claims to rectify inconsistencies in and improve upon the English language of the Hilali-Khan translation, and as such is assumed to be based upon the later translation.

• The Qur'an by Mohammedali H. Shakir is an English translation with its roots in the Shia tradition. It is widely available in the North American market, primarily due to its printing in numerous editions by New York-based publishers Tahirke Tarsile Qur'an.

• Quran: The Final Testament is controversial author and computer scientist Rashad Khalifa's seminal work and is not recognized in the mainstream American Muslim circles, primarily due to Dr. Khilafa's development of heretical beliefs later in life, to which his untimely homicide by an unknown assailant, could well have been attributed. Earlier, Dr. Khilafa had caused a major stir in the Muslim world by allegedly showing (via computer and mathematical analysis) extraordinary hidden numerical structures centered around the number 19 in the Qur'an.

• The Noble Qur'an: A New Rendering of Its Meaning in English (1999) by Abdalhaqq Bewley and Aisha Bewley. A Sufi translation, acclaimed for lack of bias and readable English, but difficult to obtain because it is not supported by religious institutions. Aisha Bewley, one of the translators, has also translated numerous classical Islamic works from Arabic into English, including the Muwatta of Imam Malik, Tafsir al-Qurtubi and 'the Ash-Shifa of Qadi Iyad.

• The Glorious Qur'an (1993), a joint translation of UK-based Egyptian-born Dr. Ahmad Zidan and British Muslim convert Mrs. Dina Zidan.

• The Quran: A Poetic Translation (1999) a recent work by Iranian-born lecturer, translator and linguist Fazlollah Nikayin attempts to capture the poetic brilliance of the Qur'an in the English Language.

• The Qur'an: A New Translation (2004) by well-known California-based translator of numerous oriental works Dr. Thomas Cleary appeared in an earlier volume as a partial translation, which at the time was highly praised by famous American-Muslim scholar Hamza Yusuf.

• The Qur'an is one of the many new translations to appear since the mid-1990s, this work by M.A.S. Abdel-Haleem being published under the Oxford World Classics imprint.

• The Glorious Qur'an, by Dr. Syed Vickar Ahmed is another in the stable of translations from New York based Tahirke Tarsile Qur'an.

• The Qur'an in Persian and English (Bilingual Edition, 2001) features an English translation by famous Iranian poet and author Tahere Saffarzadeh.

• The Qur'an (2002), by UK-based Afghanistan-born writer M.J. Gohari, is an Oxford Logos Society imprint.

• Translation and Commentary on The Holy Quran (2000), a 1,256 page effort by the eminent Indian-Bengali translator Dr. Zohurul Hoque.

• Al-Qur'an: Guidance for Mankind by M. Farooq-e-Azam Malik is a new translation finding popular acceptance among the mainstream American-Muslim readership. Malik hails from the original first-generation of professionally-employed immigrants to arrive in the United States in the early 1970s and later evolve into active Islamic community leaders thereafter. As such the translation offers the reader a vantage point other than the traditional university academic or professional clergyman translator. Unique to the work is the author's refusal or inability to translate the commonly occurring word Rabb (God) into English throughout the translation.

• The Majestic Qur'an: An English Rendition of Its Meanings (2000) is a highly regarded translation released by upscale sufi publishers Starlatch Press, LLC from the United Kingdom. The translation (ISBN 978-1-929694-50-1) was undertaken by a 'translation committee' featuring such prominent writers as Cambridge Professor Timothy Winter, American-Muslim writer Uthman Hutchinson and Mostafa al-Badawi.

• The Qur’an with an English Paraphrase (2003), a translation by Indian-born Sayyid Ali Quli Qara'i is an imprint of the Iranian "Centre for Translation of the Holy Qur'an".

• The Sublime Qur'an (2007), is a recent translation, this by Chicago-based scholar Laleh Bakhtiar, a translator and editor of numerous major Islamic and philosophical works, mostly of sufi and shia background, somewhat similar in nature and scope to the spiritual writings of popular writer Seyyed Hossein Nasr.

• The Message - A Translation of the Glorious Qur'an is a new translation officially credited to the Monotheistic Group whose background traces to the new emerging wave of Progressive Muslims receiving wide media coverage in the Western world. Liberal Muslims do not necessarily subscribe to the more culturally-based interpretations of the Qur'an and Hadith. They generally claim that they are returning to the principles of the early Ummah and to the ethical and pluralistic intent of their scripture.

• The Quran: A Reformist Translation (2007), is a recent translation by the team of Edip Yuksel, Layth Saleh al-Shaiban and Martha Schulte-Nafeh, who claim to offer a non-sexist understanding of the divine text, explicitly rejecting the right of the clergy to determine the likely meaning of disputed passages, using instead the logic and the language of the Quran itself as the ultimate authority in determining likely meanings.

• The Tajwidi Qur'an is a monumental work undertaken by Virginia-based American Muslim convert and Sufi A. Nooruddeen Durkee. While its primary emphasis is to develop a new romanized transliteration system to allow readers to pronounce the Arabic using English letters, the work is accompanied by a translation, which the author has amalgamated from various other extant translations.

• The Quran is a new translation by Maulana Wahiduddin Khan of India, whose publishing house Goodword Publications has emerged as a major powerhouse in mainstream Muslim publishing in the English language over the past decade. The Maulana is a prolific writer and writes with a non-sectarian, non-political Islamic viewpoint representative of the Indian Muslims as an embattled minority in a multi-cultural society.

• The Gracious Qur'an: A Modern Phrased Interpretation in English is a major new translation by Al-Azhar University's Dr. Ahmad Zaki Hammad, who boasts a formidable resume in translations as a senior professor of the Languages Department at Al-Azhar, Egypt.

• The Qur'an With Annotated Interpretation in Modern English (2007) traces its background to the Gülen Movement, a modernist Islamic group in Turkey, with which the translator Ali Ünal is closely associated.

• The Qur'an (2007) a recent translation by retired Oxford University lecturer and Arabist Alan Jones.

• The Qur'an: A New Translation (2008) is a Penguin Classics imprint translated by Tarif Khalidi, Professor of Islamic Studies at the American University of Beirut.

Translations from Urdu into English

• The Meaning of the Qur'an (Lahore, 1967), by Muhammad Akbar is the first English translation of Maulana Abul Ala Maududi's original Urdu translation of the Holy Qur'an.

• Kanzul Iman, Ahmad Raza Khan Barelvi's famous Urdu translation, originally published in 1910, has several editions translated into English. The first translation into English was by University of Kuwait based Prof. Hanif Akhtar Fatmi. A second translation was completed by Prof. Shah Fareed al Haq in Pakistan. And recently a third translation in English has arrived, this by Aqib Farid Qadri.

• Exposition of the Holy Quran (1996) by Ghulam Ahmed Pervez (d.1903-1985), is the English rendering of the Urdu presentation Mafhum-al-Quran, that was published in 1961.

• The Meaning of the Noble Qur'an (with Explanatory Notes) is a new translation by Justice Maulana Muhammad Taqi Usmani printed by (Maktaba-e-Darul Uloom) Karachi, Pakistan (2007). It is not clear whether this translation is a direct Arabic to English translation by Dr. Taqi or whether this is a reproduction of an Urdu to English translation undertaken by Dr. Taqi as part of his English translation of the popular Urdu commentary Ma'ariful Qur'an originally by Mufti Muhammad Shafi (1897-1976).

• Towards Understanding the Qur'an (2006) is an English translation by Dr. Zafar Ishaq Ansari of Maulana Abul Ala Maududi's immensely popular Urdu translation of the Holy Qur'an. The present work is a second translation of Maulana Mawdudi's Urdu original, this new attempt having been published by the UK-based Islamic Foundation (ISBN 978-0-86037-510-4).

• Irfan-ul-Qur'an (2007) is a new translation by prominent Pakistani scholar Tahir-ul-Qadri released in conjugation with an Urdu translation of the same name. It is not clear from the preface, whether this English version is a translation of the Urdu edition by one of Dr. Qadri's disciples, or a direct-from-Arabic translation by the author in its own right. A unique 26-page long biographical sketch of Dr. Qadri, extolling his numerous accomplishments and virtues prefaces this new English edition. There is not even a biographical sketch of the Prophet Muhammad.

• The Holy Qur'an by Allamah Nooruddin is an English rendition of an obscure Urdu translation by the Allamah's modern-day disciples Amatul Rahman Omar and Abdul Mannan, who have published a very polished high-quality edition for the English-speaking readership. The translation has failed to gain mainstream acceptance, however, since Allamah Nooruddin, an early 20th century figure, is virtually unknown among the numerous figures active in Islamic work in the Indian Sub-continent at the time.

External links

• The full text of Ross's Translation in pdf
• Quran translation in English by Abdullah Yusuf Ali at Quran-Verse.com
• The Holy Qur'an translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali at wikilivres.info
• The Koran (1876), by John Medows Rodwell at wikisource
• The Holy Qur'an (1917, revised 1920), by Maulana Muhammad Ali at wikisource
• The Holy Qur'an - original source (1917, revised 1920), by Maulana Muhammad Ali at wikisource
• The Koran Interpreted Audiobook
• Accurate Qur'an Translation in Urdu, Transliteration (Simple, Color), English (Yusuf Ali, Shakir, Pickthal, Mohsin Khan), French, Spanish, Indonesian, Russian, Melayu, & German.
• The King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Qur'an
• Sacred-Texts.com, the Quran in Arabic, and the Yusuf Ali, Pickthall, Palmer, and Rodwell translations.
• Three Translations of the Qur'ān, a site with Yusuf Ali, Pickthall, and Shakir side-by-side on a per-verse basis
• Open Translation of Quran by Wikiz.info
• Translation Ali Quli Qara'i at Online Quran Project
• Center for Translation of the Holy Qur'an (Qom, Iran)
• Translation (Muhammad Asad) with commentry
• Translation (Muhammad Asad) without commentry
• Shabbir Ahmad's Translation online