M. H. Shakir’s translation seems to have achieved some level of acceptance at American universities.
The Noble Qur’an in the English Language is the one pushed by the Saudis, but it’s criticized for being hopelessly biased against the West.
Ahmed Ali’s version seems to have some support.
The Noble Qur’an: A New Rendering of its Meaning in Modern English is the Sufi translation; I read a review that seemed to think it was an excellent, but well underappreciated version.
I’m basically looking for something that would be most representative of the faith as a whole, and also something that most Muslims would recognize as being a legitimate version, even if it’s not their favorite.
To be rather more pedantic than necessary, a scholar of Islam would say, “None of them. You should learn Arabic and read it in the original, because any translation is not what Allah spoke to Mohammed.” Obviously, few who are casually or moderately interested in the Quran would go to that length, but it deserves repeating as the ideal (from Islamic viewpoint) way to read it.
As a professional Arabic translator, I would cite four as of interest:
The translation by A. Yusuf Ali is by far the most popular and widespread among English-speaking Muslims. I recommend the original edition if you can find it, not the revised edition which was done by a committee that censored out all of the non-fundamentalist content in the original.
Muhammad Asad’s translation is probably the most popular with intellectuals. It’s the best bet for Dopers qua Dopers.
My personal favorite was going to be the recent one by Laleh Bakhtiar, because her research into the classical Arabic revealed that verse 4:34 does not say to beat women, which is how it was usually taken by male interpreters. Her translation was a boon for Muslim women. She went to great effort to reproduce the precise meaning of the Classical Arabic phrasing in English. But I was disappointed when reading it to discover that the language does not flow well. With maybe a little less exacting linguistic precision and a little more literary style, it could have been my favorite hands down. I still endorse it strongly for the verse that does not say to beat women. And she’s American.
A.J. Arberry, on the other hand, made his translation read like English poetry. Its language flows the best of any, which is a real challenge when turning Arabic into English. So if it’s purely reading pleasure you’re after instead of scholarship, Arberry’s your man.
I don’t find any of the others to be outstanding in any particular respect. Except:
:dubious: The booby prize goes to the translation by Hilali & Khan: it’s not only the most unreadable, they wrote it to promote the ultra-fundamentalist Wahhabi theology, so they crammed the English full of controversial interpolations that aren’t found in the original text. It consists of ugly, clunky, turgid English and ugly, hate-filled dogma. To be avoided at all costs! Unfortunately, the Saudi government uses its oil wealth to print up megatons of this one and spam it all over the world.
What I remember from my world religion class in college is that Muslims would say that the Koran CAN’T be translated. Anything in a language other than Arabic would be called an “interpretation” or “explanation” of the Koran, so as not to give people the impression that the true meaning could be properly conveyed without the original language.
My professor said that as a young student he’d picked up a book titled something like An Explanation of the Koran thinking it would be sort of the Cliff’s Notes Koran, only to find that it really was the whole thing in English.
I acquired this translation at a bookseller’s convention about ten years ago. In the introduction the publisher mentions that they had omitted the footnotes “with our sincerest apologies to the soul of the late translator” which has me curious as to the nature of the footnotes. I’m wondering if they were comments on the translation itself or if they were background cultural information.
The only one I’ve read is Dawood’s translation (published by Penguin books). I’ve read it three times, and want to try something different, so I think I’ll give [B[Johanna**'s suggestions a try.
Just my amateur $0.02, but I think a Koran ought to have truly copious footnotes. Even with the footnotes in Dawood’s translation, I was frequently lost. The text makes a lot of fleeting references to events in Arab history and beliefs that I, as a 20th-21st century westerner was completely unfamiliar with.
Heck yeah. Huge amounts of the text are utterly opaque to the uninitiated reader without background information on what it’s talking about. Many translations have no footnotes at all. The one by A. Yusuf Ali has long been popular for its explanatory footnotes and even whole articles/essays of background information–but as noted above, this explanatory text has been heavily censored by a fundie committee in the revised edition, which may be the only one still available. I have a copy of the original edition I got back in the 1980s before the revised one appeared. The original edition is public domain so there’s no reason other than economics (the revised one is subsidized by oil wealth) that it couldn’t be republished.
Definitely the best one for generous footnotes-- that appeal to the thinking reader-- is the one by Muhammad Asad.
Wow, thanks, Johanna. I have a copy of the A. Yusuf Ali translation that was given to me by a street preacher on Yonge Street; it seems to be the revised edition, as it’s a paperback marked “Seventh US Edition, 2001”. But as someone looking at the Abrahamic religions from the outside, I need a lot more context and explanation.
Does anyone know anything about the translation by Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall (talk about an awesome name)? I picked up a copy at a used bookstore once.
And not only that. Also, not having been raised in a Muslim context, we’ve no clue about what parts are very famous and what parts are completely unknown to the average Muslim, what parts are really important and what parts are pretty much ignored, what parts have a widely agreed upon interpretation and what parts are hotly debated and so on.
Its footnotes are very scanty, and it’s written in King James style English. But for many years it was the default one used in university courses. Maybe because it was issued by Western publishers and was the best one available around the mid-20th century. It’s OK but I don’t find it especially appealing.
In fact, the original Ali edition is available for free online in Project Gutenberg. There are actually 3 versions of it, as well as the John M Rodwell translation from the 1800’s (2 versions) and the George Sale translation from the 1700’s.
Thanks for finding that, t-. This way people can access it for free instead of shelling out bucks to kill trees. However, the Project Gutenberg text has no footnotes at all.
Really? All 3 of them? Must be an old version then – currently, Distributed Proofreading, which provides most of the books on Project Gutenberg, works hard to preserve the footnotes. Maybe that’s a book that should have a new version, WITH footnotes, added to PG.
