A guide to Quran translations into English

I recommend reading the introduction section below. However if you want to skip immediately to a specific translation you are interested, use the quick links below.

Introduction

As a Muslim, understanding the Quran is vitally important to me, since I believe that it is the direct word of God and I need to know what He requires of me.

Since the Quran has a strong influence over the lives of around 1.5 billion Muslims, everyone, Muslim or non-Muslim, should have some knowledge about what it says, just as all educated people should know what is in the Bible.

The language of the Quran is Arabic, specifically Arabic as spoken at the time of its revelation during the period 610 AD — 632 AD.

The existence of the Quran has served to stabilise the Arabic language, so that present day speakers of Arabic can understand the Quran tolerably well, even though Arabic has changed a bit during the intervening 1,400 years. Compare this with a text in Anglo-Saxon from 622 AD which would be incomprehensible to a modern English speaker.

I decided long ago that mastering classical Arabic to the level where I could rely upon my own reading and understanding of the Arabic text was not realistic.

Some learn Arabic as a second language; that is excellent if you master the language. However, the challenge should not be underestimated. I spent seven years learning French at secondary school, and while I can get a general understanding of a newspaper article, I would not dream of trying to understand Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy relying upon my French ability.

Accordingly I consider that unless a non-native Arabic speaker has genuinely mastered classical Arabic (not modern Arabic), the best approach is to read and understand the Quran in translation.

How do you know if a translation is reliable?

This question is no different to assessing other written works. There are some obvious questions:

If you really care, look at multiple translations and compare them. I now own over a dozen English language Quran translations, although most of the time I only refer to a few.

“The Qur’an – a new translation" by MAS Abdel Haleem

Muhammad A. S. Abdel Haleem, OBE is Professor of Islamic Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and editor of the Journal of Quranic Studies. He is a native Arabic speaker, being born in Egypt and he learned the Quran by heart during childhood. I have had the privilege of meeting Professor Haleem in London many times.

This translation was published in 2004 by Oxford University Press. For both Muslims and non-Muslims, I recommend this as the first translation that you should read for the following reasons:

"The Study Quran - A New Translation and Commentary" - Edited by Seyyed Hossain Nasr

This new translation was published very recently, in 2015. It is a joint effort by:

As well as translating the text of the Quran, it is very extensively annotated with references to the work of classical commentators and it has a number of supplemental essays at the end. My page "Teaching Muslims religious intolerance" quotes extensively from its translation and commentary on Quran 2:62.

I have bought two hard copies, so that I have it with me in my Manchester house and London flat, and have also bought it on the Amazon Kindle. I recommend it very highly.

“The message of the Qur’an” – translated and explained by Muhammad Asad

Muhammad Asad (1900-1992) was Jewish, born as Leopold Weiss in Lwow, Galicia, now in Poland, and then part of the Austrian empire. He converted to Islam in 1926 and became Muhammad Asad. He had a remarkable life, including becoming Pakistan’s ambassador to the United Nations, and it is summarised in Muhammad Asad's biography published in 1995 in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

The autobiography of his early years, "The Road to Mecca" is very inspiring and reviewed on my website.

When I was in Granada, Spain in May 2010, I learned that Muhammad Asad is buried there, but sadly the cemetery was closed on the only occasion when I was able to try visiting his grave.

The translation took Asad 17 years. I recommend it, both for the clarity of the translated text and for the footnotes. The text of "The Message of the Qur'an" is available free to read on the internet. You can also download a free PDF of "The Message of the Qur'an" which gives you both the translation and the footnotes. My review of "The Cambridge Companion to the Quran" edited by Jane Dammen McAuliffe has a quote from her explaining why Asad produced his translation.

A sign of how highly I regard this translation is that I own three hard copies, as well as keeping it close by on my computer. I have quoted extracts in many presentations I have given.

“The Meaning of the Holy Qur'an” by Abdullah Yusuf Ali

Abdullah Yusuf Ali CBE, FRSL (1872 – 1953) was born in Gujarat, British India, and memorised the Quran as a child. His translation was done from 1934 to 1938, and I believe was the second major translation into English by a Muslim, the first being that by Marmaduke Pickthall. (The Pickthall translation is available free on the internet.)

It is readily available from the Islamic Propagation Centre International in Birmingham, although it is sometimes cheaper to buy it from Amazon.co.uk. Each page has the Arabic text, with English translation beside it. The translation is very extensively footnoted. Indeed, almost half of each page is devoted to footnotes.

Until I learned of the Muhammad Asad translation, the Yusuf Ali translation was my first source of reference when I wanted to understand the Quran. When my wife was the headteacher of a Muslim primary school, she used to give a copy at her own expense to each pupil who was graduating from the school.

Other Quran translations

There are many other translations of the Quran. I recommend readers to read the entire text of the Quran using one of the translations mentioned above, to gain an overall understanding of the text, before going on to look at other translations.

Using multiple translations becomes very helpful when you want to look at the Quran in greater detail, since the way that different people have translated the same Arabic text can help you to understand it better. That is essential for those, like me, who are not Arabic speakers. However even for speakers of modern Arabic, looking at the work of other translators should be helpful, since the classical Arabic of the Quran is not linguistically identical to the Arabic spoken today in the cities of the Arab world.

For someone who cannot read classical Arabic the way to protect oneself against the above risks is to think about the translator's background, as with the questions listed earlier, and also to use multiple translations rather than relying upon one.

"Quran in English: Clear, Pure, Easy to Read" by Talal Itani

Talal Itani published a new translation of the Quran in the period 2009-2012 which can be read on the internet and downloaded free. I only became aware of it when he informed me by email in June 2013. I have since downloaded the text to my iPad.

The translation as I downloaded it contains the following biographical information:

The above description indicates that the translator is not an Arabic scholar by background. It also suggests that he is a convert to Islam as was Muhammad Asad mentioned above. However as explained in his Facebook comment much lower down on this page, Talal Itani was born and raised as a Muslim, and he is amending his biography to remove this incorrect implication.

I cannot see any footnotes. While I commend Haleem's translation above for having few footnotes, I have some concern about their total absence. Haleem clearly felt them to be unavoidable for certain parts of the text.

To assess the translation, I decided to compare one specific text which I had discussed recently in a presentation. That is the story of the Sabbath breaking fishermen. Talal Itani translates it as follows:

This translation seemed odd to me, compared with the text as I recalled it. The Muhammad Asad translation is below:

The behaviour of the fish is fundamentally different in the translations by Muhammad Asad and Yusuf Ali, which suggests that Talal Itani has translated this incorrectly.

I cannot be definitive, as I cannot read the Arabic for myself. However either Talal Itani is translating incorrectly or Muhammad Asad and Yusuf Ali both translated incorrectly. It is impossible for both variants to be correct.

This should not be taken as a criticism of Itani's translation overall, as all translators are human and capable of error. I particularly commend the clarity of Talal Itani's English, and his generosity in making the full translation available free on the internet.

Be as apes despicable!

In passing I am conscious that Muslim anti-Semites often refer to Jews as being descended from apes and pigs, and I condemn such abuse.

In my presentation, I gave Muhammad Asad's explanation of the text translated above. That explanation is reproduced below:

"The Quran: English Meanings and Notes" by Saheeh International

This translation is distributed by Dar Qiraat for Publishing and Distribution, based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

The title page and the introduction does not name the translator, but right at the back she is named on a page which gives more details about Saheeh International and references its website www.saheehinternational.com (the website seems to have become inoperative since I accessed it in 2015) which informs us:

The Saheeh International translation is often used for Islamic missionary activities, and I have seen it being given away free to passers by at a London Underground station. I assume the reason is that bulk copies are supplied free or at very low cost from Saudi Arabia.

As explained on my page "Teaching Muslims religious intolerance" I find this translation very problematical. In my opinion it deviates significantly from the quality translations named above, and promotes an interpretation of Islam that is extremely hostile to other religions.

"The Koran Interpreted" by Arthur Arberry

Arthur John Arberry was a British orientalist with expert knowledge of Arabic and experience in the Middle East, although not a convert to Islam.

In the introduction, Arberry reminds us of the Quran that "from the earliest times orthodox opinion has rigidly maintained that it is untranslatable, a miracle of speech which it which it would be blasphemous to attempt to imitate" and then goes on to mention briefly the previous English translations of Sale (1734), Rodwell (1861), Palmer (1880), Pickthall (1930), and Bell (1937-39).

Accordingly, the translation is laid out on the page as poetry, rather than continuous prose.

I bought a copy in spring 1972, and read it in full 48 years later during Ramadan 2020. It is very readable, having no footnotes. Because Quran translations have moved on since 1972, I don't recommend it as a first Quran to read (see Haleem's translation above), but recommend it highly as one to read later if you just want to read the Quran in English rather than use it for detailed study (see "The Study Quran" above.)

In passing, I do not regard Arberry's use of "Koran" as improper, since at the time he was writing that was a common transliteration into English, even though that is no longer the case. See my page "Koran, Qur'an or Quran and Moslem or Muslim?"