English Translations of the Quran: Who Made Them Since 1649

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The first English Quran was still on the press in London in March 1649 when Parliament sent soldiers to find it. A man named Ross had put it into English from a French version, and for more than two and a half centuries after that, anyone who wanted the Quran in English had it from somebody outside the faith, most often a Christian who thought it false. Muslims in India began answering in English in 1905, and since then an English clergyman’s son, a Jewish man from Baghdad, three American women living in Saudi Arabia and a professor who called himself an infidel have all had a hand in it.

None of these books is the Quran, as Muslims will tell us, because they hold that the Quran is God’s own speech, given in Arabic to the Prophet Muhammad, and that a translation can only explain what it means. So who made each one, and what that person believed, is most of the story, and if we are wondering which one to read it is the first thing to find out.

Marmaduke Pickthall, the son of an Anglican clergyman, became a Muslim in 1917, and when he published his own translation in 1930 he opened it by telling his readers, “The Koran cannot be translated. That is the belief of old-fashioned Sheykhs and the view of the present writer.” He had rendered it almost literally and taken every care over his English, he said, “But the result is not the Glorious Koran, that inimitable symphony, the very sounds of which move men to tears and ecstasy.” He called his book The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, and he warned them that it “can never take the place of the Koran in Arabic, nor is it meant to do so.”

A Muslim learns the opening chapter in Arabic to pray with, and if he reads it in English it is to understand what the book asks of him. The scholars put that in a lawyer’s language: “Translations of the meanings of the Qur’an are just explanations,” the Permanent Committee for Scholarly Research and Ifta answered when it was asked, and by the consensus of the scholars the rules for the Quran do not apply to them. The Hanafi school has an old exception, and Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta ruled by it in 1961: Abu Hanifa let a man who could manage Arabic recite in Persian and still have his prayer stand, and the fatwa went with him against his two students, Abu Yusuf and Muhammad. Fewer than one Muslim in five speaks Arabic, by the reckoning of the Muslim scholar Khaleel Mohammed, so most come to the meaning of the book through a translation, holding all the while that it “cannot be more than an approximate interpretation.”

We Christians come to this from the other side, for when the Spirit came at Pentecost the crowd “were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language” (Acts 2:6), and the Bible in our own tongue is the Bible to us, whatever we go on to argue about why there are so many versions. It helps to know, before we open an English Quran, that our Muslim neighbour does not hold that book as we hold our Bible.

Europe had been reading the Quran in Latin since Robert of Ketton made his version in 1143, and in 1647 André du Ryer put it into French. Two years later, on 19 March 1649, seven weeks after the execution of Charles I, a colonel named Anthony Weldon warned the House of Commons that it was about to appear in English, and the members sent him off with an officer and several soldiers to “make Search for the Press, where the Turkish Alcaron is informed to be now printing.” Within two days the printer, Robert White, was under arrest and the copies had been seized, and only then did the members find out that the book had been licensed all along, by John Downame, the official licenser of divinity books. They handed the whole affair to the Council of State, which on 4 April let Thomas Ross, the man behind the translation, go “with a monition not to meddle more with things of that nature.” A second edition was called for before the year was out.

Its title page offered the book “for the satisfaction of all that desire to look into the Turkish Vanities,” and its translator told the reader that he had taken the pains only to put it out of the French, “not doubting, though it hath been a poyson, that hath infected a very great, but most unsound part of the Universe, it may prove an Antidote, to confirm in thee the health of Christianity.” That was how the book was sold, at any rate. Mordechai Feingold, who has gone through the records, finds nothing to suggest that the men who made it wanted more than a profit, and they got one.

We still cannot say for certain which Ross did the translating. George Sale, writing in 1734, named Alexander Ross and had no mercy on him, “being utterly unacquainted with the Arabic, and no great master of the French,” and the name has stuck. Yet Alexander Ross only signed the “needfull Caveat” printed with the book, and in it he speaks of the translator as somebody else. Feingold thinks the likeliest man is Thomas Ross, the name that came up when Parliament investigated, and Noel Malcolm argues for a Hugh Ross, with Thomas only the courier, so in the table further down we say only that it was a Ross.

The translation that held the field for some two centuries came from a solicitor, George Sale, who had worked without pay for the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge and had been the chief worker on its Arabic New Testament for the Christians of Syria. His Koran came out in November 1734, the first in English made from the Arabic, though some have suggested he leaned on the Latin that Lewis Marracci published in 1698. His preface says what he thought he was doing: “They must have a mean opinion of the Christian Religion, or be but ill grounded therein, who can apprehend any danger from so manifest a forgery,” and again, “The Protestants alone are able to attack the Korân with success; and for them, I trust, Providence has reserved the glory of its overthrow.”

You would think that settles what he believed, and yet his notes draw on Muslim commentators page after page, and some of his own contemporaries suspected him of having secretly converted. Edward Gibbon called him “our honest and learned translator, Sale … half a Mussulman.” After the book came out Sale went less often to the Society’s meetings, and the Dictionary of National Biography wonders whether the Society had come to suspect his orthodoxy. He died of a fever on 13 November 1736, two years after it appeared, and it went on without him for a very long time; Thomas Jefferson bought it in 1765.

The Reverend J. M. Rodwell, in 1861, moved the suras out of their traditional order into what he took to be the order of their composition, and he judged Muhammad “a great though imperfect character, an earnest though mistaken teacher.” Edward Henry Palmer, translating for Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East in 1880, wrote a plainer English with less of the old polemic in it, and two years later, on a secret-service mission to Egypt for Gladstone’s government, he was shot at the Wady Sudr.

The first Muslim to put the Quran into English was Mohammad Abdul Hakim Khan of Patiala, in British India, in years of colonial rule and busy missionaries, and his book came out in 1905. For more than two decades he had been a close follower of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the founder of the Ahmadiyya movement, and his notes argued for that man’s claims, but soon after the book came out he left the movement. Mirza Hairat Dehlawi at Delhi and Mirza Abu’l Fazl at Allahabad followed in 1912, and Dehlawi said outright that he meant to give “a complete and exhaustive reply” to the criticisms of Sale, Rodwell, Palmer and Sir William Muir. So the men who had been explaining the Quran to English readers were now being answered by name, and having read Sale’s preface we can hardly be surprised.

By the outbreak of the Second World War there were at least seven Muslim translations from South Asia. Muhammad Ali’s came in 1917. He was an Ahmadi too, the leader of the movement’s Lahore group; his book was taken up by Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam in America, and Sunni hostility to the Ahmadis has got it banned in Egypt. Pickthall’s came in 1930, revised word by word in Egypt, in an English after the manner of the King James Version, and it has run to 150 editions. He thought the translator’s faith settled a great deal. “It may be reasonably claimed that no Holy Scripture can be fairly presented by one who disbelieves its inspiration and its message,” he wrote, and for most of the three centuries before him English readers had been getting the Quran from people who disbelieved it.

Abdullah Yusuf Ali, an Indian civil servant, the son of a Sunni mother and an Ismaili father, brought his out between 1934 and 1937 with some 6,000 footnotes that call on Shakespeare, Milton and Tennyson. For decades it was the English Quran most Muslims used, helped along by Saudi favour and wide distribution, and the man who made it died poor and forgotten.

Here are the main translators in order, with what each of them believed. It is a short list from a long shelf, because Bruce Lawrence of Duke, who wrote the history of the English Quran, counted seven complete translations before the twentieth century, 60 in it and 45 already in this one when his book came out in 2017, which makes 112, with 13 partial ones besides.

Year	Translator	Faith
1649	A Ross (Thomas or Hugh), from the French	Christian
1734	George Sale	Christian, suspected of leaning to Islam
1861	J. M. Rodwell	Christian clergyman
1880	E. H. Palmer	Christian
1905	Mohammad Abdul Hakim Khan	Ahmadi Muslim, left the movement soon after
1912	Mirza Hairat Dehlawi	Muslim
1917	Muhammad Ali	Ahmadi Muslim, Lahore group
1930	Marmaduke Pickthall	Muslim, English convert
1934–37	Abdullah Yusuf Ali	Muslim
1955	A. J. Arberry	Not a Muslim
1956	N. J. Dawood	Jewish
1977	Muhammad al-Hilali and Muhsin Khan	Muslim, Salafi; finished in Medina
1980	Muhammad Asad (born Leopold Weiss)	Muslim, convert from a Jewish home
1988 edition	Syed V. Mir Ahmed Ali	Shia Muslim
1997	Sahih International (three women)	Muslim, American converts
2004	M. A. S. Abdel Haleem	Muslim, born in Egypt
2007	Laleh Bakhtiar	Muslim, raised Catholic
2015	The Study Quran (S. H. Nasr and others)	Muslim, Sunni and Shia together
2018 edition	Mustafa Khattab, The Clear Quran	Muslim, doctorate from Al-Azhar

After the Second World War the list stops sorting itself so neatly into Christians warning and Muslims answering. A. J. Arberry, who was no Muslim, published The Koran Interpreted in 1955 and said he had chosen that title to concede the orthodox view that the Koran cannot be translated, which is a long way from Sale hoping for its overthrow. The next year N. J. Dawood, born in Baghdad to an old Jewish family, gave Penguin the version that went through 70 reprints and nine major revisions, the last in May 2014, and once his religion became more widely known it drew criticism from those who held, as Pickthall had, that a believer ought to do this work. Muhammad Asad came from a Jewish home as well, born Leopold Weiss, but he became a Muslim in 1926, and his The Message of the Qur’an came out in 1980.

In 1997 three American women living in Jeddah, Emily Assami, Mary Kennedy and Amatullah Bantley, all of whom had become Muslims, brought out Sahih International to set out the orthodox reading in plain English. Ten years later another American convert, Laleh Bakhtiar, who had been raised Catholic, published The Sublime Quran and rendered 4:34, the verse on husbands and wives, differently, because she could not believe God would sanction the harm the usual reading allows.

If we want to watch a translator’s faith get into the words, Sura 4:157 is the place. It says of those who claimed to have killed Jesus, in Sale’s English, that “they slew him not, neither crucified him, but he was represented by one in his likeness,” and that last clause is three words in Arabic, walakin shubbiha lahum. What they mean divides Muslims from us and, as it turns out, Muslims from one another.

Some translators leave the words almost as bare as they stand. Pickthall has “but it appeared so unto them,” Palmer “but a similitude was made for them,” Rodwell “but they had only his likeness,” and Abdel Haleem “though it was made to appear like that to them.” Others add what they take it to mean. Sahih International writes “but [another] was made to resemble him to them,” with square brackets that own up to the addition, and al-Hilali and Khan write that “the resemblance of Iesa (Jesus) was put over another man,” and tell us in brackets that this was the man they killed. It is the teaching Sale told his English readers he had found among Muslims, that “it was not Jesus himself who underwent that ignominious death, but somebody else in his shape and resemblance.” Muhammad Ali went another way altogether, writing “nor did they cause his death on the cross,” and the Ahmadiyya community still teaches that Jesus was nailed to the cross and did not die there. Dawood says only “but they thought they did.”

Here we part from our Muslim neighbours, and we ought to say so plainly and kindly. Paul told the Corinthians, “For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3–4), and the church has stood on those words from the start. The two faiths are set side by side in Christianity vs Islam. What the translators add is how much can rest on three words, and that nobody can put them into English without choosing.

If you have come here wanting a ranking, we are the wrong people to ask. For a Muslim that is a question about God’s own words, and those who read Arabic answer it differently, often along the lines of their own faith. What we can do is say what each one is, taking them by date, and leave you to weigh it.

Pickthall’s of 1930 has the ring of the King James, and Yusuf Ali’s carries its great mass of notes. Arberry, in 1955, was trying to keep the rhythm of the Arabic. Mir Ahmed Ali’s has become the standard translation among Shia Muslims, and in 2005 al-Hilali and Khan’s was the one most widely handed out in Sunni mosques across the English-speaking world. Abdel Haleem, who memorised the Quran in his training in Egypt, brought his out from Oxford in 2004, and it is the one Lawrence calls “far and away the best seller in English.” He writes God where others write Allah, and whether the two names mean the same God is the question in Is Allah the same as Yahweh? The Study Quran of 2015 draws on 40 commentaries, with Sunni and Shia scholars, converts and born Muslims among its editors, so it shows how Muslims have read a passage down the centuries, and Mustafa Khattab’s The Clear Quran is a newer effort at modern English by a Canadian-Egyptian scholar. If we would rather read them side by side without buying any, IslamAwakened, a website begun by an American convert, lines up dozens of English versions verse by verse, and it is where we read Sura 4:157.

Khaleel Mohammed, going through most of them in 2005, found fault with nearly all. He thought Pickthall’s English had dated, found a polemic against Jews in Yusuf Ali’s footnotes, objected strongly to al-Hilali and Khan’s opening sura, which names the Jews and the Christians, in brackets, in a verse whose Arabic names neither, and found doctrine getting into Abdel Haleem’s words as well. Lawrence admires the notes of The Study Quran a good deal more than its English. Sale, Rodwell and Palmer tell us what English Christians once thought, and that is a different thing from what Muslims believe.

Whichever one we pick up, the first thing to read is the name on the cover, and then to remember what Pickthall said no English page can give. Arberry tells us where he heard it. All through his translation he was living again the Ramadan nights at his house in Gezira, when he would sit on the veranda and listen to an old, white-bearded sheikh chanting the Quran for the politician next door, and he says it was then that “I, the infidel, learnt to understand” the rhythms of the book.

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