Al-Qur’an

Abstract

Ahmed Ali’s book is a much welcome addition to the multiple editions now available of Islam’s holy book in English rendition. As the dust jacket informs us, this translation of the Qur’an’s meaning was first published in the United States in 1988. Now reprinted and handsomely reproduced in a handy size, these factors and its esthetics and readability make this volume suitable for general and classroom use. Educators who wish to assign a good translation of the Qur’an’s meaning, particularly for undergraduates, will find this work an obvious choice out of the plethora of choices currently available. Ali’s work avoids the linguistic archaism of Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall’s otherwise excellent rendition, jarring to the ears of a typical 20- year-old today reared on television English. A. J. Arberry’s translation, celebrated for its lyrical richness and its being supposedly (but not quite) evocative of the Arabic original, is stilted in parts and even inaccurate on occasion. When I assigned it for my undergraduate class on Islam a few years ago, at times I had to stop and disentangle the occasional fractured syntax for my students and reconstruct the original Arabic in my mind to extricate the literal meaning, sometimes sacrificed for literary effect. My next choice was T. B. Irving’s rendition of the Qur’an’s meaning into what he called American English. Although largely accurate, the rendition’s pedestrian nature, which bordered on the colloquial, was disappointingly inadequate to the task. Although the meaning was clear, the majesty of transcendental verbum dei was not evoked. N. J. Dawood’s widely used rendition is certainly adequate, but the prose is occasionally limp and uninspiring, and thus unsatisfying at a deeper level. Ali’s work straddles a happy medium between contemporaneity in style and elegance of diction, both achieved without any sacrifice in ...