New Delhi: A fresh translation of the Qur’ān into English has been released with the intention of presenting the text as it was understood by the early Islamic generations. This marks the initial significant contribution from India to the English translation of the Qur’ān since Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s widely recognized translation, which was initially published in the early 1930s. This edition provides a comprehensive introduction to the principles of Islam with its extensive annotations and appendices.
The translator, Dr. Zafarul-Islam Khan, anoted Indian scholar, began the effort as a revision of Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s translation, which he said included numerous inaccuracies and mistakes, errors and was written in an antiquated and versified manner. Over an 11-year period, Dr. Khan’s work gradually advanced into a completely revised translation that included over two thousand additional annotations and multiple appendices, including an introduction to the Qur’ān, a biography of Prophet Muhammad, the Beautiful Names of Allah, a dictionary of Islamic terms, and a Quranic subject index. As a result, this updated version of the Quran serves as a comprehensive reference to Islam.
The translator is a well-known Islamic scholar who received his PhD in Islamic Studies from Manchester University and attended the universities of Al-Azhar and Cairo. He has written numerous books in Arabic, English, and Urdu in addition to being fluent in all three languages. For around 14 years, he worked as a senior research fellow at The Muslim Institute in London. His native fluency in Arabic writing and speaking puts him in a unique position to handle such a challenging task.
To interpret obscure phrases, expressions, and terms in this work, Dr. Khan relied only on the most reliable and original Arabic works, the oldest books on exegesis and Prophet biographies, and the most authoritative Arabic and Quranic dictionaries.
The numerous fresh annotations have taken into account the kinds of queries that a reader, whether Muslim or not, would have when perusing the text of the Quran. The lack of this approach in many translations has caused issues and doubts that Islam’s adversaries have taken advantage of.
This new translation, according to Dr. Khan, is the most authentic rendering of the sacred Islamic book in plain, contemporary English. He has attempted to produce a translation that reflects as exactly as possible the way Islam’s first generations interpreted the holy text.
The translation is available in 1234 large format pages (Rs 1195) and is produced by Pharos Media, a publisher in Delhi. Its English translation and Arabic text are shown side by side. Another edition, containing 815 pages and costing Rs. 795, has also been published without the Arabic text. Orders for the work can be placed with [email protected]. In addition to being available on TheGloriousQuran.net, which is currently under construction, the translation will soon be published by several publishers across various countries.
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