Description:

Perhaps the best Quran English translation. It is clear, easy to read, and very faithful to the Arabic original. It closely follows the Arabic text, and often reminds the reader of the Arabic original. It uses today's English language, and today's English vocabulary, thus it is easy to read and understand. The flow is smooth, the sentence structure is simple, the meaning is clear. This Quran translation has no interpretations, no footnotes, and no explanations. It is a pure translation of the Quran, from Arabic to English, and it does not try to emphasize any school of thought. The text purely and accurately translates the Holy Quran, from Arabic, into contemporary English. It was translated by a Muslim, who saw firsthand the miracles inside the Quran. His native language is Arabic; his everyday language is American English. For 15 years, he studied the Quran. For many years, he translated speech between his mother and his wife. For a living, he develops quality software. This Quran translation is available in two editions. This edition (A) uses the word "Allah" to refer to the Creator. Edition (B) uses the word "God". Quran Sura 91. The Sun. ash-Shams. In the name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful. 1. By the sun and its radiance. 2. And the moon as it follows it. 3. And the day as it reveals it. 4. And the night as it conceals it. 5. And the sky and He who built it. 6. And the earth and He who spread it. 7. And the soul and He who proportioned it. 8. And inspired it with its wickedness and its righteousness. 9. Successful is he who purifies it. 10. Failing is he who corrupts it. 11. Thamood denied in its pride. 12. When it followed its most wicked. 13. The messenger of Allah said to them, "This is the she-camel of Allah, so let her drink." 14. But they called him a liar, and hamstrung her. So their Lord crushed them for their sin, and leveled it. 15. And He does not fear its sequel. The Quran is the last Book from the Creator. It contains guidance, mercy, and healing. The Quran is a blessing, within reach.

Review

Every book claims to matter, but only a handful have reconfigured the political geography of the world. What this Gutenberg edition delivers is not the Quran a believing Muslim encounters in daily prayer—it is something stranger and more disorienting: a nineteenth-century critical translation, arranged not in the received order of the text but chronologically, so that the reader watches a scripture assemble itself, verse by verse, across two decades of a prophet’s life. The effect is less like reading a holy book than watching a mind change under pressure. That is the real subject of J. M. Rodwell’s edition, and its enduring provocation. I will argue that this volume, despite its dated scholarship and its patronising editorial voice, remains one of the most intellectually fertile English encounters with the Quran precisely because it refuses to treat the text as a seamless, self-consistent whole. It insists that the Quran is a historical artefact before it is a theological one—and in doing so, it makes visible the tensions, the borrowings, and the sheer compositional labour that the canonical arrangement was designed to smooth over.

The core thesis of the critical apparatus—most explicitly in G. Margoliouth’s Introduction and Rodwell’s Preface—is that “the secret of the power exercised by the book… lay in the mind which produced it. It was, in fact, at first not a book, but a strong living voice, a kind of wild authoritative proclamation.” That voice, the editors argue, drew its materials from “Biblical reminiscences, Rabbinic legends, Christian traditions mostly drawn from distorted apocryphal sources, and native heathen stories,” yet blended them into “a wholly original manner.” The unity of diction, “a certain deficiency of imaginative power” alongside “a directness and simplicity of purpose,” is taken as internal evidence that the ayats are “the product of a single pen.” This is the book’s double claim: the Quran is both heavily dependent on prior sources and unmistakably the work of one man. That this man was, in Margoliouth’s measured phrase, “a great though imperfect character”—sincere but mistaken, a reformer who launched a civilisation—is the judgement the edition asks its reader to weigh.

What follows from this premise is a reading experience utterly unlike the Quran as traditionally recited. The early Meccan Suras, printed first in Rodwell’s arrangement, hit with the force of short, oath-laden eschatological warnings. Sura 96, identified by commentators as the first revelation, bursts onto the page: “Recite thou, in the name of thy Lord who created;—Created man from CLOTS OF BLOOD.” The capitalisation and the imperative are Rodwell’s choices, but they convey something genuine about the text’s abruptness. Sura 74 follows, the post-Fatrah call “Arise and warn!”, with its nineteen guardians of Hell and its condemnation of a wealthy Meccan opponent. Then Sura 73 establishes the night-prayer regimen and the recitation “with measured tone.” These earliest fragments are poetical, driven by rhyme and rhythm, saturated with oaths by the sun, the moon, the fig, the mountain. They threaten a coming reckoning and catalogue the destroyed peoples—Noah’s, Hud’s, Salih’s, Lot’s, Shuaib’s—who rejected their warners. The effect is rhythmically insistent, almost incantatory, and the footnotes, with their Talmudic, Midrashic, and apocryphal parallels, work against the grain of that incantation, turning each visionary passage into a comparative-textual puzzle.

The middle and later Meccan Suras broaden the canvas. The Joseph Sura (12) stands out as the only Meccan chapter with a single continuous narrative: the prophetic dream, the betrayal by the brothers, Potiphar’s wife, the prison, the interpretation of pharaoh’s dream, the rise to power, the reunion with Jacob. It is storytelling of a recognisably biblical cast, and Rodwell’s notes are thick here with Talmudic citations—Sanhedrin, Sotah, the Sepher Hadjaschar—pointing out where the Quran diverges from and depends upon rabbinic elaboration. Sura 18, the Cave, introduces the Sleepers, the two disputing gardeners, and Moses’ encounter with the mysterious servant al-Khidr, whose inexplicable acts (scuttling a boat, killing a boy, repairing a wall) Moses cannot endure without questioning—a parable about the limits of human knowledge before divine decree. Sura 19, Mary, gives us the annunciations to Zachariah and Mary, the speaking infant Jesus in the cradle, and the polemical insistence that “it beseemeth not God to beget a son.” Throughout, the footnotes from the Protevangelium of James and the Arabic Infancy Gospel make clear that these Gospel-infancy motifs were circulating in the late-antique Near East and that the Quran recasts them for its own theological ends.

The shift to the Medinan period changes not only content but texture. The brief, rhapsodic warnings give way to prosaic, lengthy legislation: Sura 2, the Cow, at 286 verses, covers the change of the prayer-direction to Mecca, fasting in Ramadan, pilgrimage regulations, marriage and divorce law, the prohibition of usury, and the celebrated Verse of the Throne: “God! there is no God but He, the Living, the Eternal; Nor slumber seizeth Him, nor sleep; His, whatsoever is in the Heavens and whatsoever is in the Earth!” That verse sits in the same Sura as “Let there be no compulsion in Religion”—a principle the later Suras will severely test. Sura 4, Women, legislates inheritance shares (“the male the portion of two females”), polygamy up to four wives conditioned on equitable treatment, the authority of husbands (“Men are superior to women… and scourge them”), and rules of warfare. Sura 24, Light, contains both the exquisite Light Verse—“God is the LIGHT of the Heavens and of the Earth. His Light is like a niche in which is a lamp… light upon light”—and the vindication of Ayesha from slander, with its newly instituted penalties for false accusation. The juxtaposition is characteristic of the Quran’s Medinan mode: luminous theological poetry alongside granular community regulation, often in the same Sura.

The arc hardens as the Medinan period progresses. Sura 8 regulates the spoils of Badr. Sura 33 deals with the siege of the Confederates, the treachery of the Jewish tribe of Koreidha, and the Prophet’s domestic rules—including the veiling of women. Sura 59 records the expulsion of the Nadhir. Sura 9, Immunity, dissolves treaties with polytheists after a four-month grace and commands war upon the People of the Book “until they pay tribute out of hand.” Sura 5, the Table, closes the chronological sequence with dietary law, the prohibition of wine and gambling, the amputation of the thief’s hand, and the declaration “This day have I perfected your religion for you.” The reader who has followed Rodwell’s chronology from the solitary vision on Hira to this final legislative consolidation cannot escape the impression of a message that has moved from warning to wielding power—from “leave them awhile alone” to “slay the polytheists wherever ye find them.” Margoliouth’s observation that the Meccan admonisher became the Medinan legislator and warrior is not an editorial imposition; it is the structure Rodwell’s arrangement makes visible.

The critical apparatus surrounding all this is both the edition’s greatest strength and its deepest limitation. The footnotes are a staggering display of nineteenth-century erudition, citing not only the Hebrew Bible and New Testament but tractates of the Mishnah and Talmud (Sanhedrin, Sotah, Taanith, Rosh Hashanah, Chagiga, Gittin, Berachoth, Baba Bathra), Midrash Rabbah, Pirke Rabbi Eliezer, the Targums, the apocryphal gospels, and a full shelf of European Orientalists—Nöldeke, Weil, Muir, Sprenger, Geiger, Caussin de Perceval, Burton, Burckhardt. When Sura 5:32 declares that whoever slays one soul is as if he slew all mankind, the note immediately traces this to Mishnah Sanhedrin iv.5. When Mary is called “sister of Aaron,” the note flags the apparent confusion of Miriam with Mary and cites Christian apologetic sources. The methodology is transparent: Rodwell worked from Flügel’s Arabic text, collated Sale, Ullmann, Wahl, and Kasimirski, and used Maracci’s Latin translation as his ultimate authority. The chronological reordering follows Nöldeke’s Geschichte des Qôrans for the later Suras and thematic groupings for the earliest fragments.

The weakness is not in the scholarship’s thoroughness but in its framing assumptions, which are everywhere audible. The repeated insistence that the Quran’s materials are “borrowed”—that Muhammad was sincere but self-deceived, that the visions may be explained by epilepsy, that the “distorted” apocryphal sources account for divergences from canonical biblical narrative—belongs to an Orientalist tradition that could not grant the text its own theological integrity even as it lavished philological attention on it. Margoliouth’s moderate tone cannot disguise the underlying conviction that Islam is a derivative religion and its prophet a well-meaning eclectic. This is the rationalist tradition to which the Pass 4 canonical map assigns the volume, and it performs its characteristic double move: immense learning in the service of a reductive genetic account. The edition credits the Quran with launching the medieval Arabic scientific and philosophical movement and welding “heterogeneous desert tribes” into a conquering nation, but treats its doctrinal content as a patchwork of Jewish, Christian, and pagan borrowings “freshly blended.” The reader today will notice that the same kinds of borrowing (biblical narrative, legal codes from neighbouring cultures, apocalyptic imagery from Persia) that are treated as signs of religious genius in the Hebrew Bible are treated as signs of derivative confusion in the Quran.

This is not to say the critical approach yields no insight. The chronological arrangement, for all its speculative dating of individual verses, does reveal a genuine developmental logic: the growing preoccupation with the “hypocrites” (munafiqin) of Medina, the hardening stance toward the Jewish tribes after the broken treaties of Nadhir and Koreidha, the increasing density of legal prescription. It also makes visible the internal tensions that later interpretive traditions have had to manage—most acutely, the tension between “no compulsion in religion” and the war verses, between the universalist declaration that all peoples were created from a single male and female (Sura 49:13) and the hierarchical gender and confessional legislation. The footnotes record that the Hanafite school restricted the war-command of Sura 47 to the Battle of Badr alone, while the Shiites read it as a standing universal obligation. The edition itself sides with the reading of Sura 8 as evidence that “Muhammad inculcated the doctrine of entire freedom of the will,” noting the tension with verses that speak of God sealing hearts and leading astray whom He wills. The free-will versus predestinarian tension is left unresolved in the text; Rodwell’s apparatus flags it without resolving it, which is to its credit.

The translation itself is a period piece. Rodwell aims at a literal sense with bracketed explanatory additions, preserving the Arabic initial letters—Elif. Lam. Mim., Ta. Ha., Ya. Sin.—that the notes concede were already mysterious to the earliest Muslims. He renders the Bismillah as “In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful” at the head of every Sura except Sura 9, where a footnote explains its absence by Othman’s lack of instruction. The diction is Victorian: “thou,” “hath,” “nay,” “verily.” This will grate on modern ears, but it also lends a certain hieratic gravity that more colloquial translations sometimes lose. The real cost is not archaism but the editorial decision to reorder the Suras. A Muslim reader who opens this volume looking for the Fatthah as Sura 1 will find it marked “[VIII.]” and buried after six earlier fragments. The traditional arrangement, which places the longest Suras first after the opening prayer, has its own logic—liturgical, pedagogical, and canonical—and Rodwell’s reordering, however defensible on historical-critical grounds, severs the reader from the text’s lived reception. The volume does print both numerations, but the experience of reading will be governed by the chronological sequence, and that sequence imposes a narrative of development that is itself an interpretation.

What, then, is this edition for? It is not a replacement for a believing Muslim’s Quran, nor even an ideal first encounter with the text for a general reader—the constant interruption of footnotes, the dated language, and the disorienting order make it more a reference work than a readable scripture. It is best understood as a primary document of a particular intellectual tradition: the Western critical-historical encounter with Islam in its high Orientalist phase. As such, it remains indispensable for anyone studying the history of Quranic scholarship, the reception of Islamic scripture in Europe, or the philological methods by which nineteenth-century scholars traced textual genealogies across religious boundaries. It is also, paradoxically, an effective tool for seeing the Quran’s compositional texture—the shifts in register, the recurring narrative patterns, the refrain-like quality of certain phrases, the way a legal prescription in one Sura is modulated or intensified in a later one. The edition does not let the text settle into a smooth, harmonised whole, and that resistance to harmonisation, however motivated, is intellectually productive.

Its deepest limitation is not its Orientalism but its insularity. For all the footnotes’ reach into Talmud, Midrash, and apocryphal gospel, the interpretive traditions internal to Islam appear only as sources of information—Beidhawi, Zamakhshari, Jalalayn, Ibn Ishaq cited for occasions of revelation and lexical glosses—never as living hermeneutical communities whose readings might challenge the editors’ genetic assumptions. The Sufi reading of the Light Verse, the Shia exegesis of the Purification clause in Sura 33, the legal debates between Hanafites and Shafi‘ites over the scope of the war verses: these appear in the footnotes as data points, not as rival frames of understanding. The effect is that Islam’s own intellectual history is mined for philological clues while its theological and jurisprudential reasoning is treated as something to be explained away. A reader who comes to this volume without prior knowledge will learn a great deal about what the Quran shares with rabbinic Judaism and apocryphal Christianity, and almost nothing about what it means for a Muslim to recite the Fatthah seventeen times a day, to fast Ramadan, to pilgrimage to Arafat, or to live under the sharia the Medinan Suras enact. That is a serious absence.

Still, an edition should be judged by what it sets out to do, and this one sets out to make the Quran legible as a historically developing text—to break the spell of the canonical order and expose the joins. It succeeds at that task, and the result, for all the patronising asides about “imperfect theology” and “distorted apocryphal sources,” is a volume that forces its reader to reckon with the Quran’s internal complexity. The spider-web parable, the wisdom of Lokman to his son, the declaration that those slain on God’s path are “alive with their Lord, richly sustained,” the Light Verse that has sustained centuries of mystical contemplation: these passages land with undiminished force even through the Victorian prose, and the editorial apparatus, for all its reductive impulses, cannot make them small. The book is caught between two imperatives—to demonstrate the text’s derivative character and to account for its world-altering power—and it never quite resolves the contradiction. That unresolved contradiction is what makes it worth reading.

Notable Quotes

Recite thou, in the name of thy Lord who created;—Created man from CLOTS OF BLOOD:—Recite thou! For thy Lord is the most Beneficent, Who hath taught the use of the pen;—Hath taught Man that which he knoweth not.

Sura 96, 'Thick Blood or Clots of Blood' — considered the very first revelation to Muhammad, linking creation, literacy, and divine generosity — creation, knowledge, divine revelation, origins of Islam

O THOU, ENWRAPPED in thy mantle! Arise and warn! Thy Lord—magnify Him! Thy raiment—purify it! The abomination—flee it!

Sura 74, 'The Enwrapped' — among the earliest revelations, commanding Muhammad to begin his public prophetic mission — prophetic calling, duty, purification, moral courage

SAY: He is God alone: God the eternal! He begetteth not, and He is not begotten; And there is none like unto Him.

Sura 112, 'The Unity' — the Quran's most concentrated statement of monotheism, recited daily in Islamic prayer — monotheism, divine unity, theology, anti-trinitarianism

By the noon-day BRIGHTNESS, And by the night when it darkeneth! Thy Lord hath not forsaken thee, neither hath he been displeased. And surely the Future shall be better for thee than the Past, And in the end shall thy Lord be bounteous to thee and thou be satisfied.

Sura 93, 'The Brightness' — revealed during a period of Muhammad's deep mental anxiety, offering reassurance — consolation, divine faithfulness, hope, perseverance

Verily along with trouble cometh ease. Verily along with trouble cometh ease.

Sura 94, 'The Opening' — the deliberate repetition emphasizing God's promise that hardship will be followed by relief — suffering, hope, perseverance, divine promise

God is the LIGHT of the Heavens and of the Earth. His Light is like a niche in which is a lamp—the lamp encased in glass—the glass, as it were, a glistening star. From a blessed tree is it lighted, the olive neither of the East nor of the West, whose oil would well nigh shine out, even though fire touched it not! It is light upon light.

Sura 24, 'Light' — the famous 'Light Verse,' one of the most mystically rich passages in the Quran — divine light, mysticism, cosmology, transcendence

THE DESIRE of increasing riches occupieth you, Till ye come to the grave. Nay! but in the end ye shall know. Nay! once more, in the end ye shall know your folly.

Sura 102, 'Desire' — an early Meccan warning against materialism, notable for its terse, hammering repetitions — materialism, mortality, warning, greed

Oh, thou soul which art at rest, Return to thy Lord, pleased, and pleasing him: Enter thou among my servants, And enter thou my Paradise.

Sura 89, 'The Daybreak' — God's address to the soul at peace, recited at Muslim funerals — death, peace, salvation, the soul

We feed you for the sake of God: we seek from you neither recompense nor thanks: A stern and calamitous day dread we from our Lord.

Sura 76, 'Man' — the righteous explaining why they give food to the poor, orphan, and captive despite their own desire for it — charity, selflessness, fear of God, social justice

There is no piety in turning your faces toward the east or the west, but he is pious who believeth in God, and the last day, and the angels, and the Scriptures, and the prophets; who for the love of God disburseth his wealth to his kindred, and to the orphans, and the needy, and the wayfarer, and those who ask, and for ransoming; who observeth prayer, and payeth the legal alms, and who is of those who are faithful to their engagements when they have engaged in them, and patient under ills and hardships, and in time of trouble: these are they who are just, and these are they who fear the Lord.

Sura 2, 'The Cow' — often called the 'Verse of Righteousness,' defining piety as substance over ritual — piety, charity, justice, faith versus ritual

And when my servants ask thee concerning me, then will I be nigh unto them. I will answer the cry of him that crieth, when he crieth unto me: but let them hearken unto me, and believe in me, that they may proceed aright.

Sura 2, 'The Cow' — a rare passage where God speaks with direct intimacy about His nearness to human prayer — prayer, divine nearness, faith, divine responsiveness

Seest thou not to what God likeneth a good word? To a good tree: its root firmly fixed, and its branches in the Heaven: Yielding its fruit in all seasons by the will of its Lord.

Sura 14, 'Abraham' — the parable of the good word versus the evil word, using the image of deep-rooted versus uprooted trees — truth, speech, stability, moral fruit

Verily, we have sent down the law wherein are guidance and light. By it did the prophets who professed Islam judge the Jews; and the doctors and the teachers judged by that portion of the Book of God, of which they were the keepers and the witnesses.

Sura 5, 'The Table' — affirming the Torah as containing God's guidance and light, while claiming Islamic continuity with it — scripture, law, continuity of revelation, Judaism

And if God had pleased He had surely made you all one people; but He would test you by what He hath given to each. Be emulous, then, in good deeds. To God shall ye all return, and He will tell you concerning the subjects of your disputes.

Sura 5, 'The Table' — explaining religious diversity as divinely intended, with competition in goodness as the proper response — religious pluralism, divine will, moral competition, diversity

Kill not your children for fear of want: for them and for you will we provide. Verily, the killing them is a great wickedness.

Sura 17, 'The Night Journey' — prohibition of infanticide, a pre-Islamic Arabian practice — infanticide, social reform, divine provision, sanctity of life

SAY: Truth is come and falsehood is vanished. Verily, falsehood is a thing that vanisheth.

Sura 17, 'The Night Journey' — a lapidary declaration of truth's inevitable triumph over falsehood — truth, falsehood, inevitability, divine order

Verily, were men and Djinn assembled to produce the like of this Koran, they could not produce its like, though the one should help the other.

Sura 17, 'The Night Journey' — the Quran's famous challenge to its doubters to produce anything comparable — inimitability, divine authorship, Quran's self-assertion, challenge

We have not created the heavens and the earth and all that between them is, but for a worthy end.

Sura 15, 'Hedjr' — affirming purposive creation against the idea that the cosmos is meaningless or arbitrary — creation, purpose, cosmology, meaning

But I only called you and ye answered me. Blame not me then, but blame yourselves: I cannot aid you, neither can ye aid me. I never believed that I was His equal with whom ye joined me.

Sura 14, 'Abraham' — Satan's speech on Judgment Day, disowning his followers and admitting he had no real power over them — personal responsibility, Satan, self-deception, judgment

O men! ye are but paupers in need of God; but God is the Rich, the Praiseworthy!

Sura 35, 'The Creator' — a stark statement of human dependence and divine self-sufficiency — human dependence, divine self-sufficiency, humility, theology

Know ye that this world's life is only a sport, and pastime, and show, and a cause of vainglory among you! And the multiplying of riches and children is like the plants which spring up after rain—Their growth rejoiceth the husband-man; then they wither away, and thou seest them all yellow; then they become stubble.

Sura 57, 'Iron' — comparing worldly life to vegetation that flourishes briefly then decays — transience, materialism, mortality, worldly illusion

We have sent our apostles with the clear tokens, and we have caused the Book and the balance to descend with them, that men might observe fairness. And we have sent down IRON. Dire evil resideth in it, as well as advantage, to mankind!

Sura 57, 'Iron' — linking prophetic mission with justice (the balance) and acknowledging technology's dual nature — justice, technology, ambiguity of power, divine provision

He who slayeth any one, unless it be a person guilty of manslaughter, or of spreading disorders in the land, shall be as though he had slain all mankind; but that he who saveth a life, shall be as though he had saved all mankind alive.

Sura 5, 'The Table' — the Quran's most famous ethical injunction on the value of human life, linked to the story of Cain and Abel — sanctity of life, murder, universal ethics, human dignity