Translator's Note

The basic Message of the Qur'ān is that Allāh has created this Universe according to a plan, not as a jest (21:16). Allāh has sent us to earth for trial. For this, Allāh has created Mankind and instilled in each human being the basic sense of good and bad, right and wrong, justice and injustice.

Then, from the very beginning, Allāh sent His Messengers to guide and convey to Mankind His Message of how to spend our lives on earth. In the end, each individual will be rewarded or punished according to his or her deeds and misdeeds on earth. Every human has been given full freedom to choose the right or wrong path. No one has been forced by Allāh to follow a certain path in his life on earth but, since Allāh is beyond human limits of Time and Space, He knows how each person will behave in life.

The Messengers of Allāh told their people that they must shun false and powerless "gods" and worship and obey only the One and Only God who is the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe. After their death, all human beings will be brought back to life on the Day of Resurrection. They will be judged according to their deeds. Those whose good deeds outweigh their misdeeds will go to Paradise to live therein forever. But those whose burden of injustice and evil deeds in this life outweighs their good deeds will be thrown into Hell where they will live forever in a state of no-life, no-death (20:74). A place in Paradise will be the reward of those who did righteous deeds, did not do injustice to others and obeyed Allāh and prayed to Him as He has enjoined them to do.

In the Qur'ān, Allāh asks us again and again to travel throughout the land to see how previous nations and civilizations that once flourished were destroyed; how nothing is left of them except some ruins like those of the ‘Ād, the Thamūd and the people of the Pharaoh in Egypt. Likewise, Allāh invites us to ponder over nature and all the beautiful, delicate, precise, complicated and useful things He has created and provided for human survival on earth.

The Qur’ān tells us that Allāh alone is the Creator, Master and Sustainer of the Universe, including the earth and all forms of life on it. Therefore, He alone should be worshipped (51:56). He does not tolerate anyone else to be associated with Him in godhood (4:48).

Time and again, Allāh invites us to think about His universe: how humans were created out of nothing, how such a wondrous world was created and is functioning in complete order. Allāh gives the example of a speck of sperm that evolves into a full human and that of a seed which takes the shape of a beautiful plant and tree. We are invited, again and again, to ponder over these Miracles of Allāh in order to submit ourselves to Him. Allāh reminds us again and again that this temporary world is for our trial and that an eternal life awaits us after the Resurrection.

To guide people, Allāh sent His Messengers from the earliest times, to all parts of the world. Prophet Muḥammad was the last of Allāh’s Messengers, and he came at a time when humanity had learnt to preserve knowledge by committing it to writing. The Qur’ān was thus meticulously preserved and Allāh took upon Himself the responsibility of safeguarding and preserving it forever (15:9).

The earliest audience of the Qur’ān, besides the Muslims following Prophet Muḥammad, were the Quraysh in Makkah and the Arabs and Jews of Madīnah. But, by extension, the audience of the Qur’ān is the whole of humanity until the Day of Resurrection, and every divine command or advice will apply to a similar situation in the future. Therefore, it is the duty of Muslims of all ages and countries to make this divine Message available to all communities in their respective languages across the world. Muslims also have a duty to be living examples of this divine Message.

The Qur’ān is a direct message of our Lord and Creator to each and every one of us on earth. Each one of us must try to understand this personal message from Allāh. Reciting it without understanding its meanings is useless, rather an insult to this personal divine message. Without it our lives will fail to reflect the purity, truth, compassion, peace and justice which are the essence of this divine message.

The last in the long chain of prophets, sent for all peoples and all regions, Prophet Muḥammad attained prophethood in August 610 CE while in Makkah, Arabia. His people rejected him and made his and his followers’ lives miserable. As a result, some of them had to migrate twice to Abyssinia and finally to Madīnah where the Prophet too migrated. His detractors did not leave him in peace even in Madīnah. They kept waging wars against him until they were decisively defeated with the Conquest of Makkah in January 630 CE.

After a great struggle against his detractors in Arabia, the Prophet was able to establish an independent Islamic state before his death in June 632 CE. He is buried within the compound of his mosque in Madīnah. After his death, Muslims were able, within a few decades, to conquer large parts of the old world. His followers are spread today from Europe to Indonesia and are found in all countries of the world. Today, around one in every four persons is a Muslim. It is projected that by 2030, Muslims will be the largest religious group in the world.

The Divine Message of the Prophet of Islām is meticulously preserved in the Qur’ān which was revealed to him over a period of 23 years. It is in Arabic, a great classical language that matured some two millennia ago. Translations of this divine book are available in most languages.

The Prophet’s sayings and reports about his deeds as well as his life are preserved in huge collections of Ḥadīth, Sīrah and Maghāzī that are meticulously kept separate from the Qur’ānic text. There are hundreds of Ḥadīth collections containing tens of thousands of ḥadīths. The ones considered most accurate and reliable are called al-Ṣiḥāḥ al-Sittah (The Six Correct Books [of Ḥadīth]). These are in Arabic but their translations are available in many languages.

After the Qur’ān, Ḥadīth is considered the second primary source of Islamic jurisprudence. The third source of the Islamic legislation is ijmā‘ (consensus), i.e., interpretations agreed upon by a large group of Islamic scholars. The fourth source of Islamic jurisprudence is qiyās (analogy) whereby a learned jurist uses the available corpus of Islamic knowledge to arrive at an opinion about a new issue or situation not faced by earlier generations. In order of authority, the Qur’ān is the supreme source of jurisprudence, then Ḥadīth, then Ijmā‘ and finally qiyās.

The Qur’ānic text has been meticulously preserved by Muslims. In the early Islamic period, there were several copies, but the third caliph, ‘Uthmān ibn ‘Affān (d. 656 CE), had a master copy prepared by a committee and sent copies of it to all major Muslim cities and provinces. The current copies of the Qur’ān follow that master copy.

Muslims believe that the copy of the Qur’ān available today is exactly the same that was left behind by Prophet Muḥammad. Allāh has taken it upon Himself to preserve the Qur’ān (15:9) and has challenged that no one can ever produce even one chapter like it (2:23, 10:38, 11:13). Many attempts have been made in the past to produce a likeness of the Qur’ān but all failed.

This translation started over a decade ago as a revision of Abdullah Yusuf Ali (AYA)’s English translation of the Glorious Qur’ān. I had intensely felt the need for a revision of this popular work at least since 1980 while I was a research fellow at The Muslim Institute, London, and had to frequently quote the translation of Qur’ānic āyahs in papers and books. AYA’s translation came in handy but every time I used it, I felt that it failed to offer an accurate rendering of the Arabic text. The translations were either inaccurate or offered an explanation instead of an accurate and faultless word-for-word rendering.

While performing Ḥaj with my wife Habiba in 2010, I decided that I must not delay this work any further. Thus, my first revision started on 21 January 2011 and was completed on 9 August 2012. Ever since further revisions continued on and off. Before the final publication, seven revisions took place on printouts as well as on computer screens. The work was resumed in earnest on a full-time-basis only after I retired in July 2020 as Chairman of the Delhi Minorities Commission. Within one year, a fresh, thorough rendering was completed. Checking, re-checking and addition of footnotes continued thereafter. This work has surpassed much of the parameters of revision I had set for this work at the beginning. This time the translation was also emailed in parts to over 70 Islamic scholars, professors and experts around the world for their corrections and suggestions to improve the work.

Due to a thorough revision and insertion of new footnotes, this translation is now hardly a “revision” of AYA’s original work. Such a thorough revision was not my intention at the outset. Hence, this translation may be treated as a new work though it started as a revision of AYA’s work which remains a pioneering work.

Soon we will try to get this work translated into some other languages so that the footnotes and the appendices are available to people who do not read English.

Concise explanatory words have been inserted in the translated text within the printer’s [square] brackets while more extensive explanations have been placed in the footnotes, which do not contain academic or polemic discussion. They aim only to explain terms, difficult words and the timing of a revelation where relevant, rules derived from an āyah, if any, and to give the reader context about events, historical personalities, places, ancient communities and prophets mentioned in the Qur’ān.

In the Introduction light has been shed objectively on the history and contents of the Glorious Qur’ān. Appendix A has a short biography of the Prophet of Islām (pbuh) based on original sources. In Appendix B, the 99 names/attributes of Allāh have been mentioned indicating their meanings and the āyah where a certain name/attribute first occurred in the holy text and has been explained there in a footnote. Names of all prophets mentioned in the Qur’ān are collected in Appendix C while a short note about each Prophet has been placed in a footnote where the name of that particular Prophet occurs for the first time in the Qur’ān.

Where two or more meanings of a word or āyah are possible, the one most plausible in the light of the context and the totality of the Message of the Qur’ān has been adopted while the other meaning(s) have been explained in footnotes.

I have avoided discussion of linguistic or grammar issues since these will not interest non-Arabic-speaking readers. Instead, the most appropriate English word has been chosen to convey the meaning and where this was not possible, the term has been explained in a footnote.

I have also avoided discussion about meagre differences in how to recite a certain word or part of an āyah. Tafsīr books are replete with such discussions about minute differences among reciters of Madīnah, Kūfah and Baṣrah etc. Such discussions are mostly semantic or related to Arabic dialects and rarely convey a different meaning of the divine text.

Footnotes in this work aim at facilitating an ordinary Muslim or non-Muslim reader to understand the meanings and contexts of āyahs. An effort has been made to avoid “academic” or comparative comments that would confuse an ordinary reader.

Apart from AYA’s, I have not consulted for this work any other translation of the Holy Book in any language. Moreover, I have consulted only basic and primary Arabic works of Tafsīr and Ḥadīth and only basic Arabic dictionaries to ascertain the meanings and contexts of words, terms and āyahs.

I did not seek at any point, before starting this work or while doing it, to prove any preconceived ideas or ideology or philosophy. My attempt has been only to understand and present the divine text as is obvious from the words and context and as it was understood by the earliest scholars of Islām.

In the case of some Arabic words, especially as regards the attributes of Allāh where translation is not possible by a single word, I have joined several words with hyphens.

It is not possible for most ordinary non-Arabic-speaking Muslims and for non-Muslims in general to read the Qur’ān in Arabic. This is why the earliest generations took care to translate the Qur’ān into Persian. There are fatwās allowing non-Arab Muslims to recite the Qur’ānic verses’ translation even in Persian, a duty forgotten by later generations. Meanwhile non-Muslims translated the Qur’ān into European languages starting with Latin and other languages like French and English, etc. The earliest translations were not to discover the Message of Islām but to be able to criticise it and defame the Prophet.

Muslims started translating the Qur’ān into other languages only in the last two centuries or so. As a result, now we have translations in all of the world’s leading languages, especially Persian, English and Urdu.

There are hundreds of Tafsīr (exegesis) works in Arabic, written from the earliest times to the present day. For this translation, we have chosen the most authentic and trusted earliest Tafsīrs like those of al-Ṭabarī, Ibn Kathīr, al-Zamakhsharī and al-Qurṭubī and Aḥkām al-Qur’ān of Al-Jaṣṣāṣ, to understand difficult passages, while Aṣfahānī’s Mufradāt and Ibn Manẓūr’s Lisān al-‘Arab, as well as Lane’s Lexicon have been consulted to determine the meanings of difficult words and terms. To understand and quote events related to the Prophet’s life, Ibn Hisham’s al-Sīrah al-Nabawīyyah, al-Wāqidī’s al-Maghāzī and Ibn Sa‘d’s Ṭabaqāt, among others, have been consulted.

This new translation and the explanations offered in the footnotes are an attempt to present the divine text as it was understood by Islām’s earliest generations. This has been done using simple words and a modern style. This translation does not offer any ideological or philosophical interpretations of the divine text. This is why only the earliest and basic Arabic works of Tafsīr (exegesis), Ḥadīth and Sunnah have been consulted to understand the meanings of words, terms and the reasons for a particular revelation while contending that any given āyah is not concerned with only a certain historical context but it has an eternal meaning applicable to similar situations until the last day of human life on earth.

The footnotes do not offer any comparative study by including Jewish and Christian perspectives and various Islamic narratives. I have attempted to put across how the divine text was understood and interpreted by the earliest Islamic exegetes, scholars and generations. I believe that any Qur’ānic and Islamic narrative that is not firmly rooted in the understanding of the holy text by the earliest Muslim generations is not genuine.

In the English translation, I have preferred the Arabic or Islamic names of the prophets, communities, people and places and have mentioned their Biblical/Christian equivalents at the time of their first occurrence in the Qur’ānic text. Also, at the same place, I have offered a short account about the said personality, place, community or event in a footnote to help the reader understand the context, time and place.

In the footnotes, I have highlighted some scientific facts mentioned in the Qur’ān. It should be clear that the Qur’ān is not a book of science. It is a book of guidance for humanity but since it has a divine source, it mentions in passing some scientific facts for future generations to ponder and realise the greatness of the Creator.

I have referred to some “scientific” matters in the Qur’ān in the Introduction with the understanding that the Qur’ānic text is final and unchanging while scientific “facts” and themes keep changing and evolving as they are only attempts in a particular time to understand and interpret the phenomena and realities of the universe. Scientific explanations and theories change but the phenomena they deal with remain. It is our belief that coming generations will continue to discover more and more scientific indications in the Qur’ān that we are not able to fathom at present due to our limitations.

A Muslim is one who submits himself or herself fully to Allāh and His commands as communicated to us through His last revealed book, The Qur’ān, and who believes in Prophet Muḥammad (pbuh) as Allāh’s last Messenger. This submission is required of Muslims on both an individual as well as a collective level.

Individually, every Muslim has to live according to Allāh’s directions. This includes offering prayers at the appointed times five times a day, preferably in congregation; paying annual Zakāt (the poor due); undertaking pilgrimage (Ḥaj) once in a life-time if physically fit and financially sound; and observing fast (ṣawm) during the month of Ramaḍān if physically able.

A Muslim should also take care of relatives and neighbours as well as other poor and needy people including non-Muslims in his society. The limit for spending has been defined as what is remaining (al-‘Afw) after meeting one’s legitimate needs (2:219). One should also take an interest in community and society affairs, doing ’amr bi’l-ma‘rūf and nahy ‘an al-munkar (enjoining good and prohibiting the abominable – 3:110). In his or her private life, every Muslim must be truthful, trustworthy and caring. It means that Muslim-majority communities must run their collective affairs in submission to Allāh’s commands.

A Muslim society, as a rule, must be caring and supportive of its needy members. Collectively, if Muslims’ numbers and standing in any country permit, they must implement the divine laws in their society taking due care of the civilian and religious rights of non-Muslims who must be treated with respect and left free to practise their faiths as they interpret them.

The shape of an Islamic polity has not been defined. It may be a caliphate or an emirate or a kingship or a republic but in all types of governance, Muslim rulers must submit to the divine rules in their private lives before demanding that the general population obey them in public. In an Islamic state, there cannot be a dichotomy in which rulers have one set of rules for themselves while the people have another. Legislatures have to be guided by the general rules of Sharī‘ah while promulgating laws. While doing this, they will be guided by the higher aims and objects of the Sharī‘ah (Maqāṣid al-Sharī‘ah), taking the larger interests of the Muslim and wider communities into consideration as well as the prevailing international conventions.

Muslims living as minorities are no less Muslims than those living as majorities. Prophet Yūsuf not only lived under a non-Muslim ruler in ancient Egypt but even asked to be entrusted with a responsibility that amounts to the status of the minister of food and supplies in present times.

Living as minorities is not an aberration in Islām. After all, during the Makkan and most of the Madīnan period, Muslims were in a minority. They migrated twice to Abyssinia and lived there as a minority. In Madīnah, Muslims were a minority until the Conquest of Makkah two years before the Prophet’s death in 632 CE.

Early Muslims lived as minorities in Spain and Sicily after their fall into non-Muslim hands. In the present times, as a result of globalisation, Muslims live as minorities in almost every country in the world besides the 58 “Islamic” countries in Asia, Africa and Europe, that are members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.

Wherever they are, Muslims must live according to Islām’s divine rules as much as they can while being patriotic citizens of their countries. They will not be answerable for the Islamic rules that they cannot implement in their private or public lives. Muslims must be faithful to their countries and honour the common compact binding their societies. This is to honour the covenant or compact we enter into as citizens or even as visitors to a country.

It is my duty to acknowledge here with gratitude my late colleague Mohammad Zeyaul Haque who proof-read and edited the translation up to the āyah 6:52 before he was snatched away from us by Covid-19.

My wife Ḥabība and daughters ‘Aisha, Aamena and Aaliya and son Māzin read parts of the work and offered valuable suggestions that improved the text.

My colleague Ṣadāqat Ḥusain has helped me with basic research all these years during the slow progress of this work since 2011; Salman Naqvi diligently checked the insertion on the computer copy of the corrections of the first proof; Mahboob Khan did the typographical work and my son Māzin did the meticulous work to embellish the designing and final outcome of this edition.

My thanks are due to all the scholars who offered valuable suggestions upon receiving my emails over an extended period during 2020-21, especially Mr ‘Abdullāh Ṭāriq of Rāmpūr, an accomplished scholar of Islām in the modern and interfaith contexts, who took his time to reply in detail to a number of my questions regarding issues in the present-day context. I am also thankful to Mr Kaleemullah Khan (Srinagar) and to Mr Anis Luqman (UAE) whose observations led to corrections of typos and improvement of the text.

Finally: my life’s work is done with this effort though, sorrowfully, it comes at a very late stage of my life after squandering my best years in umpteen, mostly less important, pursuits. In this I take solace in the example of a great predecessor from my native Azamgarh, ‘Allāma Shiblī Nu‘mānī, who paid attention only towards the end of his life to his unique contribution to Islamic literature, Sīrat al-Nabī.

Zafarul-Islam Khan

zik@zik.in

New Delhi

17 Ṣafar 1432 — 22 Ramaḍān 1444

21 January 2011 — 14 April 2023

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