Thus we get “And naught prevents men from believing when guidance comes unto them, and from seeking forgiveness of their Lord, save that the wont of those of old to come upon them, or the punishment to come upon them face-to-face” (18:55 the bracketed insertion is the translators’). It is dangerous to use an archaizing style unless you are a master of prose in a way that these translators are not. The translators try to give the work an archaic flavor that tries to do justice to the grandeur of the original but does not succeed. To turn to the translation: for the most part it is clear, though the English is far from impressive. So I will restrict my comments to the extent that this edition succeeds in presenting the Qur’an to a general reader in the English-speaking world. In addition to Nasr’s introduction, there is a full set of verse-by-verse annotations on the text, along with essays on such subjects as the Qur’an’s influence on art, science, and Islamic law, as well as its views on other religions, ethics and human rights, war, and death and the afterlife.Īs a reviewer, I am limited in being neither a scholar of Islam nor an Arabic speaker. It would also exclude “modernistic or fundamentalist interpretations that have appeared in parts of the Islamic world during the past two centuries.” do not accept it as the Word of God” (emphasis Nasr’s). it would not be determined or guided by assertions presented by non-Muslim Western scholars and orientalists who.

He agreed on the condition that “this would be a Muslim effort and that. Several years ago the publisher of Harper One approached Nasr and asked him to compile a new study edition of the Qur’an.

As the Iranian scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr says in his introduction to this new translation, although the Prophet Muhammad was the instrument through which this text was revealed, “its Author is God.” In Muslim belief, the very sound of the words of the text - in the original Arabic and only in the original Arabic - is a divine transmission. The Qur’an (or Koran, or, in this edition, Quran), as is well known, is the holy book of Islam.

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