New Translation of Qur’an

Penguin Classics have just published a new translation of the Qur’an by the scholar Tarif Khalidi. The Times Literary Supplement hailed it as ‘A landmark in the history of English translations of the Quran’.

Tarif Khalidi is Sir Thomas Adam’s Professor of Arabic at Cambridge University (the oldest chair of Arabic in the English-speaking world), and also Director of the Centre for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the same university.

In his Introduction he says the following about the history of the Qur’anic text. I have put some significant statements in bold.

‘So far as one can determine its general contours, early Muslim scholarship on the Qur’an emanated from circles close to the Prophet Muhammad (c. 570-632) and involved, in its beginnings, the collection and preservation of revelation. For the first twenty or so years of its existence, copies of the Qur’an, in whole or in part, were in possession of venerable collectors dispersed by the Muslim conquests in the diverse regions of the new empire. Because of this dispersal and subsequent political and ideological alignments we possess several contrasting, sometimes conflicting, accounts of the Qur’an’s earliest history. Eventually a dominant narrative emerged which held that a committee appointed by the third caliph ‘Uthman (r. 644-56) assembled one definitive copy of the text, disseminated it in the major urban centres of the new empire and ordered all other copies destroyed.

This master narrative holds that the caliph’s edict caused a great deal of distress to possessors of private or family copies of the pre-’Uthmanic text was indeed one of the causes of the rebellion which ended in the caliph’s murder in 656. Nevertheless, Muslim scholarship has preserved examples, in the form of lists, of the variant readings of these early texts. In almost all cases, however, such readings concern very minor variations in grammar or dialect and add nothing of substance to the ‘Uthmanic text, the one that is in our hands today. This narrative has not gone unchallenged in both Muslim and non-Muslim circles, but it has withstood the test of time and of recent and dramatic epigraphic and textual discoveries. The result is that Islam has possessed a definitive sacred text from a very early point in its history. There are simply no ‘apocrypha’ where the Qur’an is concerned. We can therefore be confident that what we possess today is in all essential respects the Qur’an that Muslim narrative tells us was circulated by caliphal fiat somewhere around the year 650. Numerous historical problems remain, but these need not concern a reader who wishes to encounter the text directly, with minimal contextual demands.’

(ppxii-xiii)