Charles Ramsey: ‘To make English itself an Islamic Language’: Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s The Holy Qur’ān

Charles Ramsey (Baylor University): ‘To make English itself an Islamic Language’: Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s The Holy Qur’ān: Text, Translation, and Commentary.

From among the English translations of the Qur’ān prepared from South Asia, none has gained such wide usage and lasting appeal in the practice of daʿwa as that of Abdullah Yusuf Ali (1872-1953). He succeeded in rendering a dynamic equivalence of the message within stylistic bounds that honored traditional Muslim expectations and yet was appealing to a modern audience. The secret of his was, as I argue, that Yusuf Ali sought not only to provide the meaning of the Qur’ān to a curious audience, but rather to bring the reader into the experience of the Qur’ān so as ‘to make English itself an Islamic language’.

The talk was part of the in-person workshop "Da'wa and Qur'an translation in the first decades of the 20th century", organized by GloQur: The Global Qur'an, at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, June 21-22, 2022.