The Qur’an
It is difficult to start learning about a religion by reading its holy scripture. Imagine if you knew nothing about Christianity and just started reading the Bible at the beginning, page after page after page. Without guidance from a human teacher, it would be hard to know what of the Bible is truly central to Christianity as a living tradition and what gets less attention. (Though one could make one’s guesses about the begats … )
The organization of the Qur’an makes it even more challenging to read. Its 114 suras, or chapters, were revealed to Muhammad over the span of 22 years. They are typically published roughly in order of length, with the longest suras first and the shortest last. The exception is the first sura, which is quite short. As a general rule, the shorter suras were revealed earlier in Muhammad’s life, deal with fundamental theological and cosmological issues, and are quite poetic. The longer suras generally came later, when Muhammad was the religious, political, economic, and military leader of the Muslim community, and they often address specific questions and dilemmas of that community. So if you start reading the Qur’an at the beginning, it’s sort of like first encountering the Bible by reading Paul’s letters. You’ll learn a lot about the issues confronting a particular community at a particular time, but it’s hard to get the big picture.
If you want to read the Qur’an, therefore, I recommend starting with Michael Sells’ Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations (1999). Sells is a professor of religion at Haverford College. This book addresses only the shorter/earlier suras, and it talks about their historical and cultural context, their language, and their poetic symbolism. It also includes free MP3 downloads (a physical CD in earlier printings) of professional recitations of various parts of the Qur’an, so you can hear what it sounds like – which is important, given how much the Qur’an is an oral tradition. (The word “Qur’an” is typically translated as “recitation,” and many Muslims feel the text is intended to be spoken more than read.)
If you want to read the whole Qur’an, there are now many English translations to choose from. It is impossible to translate any text without losing some of the meanings and connotations of the original text and allowing one’s own beliefs and assumptions to shape the translation. Indeed, for many years Muslim tradition discouraged translation of the Qur’an. God revealed it in Arabic, and humans were not to alter this revelation by changing its language. Only about eighteen percent of modern Muslims speak Arabic, however, and many more of them are literate now than a hundred years ago. In the twentieth century, therefore, the Qur’an began to be widely translated into languages other than Arabic.
There are now many English translations and I have not looked at all of them. Of those I am familiar with, however, I have found two particularly helpful.
N.J. Dawood’s 1956 translation, The Koran with Parallel Arabic Text, is published by Penguin Books in its Penguin Classics series. I find it the most readable and accessible of the translations I’ve encountered. Dawood turned the text into prose, which is a bit of a shame for the early suras, but makes the later ones much more comprehensible.
’Abdullah Yūsuf ’Ali’s translation, The Meanings of the Holy Qur’an (10th edition 1999), was originally published in 1934 and is one of the earlier English translations. I find it useful because it offers a strict line-by-line translation, side by side with the Arabic, that I often find illuminating when I am trying to understand a passage that seems murky to me. I am usually able to pick apart the Arabic typography well enough to use a dictionary, which can also be helpful. I wouldn’t start with ’Ali, though, or use it as the only translation I’m paying attention to. Among other things, his King James Bible English is archaic. ’Ali also provides lots of commentary on the text, which is often thought-provoking, but I don’t consider it necessarily authoritative. Sometimes ’Ali states as true and universal opinion things that I know from other sources are a matter of disagreement among Muslims.
If you want to know more about the history of the Qur’an and its roles in Muslim people’s lives, I highly recommend Ingrid Mattson’s The Story of the Qur’an: Its History and Place in Muslim Life (2008). Mattson is the director of Hartford Seminary’s Macdonald Center for Islamic Studies and Christian-Muslim Relations and a former president of the Islamic Society of North America. The Story of the Qur’an is the best single source I have found for understanding the early history of the Qur’an as an oral tradition and written document, its transmittal through the centuries, various traditions of interpretation, and the many roles the Qur’an plays in the lives of Muslim people, past and present.