Recently Published : English Translation of The Qur'an by Tarif Khalidi

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Tarif Khalidi, the Sheikh Zayed Chair in Islamic and Arabic Studies at AUB, recently published an English translation of The Qur'an (Penguin Classics, May 2008).

Khalidi's translation of the Qur'an is a unique addition to previous translations due to three main highlights. Khalidi resolves the issue of whether the Qur'an was revealed to Prophet Muhammad in five verses at a time on the one hand, or "in instalments' of three, four, or five verses at a time according to need," on the other. Khalidi divides his translation into paragraphs hoping "to highlight the pericopes upon which the text is built," writes Khalidi in his introduction to the translation.

Another issue he tackles is the many voices in which the Qur'an addresses its readers. While the Qur'anic verses shift "from narrative to exhortation, from homily to hymn of praise, from strict law to tender sermon, from fear and trembling to invitation to reflections," Khalidi resolves to distinguish the verses by giving them two different looks: horizontal and vertical. The horizontal display of the verses is dedicated to the narrative and legislative content of the Qur'an, while the vertical contains the verses of "dramatic" nature which are arranged in "a vertical poetic" fashion.

Finally, concerning the issue of the style of language a translator of the Qur'an chooses, Khalidi strikes a balance between "the familiarly modern and the alienating archaic, while preferring at all times as literal a rendering as possible," yet finding it painful to know that the "cadence of the Arabic could never be reproduced."