Amatul Rahman Omar

Amatul Rahman Omar’s The Holy Qur’an is usually identified as the first complete English rendering of the text by a woman. In character it is plain, literal and unencumbered: the translators kept the wording close to the Arabic and deliberately avoided the dense footnoting found in many scholarly editions, so that the English reads as a continuous, accessible text. The vocabulary is sober and largely free of archaism, and the rendering leans toward a rationalist reading of the Qur’an, preferring naturalistic interpretations where the Arabic allows them.

The work grew out of the exegetical tradition of Maulana Nooruddin, a scholar associated with the Lahore Ahmadiyya movement. His son, Abdul Mannan Omar — a lexicographer who spent decades editing Islamic reference works — collaborated with his wife Amatul Rahman Omar on the translation, drawing on Nooruddin’s notes and on classical Arabic lexicons and pre-Islamic poetry to recover root meanings. A trained teacher of Arabic and English, she completed the final revision in 1990, only days before her death.

The translation circulates widely online and through the family’s Noor Foundation editions. Readers value its clarity and its avoidance of sectarian polemic, while critics note that its rationalist and Ahmadiyya-influenced choices at certain verses depart from mainstream Sunni readings.