Bijan Moeinian

Bijan Moeinian’s An Easy to Understand Translation of the Qur’an is, as its title promises, a frankly simplified and paraphrastic rendering. Moeinian set out to break with what he regarded as the “Shakespearean” English of older translations, replacing it with everyday modern prose aimed at the general reader. The result reads less like a close mirror of the Arabic than like an explanatory retelling: sentences are recast for plain comprehension, implied meaning is often spelled out within the text, and the apparatus is kept light. The priority is accessibility rather than word-for-word fidelity.

Moeinian, an Iranian-American author who also published in other fields, conceived the work as a first attempt to make the Qur’an genuinely available to a broad lay audience. The volume runs to several hundred pages and has appeared through print-on-demand and digital channels, with later editions issued under a slightly revised title.

The translation is widely included in online comparison sites, where its conversational clarity stands out against more formal versions. The corresponding caution is the one that attends any paraphrase: in smoothing the text for easy reading, it commits to interpretive choices and loses some of the precision and ambiguity of the original.