Faridul Haque

The English version associated with Professor Shah Faridul Haque is, importantly, a rendering of an Urdu translation rather than a direct translation from the Arabic. Its source is the celebrated Kanzul Iman, the Urdu Qur’an of Ahmed Raza Khan, the founder of the Barelvi movement; Faridul Haque carried that Urdu text into English. The character of the result is correspondingly formal and devotional, leaning toward an archaic, reverential diction and reflecting the doctrinal sensibilities of its Barelvi origin. Because two layers of translation stand between the reader and the Arabic, distinctive interpretive choices already present in Kanzul Iman are preserved and passed on, so the work is best read as a window onto that particular tradition of understanding rather than as an independent reading of the original.

Faridul Haque completed the English version around 1981, and it found a wide readership among adherents of the Ahl al-Sunnah wa’l-Jama’ah current both in South Asia and in diaspora communities in Europe and North America.

Within that community it is prized for its piety and faithfulness to Ahmed Raza Khan; critics outside it note the elevated, dated English and the inevitable distance introduced by translating a translation.