George Sale

George Sale’s The Koran (1734) was the first major scholarly English translation made directly from the Arabic, and it set the terms for English readings of the text for the better part of a century. Its register is dignified and now distinctly archaic eighteenth-century prose, supported by a substantial apparatus of explanatory notes drawn from Muslim commentators, especially al-Baydawi. The work is most famous for its long ‘‘Preliminary Discourse,’’ an extended essay surveying the history, doctrines and practices of Islam that served as a primary reference on the subject in Georgian Britain. Sale leaned heavily on Ludovico Marracci’s earlier Latin version of 1698, even as he criticised its polemical refutations and worked to produce a more measured rendering.

Sale was an English lawyer and orientalist, a non-Muslim writing for a Christian readership, yet he aimed at a relatively even-handed presentation that impressed later figures such as Gibbon and Voltaire.

The translation is remembered as a genuine landmark in Qur’anic studies; modern readers note that its scholarship is dated and its assumptions those of its era, but its care and its influence on subsequent English versions are not in dispute.