Muhammad Mahmoud Ghali

Muhammad Mahmoud Ghali’s Towards Understanding the Ever-Glorious Qur’an (first published 1997) is the work of a professional linguist, and its character reflects that training above all. Ghali sets out to honor fine distinctions the Arabic makes—rendering near-synonyms with different English words and preserving grammatical features such as shifts in number, person and tense—rather than smoothing them into idiomatic uniformity. The English is consequently careful and technical, sometimes at the expense of fluency, the aim being precision and faithfulness to the structure of the original.

Ghali (1920–2016) was professor of linguistics and Islamic studies at Al-Azhar University in Cairo and founder of its Faculty of Languages and Translation. He studied phonetics in Britain and earned a doctorate in phonetics in the United States, and he devoted some two decades to the translation. His related study of synonyms in the Qur’an rested on the conviction that lexical nuances in Arabic ought to be carried over into the target language. This work is distinct from the committee-produced Al-Muntakhab.

Reviewers note its scholarly attention to linguistic detail as its principal strength; the main caution is that the same precision can make the prose feel stiff or unidiomatic for general readers seeking a smooth reading text.