Muhammad Taqi Usmani

Muhammad Taqi Usmani’s The Noble Qur’an: Meaning with Explanatory Notes (2007) is a faithful, text-anchored rendering paired with concise notes that aim to make the meaning accessible to the ordinary reader. It hews closely to the Arabic while supplying short introductions to many surahs and explanatory footnotes that clarify references, legal points, and difficult passages. The commentary draws heavily on the Deobandi tradition—especially the well-known Urdu Ma’ariful Qur’an—though Usmani substantially reworked the underlying translation to bring it nearer the wording of the original.

Usmani (b. 1943) is among the most influential Hanafi jurists of his generation. Trained in the Deobandi school and long associated with Dar al-Ulum in Karachi, he served as a judge on the Shariah Appellate Bench of the Supreme Court of Pakistan and is a recognized authority on Islamic finance and law. His two-volume translation was first issued in Karachi; a later British-English edition appeared from a London publisher with revised typesetting.

The work is widely respected for its accuracy and the restraint of its notes, which favor traditional Hanafi scholarship; readers seeking a broader interpretive range may wish to consult it alongside other renderings.