Mustafa Khattab 2018

Mustafa Khattab’s The Clear Quran aims, as its title suggests, at clarity above all: a contemporary, accessible English that reads smoothly while staying close to the sense of the Arabic. It is lightly apparatus-ed—short footnotes supply historical context and explanation where needed, and verses are gathered under thematic section headings that help the reader follow the internal coherence of each surah. The result is interpretive in tone but restrained, intended for a broad modern readership rather than for specialists.

Khattab is a Canadian-Egyptian scholar who earned his degrees in Islamic Studies in English at al-Azhar University’s Faculty of Languages and Translation, where he later lectured. His translation, first published in 2018, was approved by al-Azhar and endorsed by Canadian Muslim bodies, and it has been widely adopted—becoming, among other things, a default English text on a major Quran website.

It is generally praised for its readability and flow; some readers note that its smooth phrasing, like that of other interpretive renderings, can resolve ambiguities the Arabic leaves open.