N J Dawood 2014

N. J. Dawood’s The Koran, first published by Penguin in 1956 and reissued in revised printings including 2014, is a readable, literary translation in modern English. Dawood deliberately avoided the archaic, King-James register common in earlier renderings, aiming for natural contemporary prose accessible to the general reader. The earliest editions also rearranged the suras into a roughly chronological order, in the manner of biblical anthologies; later printings restored the traditional canonical sequence.

Dawood (1927–2014) was an Iraqi-Jewish writer and translator who came to England in 1945 and studied English literature and classical Arabic in London. His version—the first translation of the Qur’an into genuinely contemporary English—sold over a million copies and became a standard general-readership edition. It is a secular, literary undertaking by a non-Muslim translator rather than a work of devotional scholarship.

Reviewers value its fluency and readability; the principal caution is that its literary, non-confessional approach—and historically its reordering of the suras—departs from how Muslim readers approach the text.