Talal Itani (2012)

Talal Itani’s Quran in English—widely known as ClearQuran and subtitled to indicate it is clear and easy to read “for ages 9 to 99”—is among the plainest modern English renderings available. Itani deliberately stripped away the apparatus that fills many translations: there are no footnotes, no parenthetical glosses, and no interpretive commentary. Sentences are short, the vocabulary is everyday, and the flow is smooth, with the explicit goal of producing a text a child or a non-specialist adult can read straight through. The trade-off is openly accepted: nuance and ambiguity in the Arabic are resolved into simple statements rather than preserved.

Itani (born 1961 in Beirut) is a Lebanese-American electrical engineer who emigrated to the United States in his late teens. He first encountered the Qur’an in the early 1990s and, after years of study, published this translation in 2012, distributing it freely in print and digital form.

The translation is popular for outreach and first-time readers and is praised for accessibility. Its simplicity is also its main limitation: the absence of notes leaves interpretive choices unexplained, and the smooth phrasing can flatten the original’s complexity.