The Qur’an: A Verse Translation

By M.A.H. Habib & Bruce B. Lawrence

Liveright 2024

Liveright has produced a stylishly designed new edition of the Koran that it describes as “a monumental feat of translation.” The translators are M.A.R. Habib, an English professor at Rutgers University, and Bruce Lawrence, a religion professor at Duke University, and although it’s unsigned and uncredited, one can presume they wrote the Introduction and “About This Translation” prefatory material readers typically find in monumental feats of translation these days, the kind of things that are also featured in other modern Koran translations by the likes of M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, Tarif Khalidi, and N. J. Dawood. The book has all the appurtenances of a work of scholarship, including footnotes, endnotes, and a glossary. 

But it’s not what it appears, and the cracks show up immediately. The aforementioned Introduction starts with “In the cave of Hira on the outskirts of the Arabian city of Mecca, the Prophet Muhammad is said to have received his first revelation.” 

Yes, that is “said” – by the faithful. It isn’t “said” by anybody else, and in any case, what’s it doing in a monumental feat of translation? Imagine opening a new translation of the New Testament from a secular publisher and finding an opening line like “In first-century Judea, some disciples of Jesus Christ the Messiah are said to have recorded His revelations.” At the very least, someone reading that would know that the translation they’re about to read prioritizes faith over fidelity to the text in question. They’d know they were reading a devotional exercise aimed at religious believers who want their reading path artificially smoothed over, not a new scholarly version of some ancient text.

Since no kind of precognition has ever been materially verified, Muhammad was not a “prophet,” because “prophets” don’t exist. Since no supernatural beings have ever been materially verified, Muhammad did not have decades of discussions with the Archangel Gabriel in the cave of Hira, because angels don’t exist. Since therefore Muhammad (in the long-odds event he himself existed) did not receive the Koran from an angel, the Koran itself is not, as this volume’s uncredited Introduction repeatedly states and quotes others stating, “more” than just a book, recounting more than merely human matter. “These revelatory experiences,” that Introduction goes on, speaking of Muhammad, “raised him from a humble shepherd and a trader to the rank not only of prophet, but of statesman, military strategist, ruler, and, above all, a model of conduct for millions of human beings across the globe.” 

Even readers who are reeling from reading such gummy nonsense in the introduction to an ostensibly scholarly work will nevertheless start to recognize it, particularly that reference to Muhammad being “a model of conduct.” Muslim proselytizing regularly cites Muhammad as the perfect man, the epitome of all human behavior. If Habib and Lawrence wrote this uncredited Introduction, and if they aren’t simply proselytizing, they’d be citing such a claim rather than making it, but just a bit later we get this:

From the age of fifty until fifty-two [Muhammad] remained unmarried. Thereafter, between the ages of fifty-three and sixty, he married ten women, primarily for political reasons. For example, he married A’isha and Hafsa, daughters respectively of the influential leaders Abu Bakr and Umar. He also married a Jewish woman, Rehana, to form ties with the tribe of Bani Qurayza, as well as a Christian woman, Maryam …

The string of names goes on, all clearly meant to huddle under the “primarily for political reasons” umbrella. If this is preaching instead of teaching, the technique will deliberately conceal things in order to smooth the beliefs of the faithful. Does it? Yes: in Muslim mythology, Abu Bakr was not a political ally when Muhammad married his six-year-old daughter A’isha, and if there’s any imaginable “political reason” for Muhammad to then rape her when she was nine, Habib and Lawrence don’t mention it – they just shuffle A’isha into a crowd of names. 

Habib and Lawrence occasionally use the kind of language readers might hear from other translators of ancient texts. They inform their readers that their intention is “to make our English rendering of the Qur’an as readable and accessible as possible.” But they also write things like, “The Qu’ran (meaning ‘recitation’) was revealed to the Prophet by the Archangel Gabriel over a period of twenty-three years (610-632). Its Arabic text has survived unchanged for over fourteen centuries …” – which are faith claims. They write things like “Much more than a conventional book, the Qur’an is the expression of God’s spoken message” – which is a faith claim. They write things like “One might say that God reveals Himself through the Qur’an” – which is a faith claim.

As noted, this volume’s Introduction hopes the translation here is readable and accessible. It might be both, but who cares? For the presumably large number of readers who’ll come to this version of the Koran with no Arabic, readability and accessibility are surely secondary to trustworthiness. If Habib and Lawrence are basing their translation on the Koran being the perfect, unchanging, and divinely-dictated work of the Archangel Gabriel, if they’re simply telling their readers that these completely unverifiable claims are their starting point, they obviously can’t be trusted as translators by secular readers.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News