Qur’an Interpretation by Laleh Bakhtiar

This is the first edition of the Qur’an translated by an American woman. Dr. Laleh Bakhtiar has translated the original Arabic into clear English that emphasizes the universal message of the Qur’an. For example she translates ‘Allah’ as ‘God’ in the same way that ‘God’ would be translated as ‘Allah’ for Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Arabic speaking world. A customer review says the following:

“Encountering this translation represented a real personal breakthrough for me regarding Islam, or at least any kind of Islam one approaches through an English approximation of the Quran. The translator’s internal consistency and attempted avoiding of subjective interpretation worked well for me: and as I read more and more, what normally strikes the English only reader as disjointed and theologically fragmented in translations of the Quran gave way to a kind of majesty, a kind of excitement (and unique sadness) I’d never encountered before in any other translation. I felt that at last I’d received a tiny glimpse of what the Quran means, or at least what it could mean, on a very personal, psychological level.”