Muhammad Abdel-Haleem

Abdel-Haleem memorised the Qur'an as a boy in Egypt, trained at al-Azhar and then at Cambridge, and taught Islamic studies in London for decades. His English version, published by Oxford in 2004, is the one usually handed to a reader who has never opened the book before: he set it in paragraphs rather than numbered verses on separate lines, moved the historical context into footnotes instead of brackets inside the text, and wrote plain modern English in place of the archaic register earlier translators reached for. He describes the result as an interpretation of the meaning rather than as the Qur'an itself, which is the traditional Muslim position on any translation. He edits a journal of Qur'anic studies and holds an OBE.