The Great Tiding: An Annotated Translation of the Thirtieth Part of the Qur'an (Mahmoud Ayoub)

The Great Tiding is an annotated English translation of Juz' Amma, the last part of the Qur'an, together with al-Fatiha, by Mahmoud Ayoub, published by the Islamic Call Society of Tripoli, Libya, in 1983. ¹

Ayoub (1935–2021) was born in South Lebanon into a practising Shia family; blind, he attended a school for blind children run by British missionaries and became a Christian missionary in youth, returned to Islam during his studies, earned a Harvard doctorate in 1975 and became professor of Islamic studies at Temple University. ¹

Libya founded the Islamic Call Society in Tripoli in 1972 to publish multilingual Qur'an translations; it commissioned Ayoub to translate Juz' Amma, whose suras are so often recited in prayer. ¹ In 1997 Ayoub self-published a second edition in Iowa with small corrections and a new title, The Awesome News. ¹

It is bilingual, with a general introduction, an introduction to each sura and footnotes; Ayoub called it "a textbook" meant to give direct access to the Qur'an's meaning. ¹ Its English is modern, clear and elegant, and its commentary rests on the classical tafsir tradition, setting out its range of opinions without claiming certainty; Johanna Pink finds it drawn largely from Sunni commentaries with no discernible Shia leanings. ¹

Pink sees it as an attempt to continue madrasa-style tafsir in English, which seems not to have met a wide response; Ayoub never extended it beyond Juz' Amma. ¹

• Johanna Pink, "Qur'an translation of the week #164", The Global Qur'an, 2023. ¹