The Qur'an: The First American Version

The Qur'an: The First American Version is an English rendering of the meanings of the Qur'an published in 1985 by T. B. Irving, also known as al-Hajj Ta'lim Ali; it was the first Qur'an translation in American English. ¹

Irving (1914–2002) was born in Ontario, educated in Canada and the United States, and became Muslim in the 1950s; in 1968 he published a thematically arranged selection of translated passages with a publisher in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. ¹

After discriminatory immigration quotas were abolished in 1966, many Muslims came to the United States from the Middle East and South Asia, most of them students and professionals; a readership for Islamic books in English formed, and Islamic publishers were founded from the early 1970s, especially in Chicago and on the East Coast. ¹ Between the late 1970s and the mid-1980s the first two original translations by Muslims to drop the King James style were published there: Hilali–Khan in 1977, and then Irving's. ¹

Irving wrote in his introduction that his readers were second- and third-generation North American Muslims who knew no Arabic and had no traditional Islamic education, and non-Muslims seeking a fair picture of Islam, and that none of the existing translations, those of Abdullah Yusuf Ali and Pickthall among them, suited them. ¹ He aimed at a plain translation children could understand, in a language shaped by Muslims on their own terms, and the result is succinct and fluent, with few explanatory additions. ¹

Donors included Canadian Muslims and others in Qatar and the Gulf, above all the Aossey brothers of Cedar Rapids, one of the first Muslim families in Iowa, who helped build the Mother Mosque of America, completed in 1934, and some of whom founded the Midamar halal food company in 1974. ¹ The translation was reprinted several times in the 1990s and 2000s, including by India's Goodword Foundation. ¹

Johanna Pink judges that it was at first more successful in America than Hilali–Khan, though less widespread than Yusuf Ali's, and that its significance lies in marking the rise of an American Islamic publishing industry. ¹

• Johanna Pink, "Qur'an translation of the week #188", The Global Qur'an, 2024. ¹