Bewildered Rhapsodies

‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph and conqueror of Jerusalem, was initially one of the prophet Muhammad’s fiercest enemies. According to early Muslim historians, ‘Umar was an exemplary pagan Arab: physically imposing, short-tempered, and somewhat sentimental, he was a lover of gambling, wine, and poetry. His conversion occurred in 616, three years after Muhammad began preaching to the polytheists of Mecca. One night, the story goes, ‘Umar was looking for drinking companions when he came across the prophet at prayer near the square shrine of the Kaaba (then a site of pagan pilgrimage). ‘Umar slipped under the great cube’s black covering and listened. Hearing the words of the Qur’an for the first time, he later reported, “My heart softened, I wept, and then Islam entered me.”

‘Umar’s experience was, it seems, typical. Early biographies of the prophet include stories of poets—the tribunes of pagan culture and Muhammad’s political rivals—who immediately renounced their art upon hearing the prophet’s revelations. Other stories recount the conversion of Abyssinian and Byzantine Christians who accepted the Qur’anic message even though they didn’t understand a word of Arabic. In the most extreme cases, hearing Qur’anic verses caused fainting, terror, ecstasy, and even death. In the eleventh century, Abu Ishaq al-Tha‘labi published a collection of such tales, The Blessed Book of Those Slain by the Noble Qur’an, Who Listened to the Qur’an and Subsequently Perished of Their Listening. Al-Tha‘labi wrote that people who died in this fashion were “the most virtuous of martyrs.”

The Qur’an’s verbal sublimity became dogma in the ninth century, when theologians coined the doctrine of i‘jaz, or “inimitability,” according to which the Qur’an is a miracle no human effort can equal (which didn’t prevent some Arab poets from trying). This peculiar claim resulted from the back-and-forth of religious polemics. Christian thinkers pointed to the miracles performed by Jesus, which also appear in the Qur’an, as evidence of his authority and God’s favor. If Muhammad was truly a prophet, where were his miracles? Muslim theologians pointed to the Qur’an as Muhammad’s miracle, proof he was a divine messenger and not the imposter Christians claimed. The idea found support in Qur’anic verses that challenged men and jinn to match the scripture’s magnificence: “Let them produce one like it, if what they say is true.”¹

English-language readers have had a hard time believing in the beauty of the Qur’an. The historian Edward Gibbon, who had read George Sale’s 1734 translation, the first in English based directly on the Arabic, found the idea of Qur’anic inimitability to be laughable. In his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon writes:

The harmony and copiousness of style will not reach, in a version, the European infidel: he will peruse with impatience the endless incoherent rhapsody of fable, and precept, and declamation, which seldom excites a sentiment or an idea, which sometimes crawls in the dust, and is sometimes lost in the clouds.

This sort of skepticism is still common. In an otherwise sympathetic attempt to make sense of Muslim scripture from a Catholic point of view, Garry Wills wrote, “I have to admit that the Qur’an is not at first a gripping read.”² One might object that Wills didn’t read the Qur’an, he read an English translation (in this case, M.A.S. Abdel Haleem’s Oxford Press version). Many Islamic authorities—and indeed many translators—believe that the Qur’an, as the word of God spoken to Muhammad via the angel Gabriel, is strictly speaking untranslatable. If it isn’t Arabic, it isn’t the Qur’an.

Leaving theology aside, the Qur’an isn’t a book Muslims have historically encountered through reading. Instead it is recited, memorized, and used in devotional practices. ‘Umar converted after hearing the prophet recite the Qur’an; al-Tha‘labi’s martyrs were listeners, not readers. And this is only the beginning of the translator’s difficulties.

Early editions of the Qur’an in European languages were openly antagonistic toward Islam. The first was Robert of Ketton’s twelfth-century Latin version, produced for Peter the Venerable of Cluny, an erudite abbot who imagined it would help him to convert Muslims. In a dedicatory letter to Peter, Robert wrote, “I have uncovered Muhammad’s smoke so that it may be extinguished by your bellows.” Four centuries later, when Protestants in Basel debated whether to print Robert’s translation, Martin Luther wrote a letter in its favor, arguing that “because the Turks are coming near” it was important that “pastors have reliable evidence for preaching the abomination of Muhammad.” Ludovico Marracci, confessor of Pope Innocent XI, published his own Latin translation in Padua in 1698. Marracci included a verse-by-verse refutatio of the Qur’an as well as citations of Muslim commentaries. The point of the latter, he explained, was “to slaughter Mahomet with his own sword insofar as I am able.”

The London solicitor and Orientalist George Sale was no friend of Islam either. He called the Qur’an a “forgery” and looked forward to “the glory of its overthrow.” But while Sale relied heavily on Marracci, he thought the Catholic’s refutations were useless and even “impertinent.” His own translation was meant as a contribution to the secular study of comparative law: “To be acquainted with the various laws and constitutions of civilized nations, especially of those who flourish in our own time, is, perhaps, the most useful part of knowledge.” Sale’s edition was admired by Voltaire as well as Gibbon, and it was a copy of his translation that Thomas Jefferson purchased from a Williamsburg printer in 1765 while preparing for the bar exam. This is the Qur’an that Representative Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of the US Congress, used for his swearing-in ceremony in 2007.

It’s hard to imagine Sale’s translation causing anyone to weep or faint with terror. His approach was lawyerly and precise:

I have thought myself obliged, indeed, in a piece which pretends to be the Word of God, to keep somewhat scrupulously close to the text; by which means the language may, in some places, seem to express the Arabic a little too literally to be elegant English.

The results are evident in his version of the sura, or chapter, “al-‘Adiyat” (“The Charging Steeds”), whose logic and imagery are famously obscure. The sura begins with an evocation of swiftly galloping horses. This is an old trope: pre-Islamic poets often lingered over the virtues of their speediest coursers. After this tableau, framed by an oath, the sura veers suddenly into an admonishment of human greed. Attempting to tie the two parts together, exegetes have typically viewed the horses as figures of ungoverned desire. (In other words, the Qur’an converts a pagan trope of praise into one of censure.) The Arabic is sonorous and concise: each of the first five ayat, or verses, before the admonishment is composed of just two or three words. The first three verses rhyme, as do verses four and five. But Sale’s version of the opening eight ayat, which he doesn’t enumerate, sounds like a long-winded preamble:

By the war-horses which run swiftly to the battle, with a panting noise; and by those which strike fire, by dashing their hoofs against the stones; and by those which make a sudden incursion on the enemy early in the morning, and therein raise the dust, and therein pass through the midst of the adverse troops: verily man is ungrateful unto his LORD; and he is witness thereof: and he is immoderate in the love of worldly good.

Sale’s edition, the most popular in English for some two hundred years, marked a turning point. He shrugged off theology and made room—at least in his framing of the work—for literary appreciation. While his own version was pedestrian, Sale was clear about the original’s virtues: “The style of the Korân is generally beautiful and fluent…and in many places, especially where the attributes and majesty of GOD are described, sublime and magnificent.” Many nineteenth-century thinkers followed his lead. In his popular lectures on heroes, Thomas Carlyle, who had read Sale closely, made a revisionist case for Muhammad as a rough-hewn but genuine visionary, a type of Romantic genius. Carlyle admitted that he found the Qur’an “as toilsome reading as I ever undertook,” but he suggested that the book could be heard as a “wild chaunting song” or “bewildered rhapsody.” (Carlyle had also read Gibbon.) The revelations testified to Muhammad’s “vein of true direct insight, of what we might almost call poetry.”

What about translations of the Qur’an by and for Muslims? The thorny questions of whether scripture could or should be translated, and whether non-Arabic versions might be used for devotional purposes—questions that interested neither Luther nor Marracci nor Sale—were debated by Muslim jurists as soon as Islam spread beyond Arabic-speaking lands. In practice there were many such translations, including a rich archive of Persian interlinear versions from the tenth century onward. These texts were intended not as replacements of the original but rather as necessary guides to its meanings: most of the world’s Muslims aren’t native Arabic speakers, after all.

The first sizable community of Anglophone Muslims emerged in nineteenth-century British India, and the earliest Muslim translators of the Qur’an into English came from this population. For them, English was the lingua franca of an educated elite, and it was most often a language learned at school rather than spoken at home. They were aware of earlier Orientalist and explicitly hostile translations and felt that it was important—for the dignity of their faith, among other reasons—to produce their own English versions of scripture.

One of these early translators was Muhammad Ali, a leader of the Lahore Ahmadiyya movement, which followed the teachings of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, a Punjabi religious reformer and self-declared messiah. Mirza Ghulam relished public debates with local Protestant missionaries, and he preached “a jihad of the pen.” Ali’s The Holy Qur’an: Containing the Arabic Text with English Translation and Commentary, published in a bilingual format in 1917, was a result of this counterevangelism. Ahmadis founded the first Muslim missions in the US, primarily in Detroit and Chicago, and The Holy Qur’an was adopted by Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam.

Another center of Ahmadi missionary work was the Woking Mosque southwest of London, where Ali’s translation was used for Friday sermons. One imam was the marvelously named Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, a British convert to Islam and well-known author, whom E.M. Forster called “the only contemporary English novelist who understands the nearer East.” A schoolmate of Churchill, Pickthall traveled in Egypt and the Levant, where many of his fictions were set, defended the Ottoman cause in World War I (some viewed him as a traitor), and became a close friend of Gandhi. Pickthall’s Woking congregation consisted mostly of English-speaking converts, and he regarded Muhammad Ali’s (at times unidiomatic) translation as a hindrance to missionary work. He claimed, with a touch of colonial hauteur, that The Holy Qur’an “seemed nonsense to the English people who came to my services.”

Pickthall was soon at work on his own version, supported by the fabulously rich Nizam of Hyderabad. In 1929, with a complete draft in hand and eager for orthodox approval, Pickthall approached the authorities of al-Azhar in Cairo. But the clerics weren’t sure that Qur’an translations were permissible at all. Some worried that they would fracture the Muslim community—a potent anxiety in the aftermath of the caliphate’s abolition in 1924 and amid an upsurge of nationalist movements from Morocco to Indonesia. In 1925 Muhammad Ali’s edition was seized by Egyptian customs, and al-Azhar issued a fatwa urging Muslims to burn the book wherever they found it (an extraordinary decree, since The Holy Qur’an included the Arabic text). Christian authorities had once feared that translations of the Qur’an might harm their flock, and now Muslim sheikhs shared the same worry.

In time, the clerics agreed that so long as a book acknowledged it was only a translation—that is, a sincere attempt to construe the original Arabic’s meanings and not to provide a substitute for God’s words—it might be acceptable. “The Koran cannot be translated,” Pickthall wrote in the introduction to his version. “That is the belief of old-fashioned Sheykhs and the view of the present writer.” His edition, published in 1930, was titled The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation.

Pickthall’s version is still widely used. (It was recently adopted as the basis for the Norton Critical Edition.) The only translation comparable in popularity is Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s The Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation, and Commentary, published in Lahore between 1934 and 1937. Yusuf Ali was a distinguished civil servant of the Raj. Born in Bombay, he memorized the Qur’an, graduated from Cambridge, and was an outspoken supporter of empire. His Anglophilia enlivens his edition’s footnotes, which refer to the canon of English poetry as often as Sufi symbology. Explaining the Islamic virtue of sabr, or forbearance, he quotes Milton: “They also serve who only stand and wait.” On memory’s tendency to spoil present pleasures, he cites Tennyson: “A sorrow’s crown of sorrows is remembering happier things.” Yusuf Ali died in 1953 and was buried in the Muslim section of Brookwood Cemetery, just down the road from Woking, in a plot very close to Pickthall’s.

In the preface to his version, Yusuf Ali declares his ambition “to make English itself an Islamic language.” But one might argue that his translation, as well as Pickthall’s, did the opposite—not so much Islamizing English as Englishing Islam. Both men felt, as Muslims, that the Qur’an had not been well served by previous translators. Pickthall even doubted whether “Holy Scripture can be fairly presented by one who disbelieves its inspiration and its message.” They sought to make the Qur’an look and sound like scripture for readers raised on the King James Bible and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Their language is measured, formal, self-consciously archaic. It is a poetics of respectability, not ecstasy. Here is Pickthall’s version of “al-‘Adiyat,” which includes the numbered Qur’anic verses:

1. By the snorting coursers,
2. Striking sparks of fire
3. And scouring to the raid at dawn,
4. Then, therewith, with their trail of dust,
5. Cleaving, as one, the centre (of the foe),
6. Lo! man is an ingrate unto his Lord
7. And lo! he is a witness unto that;
8. And lo! in the love of wealth he is violent.

The Qur’an is a very different kind of text than the Old or New Testament. One reason readers like Gibbon and Carlyle struggled to make sense of it is that they took the Bible as a norm, and they expected to read something similar. But although the Qur’an includes a related cast of characters (Abraham, Noah, Moses, Jacob, Jesus, and others) and a familiar message of monotheism, it has few long narratives (the sura of Joseph is an exception); its references to historical peoples and events are brief and often elliptical; and it isn’t arranged in anything like chronological fashion.

The Qur’an is instead “a book of guidance,” as M.A.S. Abdel Haleem puts it, which may include, in a single sura, reminders of God’s grace, stories of Adam, Satan, and the angels, descriptions of Judgment Day, exaltations of God’s omnipotence, accounts of earlier prophets, and condemnations of idolatry. After the brief initial sura, “al-Fatiha” (“The Opening”), subsequent suras are arranged roughly by length, from long to short. The second and most extensive, entitled “al-Baqara” (“The Cow”), is full of guidance about prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, divorce, and relations with Jews and Christians. For a reader of the Bible, it’s a little like beginning with Leviticus.

Arthur J. Arberry’s The Koran Interpreted (1955) placed a new emphasis on the distinctively literary elements of the Qur’an. Arberry was a scholar and translator of pre-Islamic, classical, and mystical Arabic poetry. He wasn’t Muslim, but his title conceded “the orthodox Muslim view,” shared by Pickthall, that the Qur’an is untranslatable. Nevertheless, Arberry’s version was ambitious. While previous English versions showed “a certain uniformity and dull monotony,” his own brought out “those rhetorical and rhythmical patterns which are the glory and the sublimity of the Koran.” The most helpful analogue to Muslim scripture wasn’t a written text like the Bible, he pointed out, but song. “Each Sura is a rhapsody,” Arberry wrote, using the same word as Gibbon and Carlyle but intending it more seriously, “composed of whole or fragmentary leitmotivs.”

Arberry’s approach was partly the fruit of personal experience. In his preface he writes of being inspired by memories of Ramadan nights in Egypt—he taught for two years at Cairo University—when he would sit on his veranda “and listen entranced to the old, white-bearded Sheykh who chanted the Koran for the pious delectation of my neighbour.” It was during those recitations “that I, the infidel, learnt to understand and react to the thrilling rhythms of the Koran.” (Many subsequent visitors to Cairo have had a similar experience listening to the cassette tape recitations that are the soundtracks of late-night and early-morning cab rides.)

Arberry’s Koran is arranged in lines of verse, sometimes centered on the page, with irregular stanza breaks, making them look a little like Pindaric odes. The rhythms are lively and one feels a new urgency of address. Here is his version of “al-‘Adiyat”:

By the snorting chargers,
by the strikers of fire,
by the dawn-raiders
blazing a trail of dust,
cleaving there with a host!
Surely Man is ungrateful to his Lord,
and surely he is a witness against that!
Surely he is passionate in his love for good things.

This captures some of the original’s momentum and sonic density: the half-rhymes of Arberry’s first five lines echo the original. But here as elsewhere, his attempts at rhapsody often get lost in the clouds. What does the fifth line mean? Why witness against rather than to? Is the final line meant to praise or admonish? Arberry’s most lasting contribution was his idea of the Qur’an as a performative text, a script for recitation, which asked translators to use their ears as well as their dictionaries.

This is also the approach of Michael Sells, another scholar and translator of pre-Islamic and mystical poetry, whose Approaching the Qur’án (1999) is an influential refinement of Arberry’s insights. Sells didn’t translate the entire Qur’an but primarily what are known as the early Meccan suras. Muhammad’s revelations are traditionally divided into three periods: the early and late Meccan, and the Medinan. The latter were received after the prophet’s hijra to Medina in 622, where he became the leader of the new Muslim community. Medinan suras focus on legal and doctrinal matters, while the early Meccan suras—many of them very short, like “al-‘Adiyat”—are often addressed to questions of faith and personal salvation (late Meccan suras take up the history of monotheistic prophets). The earliest revelations remind believers of God’s grace as they repeatedly evoke, in striking and sometimes hermetic language, a Day of Reckoning.

Like Arberry, Sells highlights the believer’s “oral encounter” with the Qur’an: a continuous experience of hearing, memorizing, and voicing the words, turning the language of scripture into leitmotifs of the believer’s life. This emphasis on orality may also derive from the influential German translation of the Bible by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig (1936), which took the Hebrew original as “a living recitation” whose “auditory form” must be conveyed in translation. Sells characterizes the early revelations as “hymnic,” with a sweeping lyricism and intricate sound patterning brought out by reading aloud. The voice he hears in the early suras is, he writes, one of “intimacy and awe.”³

It is very hard to convey the oral features of Arabic, or any other language, in an English text. Sells’s suras are acoustically adventuresome—he is a skilled and generous listener—but they don’t regularly achieve intimacy or awe. At times the responsible philologist takes over, as when the Qur’anic word al-‘ishar becomes “ten-month pregnant camels,” hardly a hymnic paraphrase. In Sells’s version of “al-‘Adiyat,” the swift gallop of the opening three lines stumbles in the next four. The metrical feet and the syntax get tangled, and some word choices (“the human being,” presumably to avoid the outdated “man”) sound studied rather than spoken:

By the coursers snorting
By the fire-strikers sparking
By the chargers at morning
Dust around them exploding
Within it the center holding
The human being is ungrateful to his lord.
To that he is witness
In love of wealth he is harsh

Is the Qur’an poetry, or “what we might almost call poetry”? God answers this question with surprising firmness: “This is the word [spoken by] an honoured messenger, not the word of a poet.” The point was worth insisting on: “We have not taught the Prophet poetry, nor could he ever have been a poet.” Pagan Arabs believed that poets were inspired by invisible presences—jinn or daemons. Muhammad also was inspired by an invisible presence, and his speech was sonorous, often rhymed, with a strong rhythmic pulse, so that he resembled the people Arabs knew as poets. But the prophet’s words were dictated by a divine spirit, not a daemonic one. To accept that distinction marked the difference between faith and unbelief.

In their new edition of the Qur’an, subtitled A Verse Translation, the scholars M.A.R. Habib and Bruce Lawrence acknowledge that the Qur’an defines itself as not poetry, but they argue it is nevertheless “deeply poetic” and even “more than poetry.” They point to the original’s use of rhyme and rhythm, along with its metaphors and allegories, and they doubt that prose translations could be faithful in any sense of the word. The formal feature that interests them most is the Qur’an’s system of pauses: the breaks between verses, marked by numbers in the Arabic text, as well as the pauses within verses—a feature highlighted by recitation, where pauses allow for breaths. The line breaks of a verse translation, they argue, can register this intricate rhythm of al-waqf wa-l-ibtida’, stopping and starting, which is basic to the Qur’an’s mode of meaning and aesthetic power. In a prose translation, by contrast, “all the pauses disappear.”

For Habib and Lawrence, as for Sells, Qur’anic poetics are primarily oral. They stem from its nature as a text for recitation. “The Qur’an is meant to be read aloud,” they write. “Hence our rendering of the Qur’an into English must be susceptible of performance.” As it happens, the Qur’an is directly helpful on this score. It instructs believers to recite its words “slowly and distinctly,” or, in Habib and Lawrence’s version, “in clear, rhythmic measure.” This deliberate and steady cadence—no thrilling rhapsodies here—is what creates the Qur’an’s characteristic mood, “the slow-moving grandeur of the Arabic.” Here is their version of “al-‘Adiyat”:

1 By those racing
like steeds, panting,
2 striking sparks with their hooves,
3 raiding at dawn,
4 raising clouds of dust,
5 thrusting through the center
of enemy lines—
6 humans are ungrateful
to their Lord,
7 as they themselves
bear witness,
8 and their love of [the world’s] good
is intense.

Arabic performances of the Qur’an follow the complex rules of tajwid, the art of recitation, which governs pronunciation, vocal timbre, vowel length, and placement of pauses. English recitations have no such rules, of course, and the line breaks in Habib and Lawrence’s version are relatively open to interpretation. The enjambments in the first verse and verses five through seven, for example, mean that pausing at the ends of the lines would be awkward. The effect of stopping and starting becomes choppy, rather than slow-moving and grand. When I read the translated lines aloud, I follow the punctuation, not the lineation. I suspect that Habib and Lawrence do too. If line breaks always signaled a pause in reading, then they wouldn’t have needed commas at the ends of certain lines. (In his version, also meant to be susceptible to performance, Sells largely dispenses with punctuation, which doesn’t exist in the Arabic either.)

The punctuation marks point to a larger problem. Although Habib and Lawrence work hard to come up with an English equivalent to the Qur’an’s oral poetics, their own relation to poetry—like that of most contemporary scholars—depends on the written and not the spoken word. This is evident throughout their translation, but particularly in the editorial apparatus. In the longer suras, for example, they include numbered sections to mark changes of topic. This makes for easier reading, although the original has no such sections. They also include several hundred endnotes. In a note to the first verse of “al-‘Adiyat,” they explain the “like” in line two, which adds a simile that isn’t in the Arabic, as an acknowledgment of the standard interpretation of the racing horses as symbols of ungoverned desires. Without that explanation, “like” is indeed puzzling, but recitations don’t have endnotes.

Habib and Lawrence also include many bracketed words and phrases where the Arabic is hard to construe. In “al-‘Adiyat,” their bracketing of “the world’s” is clarifying—it resolves the ambiguity that troubles Arberry’s version—but misleadingly suggests that everything not in brackets is more or less a literal translation of the Arabic. Literalism is a chimera, however, as authoritative interpreters of the Qur’an have pointed out: God’s words can bear more than one connotation, making literalism untenable even as an ideal. The added simile in line two suggests that Habib and Lawrence don’t take the ideal seriously either. So it’s unclear why the brackets are there at all, especially as they interfere with oral performance. How is a bracketed word to be recited? Do we say it aloud, like all the other words, or ignore it—or speak it in a whisper?

From Shawkat Toorawa’s introduction to The Devotional Qur’an, we glean these fragments of biography: a childhood in Paris, where a Senegalese tutor gave him early lessons in the Qur’an; later, in Singapore, a Tamil scholar instructed him—with mixed success—in the art of tajwid. At the University of Pennsylvania, Toorawa studied with the Jesuit scholar of Sufism Gerhard Böwering, and he soon became an academic himself, teaching classical Arabic literature. (Toorawa is now a colleague of mine at Yale.) In 1996, while he was living in Mauritius—he has translated several works from Mauritian creole—an uncle asked him for an English version of the commonly recited sura “Ya Sin” (named after the two Arabic letters it begins with). That experience, and the encouragement of fellow scholars, persuaded Toorawa to undertake a larger work of translation.

This unusual biography has birthed an unusual book. The Devotional Qur’an is a collection of suras and passages recited in regular devotions: daily prayers, supplications, rituals. The texts are ordered roughly in the sequence that Muslims encounter and memorize them. This tilts the scales in favor of the shorter, easy-to-memorize suras, and Toorawa’s selection overlaps in places with Sells’s. The Devotional Qur’an pointedly does not include the parts that typically interest scholars (and controversialists): legal and theological texts, or narratives, like those about Joseph and the birth of Jesus, that lend themselves to comparative study. This focus on the believer’s everyday experience results in an appealingly practical and even chic object: a kind of Qur’anic chapbook, small enough to fit in a tote and read on the subway.

Toorawa was drawn as a child to Yusuf Ali’s translation, to the quirkily erudite footnotes and especially to the language, “a neo-Victorian English that sounded to me very much the way I, still only a boy, thought God would sound—should sound—in English.” Yusuf Ali is powerfully present in The Devotional Qur’an, not in its diction or in the footnotes (which Toorawa uses sparingly), but rather in its confident idiosyncrasy. Toorawa is an expert by training but an experimentalist by disposition. Some of his translations have line breaks, some do not (in Toorawa’s prose renderings, the original’s verse divisions are represented by diamond-shaped symbols: ♦). Some translations are centered on the page (like Arberry’s), some are flush left. For transliterations, Toorawa uses the French circumflex (also used by Sale) for long vowels, rather than the standard English macron: i‘jâz instead of i‘jāz. He isn’t bothered by orthodox worries over literalism, and he doesn’t go out of his way to make the Qur’an acceptable to liberal sensibilities.

His translations, like Yusuf Ali’s, are what I would call Sufistic. They model a faith in the individual believer’s spiritual competence, and they are persistently—even mischievously—inventive. Here is Toorawa’s version of “al-‘Adiyat”:

By coursing chargers
and sparkstriking seethers,
by dawnraiders and dustraisers
and battleline breachers
I swear—

Humans are
ungrateful to their Lord.
They know this full well
yet they covet and hoard.

What does God’s voice sound like? Is the way it sounds in Arabic—the authoritative sound, for Muslims—the way it could or should sound in English? Toorawa’s translation hits a remarkable range of notes: from enthusiasm (he is fond of exclamation marks), to severity, to playfulness (as in the Old English alliterations and compound nouns of “al-‘Adiyat”), to intimacy. Rather than slow-moving grandeur or hymnic awe, we hear a voice that can be disarmingly bluesy: “Didn’t I soothe your heart/when you were down?” (Compare Habib and Lawrence: “Have We not made your heart broader than before?” Or Sells: “Did we not lay open your heart?”)

Toorawa is especially exuberant in his rhymes. Much of the Qur’an is in saj‘, a rhymed and rhythmic prose that was used by soothsayers in pre-Islamic times and in later periods became a mark of elegant writing. Sale didn’t try to rhyme and couldn’t understand why “Arabians are so mightily delighted with this jingling.” Later translators have been more sympathetic. Arberry, Sells, and Habib and Lawrence scatter rhymes and half-rhymes, but Toorawa makes them central to the music of his translations. Why rhyme in particular? He quotes the poet A.E. Stallings: “Translators who translate poems that rhyme into poems that don’t rhyme solely because they claim that keeping the rhyme is impossible without doing violence to the poem have done violence to the poem.” Given his own impatience with literalism, it’s odd that Toorawa seems to think this argument clinches the case for rhyme. (One might suggest, instead, that it proves the act of translation is only very poorly understood through metaphors of violence.)

Toorawa’s rhyming is as experimental as his versification. Where one rhyme falls flat, another opens our ears. He’s especially fond of consonant rhymes, an alliteration of word endings rather than beginnings, as in the first four lines of “al-‘Adiyat.” It can’t be a coincidence that this type of slant rhyme mirrors the Arabic, where rhyme is made by a repetition of final letters. (If this sounds easy to achieve, it is: Arab poets commonly use one rhyme for fifty or even a hundred lines.) Toorawa sometimes makes that parallelism explicit. “Al-Insan” (“Humankind”) is a short sura that mostly rhymes on the letter ra’, pronounced similarly to the English r. Toorawa’s version rhymes on “hear,” “favor,” “fire,” “camphor,” “pleasure,” “far,” and “pauper.” In this way the original echoes uncannily into the English, though one needn’t know Arabic to hear the music.

Yusuf Ali hoped to Islamize English through his translation of the Qur’an. In Toorawa’s devotional texts, we have a sense of what that might sound like. In his version of “Ya Sin,” a sura often recited to a person on their deathbed, we hear the happy susurrus of a life to come:

That Day, the Garden dwellers will be busy in their joyousness. ♦ They and their spouses will recline on couches, in shade and coolness. ♦ They will have fruits and whatever they request in abundance. ♦ The Ever Compassionate will greet them with a salutation of peace.