A CRITICAL STUDY OF QUR’ĀNIC ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY N. J. DĀWOOD

Abstract

This research can be abridged by the topic thereof i.e. finding out the grammatical errors of the famous English translation made by N. J. Dāwood. Simultaneously, the corrigibilities have been shown and the corrections along with the suggestions have been given. Furthermore, only the main sense and theme have been considered. Actually, the holy Qur’ān has been translated in almost all the living languages of the world such as English, Urdu, and Persian etc.  It has been tried much by both major communities i.e. Christians and Jews to make the sense of the holy Qur’ān doubtful as well as the life of the Holy Prophet Muḥammad (blessings and peace be upon him). When the researcher went into the English translations of the Holy Qur’ān profoundly, he met with the grave errors found in the translation made by Nessim Joseph Dāwood. In fact, no crookedness or even corruptibility can be penetrated in the divine scheme, schemed by the Creator Himself as He says in the Holy Qur’ān: (1)“Praise be to Allāh Who hath sent to His Servant the Book and hathallowed therein no crookedness”. [18:1] Yūsuf (2) And furthermore He assures about the powerful supervision and security and says in the Holy Qur’ān: “Lo! We even We, reveal the Reminder, and lo! We verily are its Guardian”. [15:9] Pickthall (3) Hence, Willium Muir (4) states the following words:“There is probably no other book in the world which has remained twelve centuries [now fourteen] with so pure a text.” The significance of his translation can be estimated from the fact that it has been printed out at least 70 times as Richard Dāwood and James Stredder (5) said about it: “It is thought to be the best selling English language version; it has been reprinted at least 70 times since 1956.” He himself confesses that he has done this knowingly, for instance, Dāwood’s (6) most recent revision was published in May 2014. He said of it: “I used to omit "and" in every case, in Arabic every sentence begins with "and", even now, in a newspaper. So I decided to experiment with it, and found it can be very effective at the beginning of a sentence”. It means he himself is declaring that he is the one who knows best than Allah (S.W.T). The Muslims have the faith that, in Qur’ān, if Allah Almighty has mentioned one word or sentence many times, so, each time it gives new meaning and not even a single word or phrase or sentence is useless, but he wants to say that “And” is useless that is why he has omitted that. So it is the need of time to mention these kinds of translations translated by translators through his own will, which has not the least relation to the Holy Qur’ān