N. J. Dawood

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Nessim Joseph Dawood (Arabic: نعيم جوزيف داوود)(born 1927) in Baghdad, Iraq, to an Iraqi Jewish family. He came to England in 1945 as an Iraq State scholar, and settled there. He graduated from the University of London. He is known for his English translation of the Qur’an, Tales from the One Thousand and One Nights (Penguin Classics) and his edition of the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun. Dawood’s translation of the Qur’an, titled “The Koran”, is the world’s best-selling English translation of the Qur’an.

In the first edition of his translation of the Qur’an, in 1956, Dawood rearranged the chapters (suras) into more-or-less chronological order. Later editions restored the traditional sequence.

Some have criticized Dawood’s translation for “inaccuracies”.^[1] One of the many "inaccuracies" is that in an earlier edition, the phrase “Children of Adam” was wrongly printed “Children of Allah” owing to an oversight by the printers’ proof-reader. Another is that in the verse that says "oppression is worse than killing" (meant to show how evil oppression is), Dawood translates it as "idolatry is worse than carnage".^[2] Although there have since been seven major revisions with more than 55 reprints over five decades, these “mistranslations” are still being harped upon.

Throughout his translation, Dawood has closely followed the tafsir of Al-Baidhawi and Al-Jalalain.

[edit] Notes

^ See e.g. Ziauddin Sardar, "Lost in Translation", published in New Statesman. [1]
^ Ziauddin Sardar, "Lost in Translation", published in New Statesman. [2]