Nessim Joseph Dawood (Arabic: نعيم جوزيف داوود) was born in 1927 to an Iraqi Jewish family in Baghdad, Iraq. He emigrated 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 translations 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”, was at one time 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, as to make it easier to determine which verses are abrogated. Later editions restored the traditional sequence of publishing the surahs in order of length.