ABSTRACT
The Qur’an, the Holy Book of Islam, is regarded by Muslims as a direct divine transmission to the Prophet Muhammad in the Arabic language. Reciting the Qur’an in Arabic itself came to be regarded as an act of piety and, because it is the exact word of Allah, the text and style of the Qur’an have been deemed incomparable and therefore beyond human capacity for replication in any language. In spite of the Muslim reverence for the revelation in its original Arabic form the Qur’an exists in translation into numerous languages spoken on virtually every continent. Some of the earliest complete translations of the Qur’an were undertaken into European languages by non-Muslim translators. Christians were the first not only to translate the Qur’an into their own European languages for their own European audiences. The availability of the Qur’an in translation in multiple languages today masks the fact that the practice was not always accepted by all Muslims at all times.
