A New English Translation of the Holy Quran

This work comprises the English translation of only the first two opening Surahs of the Qur’an: al-Fatihah and al-Baqarah. Al-Jibouri has done well to state clearly and honestly that his publisher’s ‘main goal is to spread the truth about Islamic faith in general and the Shia school of thought in particular’ (Backpage). However, his work is free from any tendentious sectarianism. It does not touch upon any sectarian issue. Since it offers only a bare translation, without any annotations, one learns nothing about al-Jibouri’s mind-set and predilections. Al-Jibouri has, however, suppressed a crucial fact: his work is actually no more than a collection of unacknowledged borrowings from Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s earlier translation (1934–1937). The following examples illustrate how Al-Jibouri has, without any scruples, lifted and passed off Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s translation as his own: