Quran Books With Footnotes - Binding: Perfect Bound

It may be asked: Is there any need for fresh English translation? To those who ask this question I commend a careful consideration of the facts which I have set out in my Note on Translation. After they have read it, I would invite them to take any particular passage, say 2:74 or 2:102, or 2:164 and compare it with any previous version they choose. If they find that I have helped them even the least bit further in understanding its meanings, or appreciating its beauty or catching something of the grandeur of the original, I will claim that my humble attempt is justified.
lt is the duty of every Muslim, man, woman, or child, to read the Qura an and understand it according to his own capacity. If any one of us attains some knowledge or understanding of it by study, contemplation, and the test of life, both outward and inward, it is his duty, aCCording to his capacity, to instruct others, and share with them the joy and peace which result from contact with the spiritual world. The Qura an indeed every religious book has to be read, not only with the tongue and voice and eyes, but with the best light that our intellect can supply, and even more, with the truest and purest light which our heart and conscience can give us. It is in this spirit that I would have my readers approach the Qura an.
It was between the ages of four and five that I first learned to read its Arabic words, to revel in its rhythm and music, and wonder at its meaning. I have a dim recollection of the Khayyam ceremony which closed that stage, It was called completion, it really just began a spiritual awakening that has gone on ever since my revered father taught me Arabic, but I must have imbibed from him into my innermost being something more, something which told me that all the worlda s thoughts, all the worlda s most beautiful languages and literatures are but vehicles for that ineffable message which comes to the heart in rare moments of ec_stasy. The soul of mysticism and ec_stasy is in the Qura an as well as the plain guidance for the sin m in which a world in a hurry affects to consider as sufficient. It is good to make this personal confession, to an age in which it is in the highest degree unfashionable to speak of religion or spiritual peace or consolation, an age in which words like these draw forth only derision, pity, or contempt.
I have explored Western lands, Western manners, and the depths of Western thought and Western learning, to an extent which has rarely fallen to the lot of an Eastern mortal. But I have never lost touch with Eastern heritage. Through all my successes and failures, I have learned to rely more and more upon the onetime thing in all life the voice that speaks in a tongue above that of mortal man. For me the embodiment of that voice has been in the noble words of the Arabic Qura an, which I have tried to translate for myself and apply to my experience again and again. The service of the Qura an has been the pride and the privilege of many Muslims. I felt that with such life experience as has fallen to my lot, my service to the Qura an should be to present it in a fitting grab in English. That ambition I have cherished in my mind for more than forty years. I have collected books and materials for it. I have visited places, undertaken journeys, taken notes, sought the society of men, and tried to explore their thoughts and hearts, in order to equip myself for the task. Sometimes I have considered it too stupendous for me the double task of understanding the original, and reproducing its nobility, its beauty, its poetry, its grandeur and its sweet practical reasonable application to everyday experience. Then I have blamed myself for lack of courage the spiritual courage of men who dared all in the Cause which was so dear to them.
Two sets of apparently accidental circumstances at last decided me. A mana s life is subject to inner storms far more devastating than those in the physical world around him.