Al-Azhar Considered it Haram to Translate the Qur’an into English

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ 

When Shaykh Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall (r.a.) first translated the Qur’an into English, he knew that the Muslim world would never accept it without the stamp of the ‘ulama.  This was the period after the abolishment of the Caliphate, so by default, Al-Azhar became the most prominent centre of Sunni scholarship.  Many of the ensconced ‘ulama of Al-Azhar considered it haram to translate the Qur’an into the language of the “kuffar”.  Ahmad Muhammad Shakir, a scholar of Al-Azhar, wrote in Al-Ahram that all who aided such a project would burn in Hell forever. 

Shaykh Pickthall (r.a.) published, in Islamic Culture, a long account of his battle with this scholar, and the mentality which he represented.  He included this reflection, “Many Egyptian Muslims were as surprised as I was at the extraordinary ignorance of present world conditions of men who claimed to be the thinking heads of the Islamic world – men who think that the Arabs are still ‘the patrons,’ and the non-Arabs their ‘freedmen’; who cannot see that the positions have become reversed, that the Arabs are no longer the fighters and the non-Arabs the stay-at-homes but it is the non-Arabs who at present bear the brunt of the jihad; that the problems of the non-Arabs are not identical with those of the Arabs; that translation of the Qur’an is for the non-Arabs a necessity, which, of course, it is not for Arabs; men who cannot conceive that there are Muslims in India as learned and devout, as capable as judgement and as careful for the safety of Islam, as any to be found in Egypt.”