Translating the Qur’an into English: Towards a New Approach

A DPhil from Oxford and Professor at Rutgers, and now at the Gulf University of Science and Technology, Rafey Habib was trained in three fields, literary criticism, Islamic literature, and the translation and writing of poetry. He is  the author of seven books and the editor of two books of literary criticism, including A History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present (Blackwell, 2005) (which the Times of London called “[A] magnificently comprehensive history of literary criticism”), the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. VI: The Nineteenth Century (2013) and The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (2014). He has also produced two books of translations of Urdu poetry, published respectively by the MLA and Oxford University Press, as well as a book of his own poetry, Shades of Islam (Kube Publishing, 2010).

Professor Habib’s talk will be on a verse translation of the Qur’an, which he has been doing with Bruce Lawrence.