The Message of The Qur'an is an English translation and interpretation of the 1924 Cairo edition of the Qur'an by Muhammad Asad, an Austrian Jew who converted to Islam. It is considered one of the most influential Quranic translations of the modern age. The book was first published in Gibraltar in 1980, and has since been translated into several other languages. Asad meant to devote two years to completing the translation and the commentary but ended up spending seventeen. In the opening, he dedicates his effort to "People Who Think". The author returns to the theme of Ijtihad - The use of one's own faculties to understand the Divine text - again and again. The spirit of the translation is resolutely modernist, and the author expressed his profound debt to the reformist commentator Muhammad Abduh. In the foreword to the book, he writes "...although it is impossible to 'reproduce' the Quran as such in any other language, it is none the less possible to render its message comprehensible to people who, like most Westerners, do not know Arabic...well enough to find their way through it unaided." He also states that a translator must take into account the ijaz of the Qur'an, which is the ellipticism which often "deliberately omits intermediate thought-clauses in order to express the final stage of an idea as pithily and concisely as is possible within the limitations of a human language" and that "the thought-links which are missing - that is, deliberately omitted - in the original must be supplied by the translator...". Reception The Message of The Qur'an received favorable reviews from discriminating scholars. Gai Eaton, a leading British Muslim thinker, after noting the limitations of Asad's rationalist approach, described Asad's translation as "the most helpful and instructive version of the Qur'an that we have in English. This remarkable man has done what he set out to do, and it may be doubted whether his achievement will ever be surpassed." Considered one of the leading translations of the Qur'an, it has been criticized by some Atharis for its Ash'ari leanings. The book was banned in Saudi Arabia in 1974 (before its publication) due to differences on some creedal issues compared with the Wahhabi ideology prevalent there. Contents Following is a list of 114 Chapters (Surahs) of Quran, their Arabic names and their English translations as produced by Muhammad Asad: Al Fatiha (The Opening) Al Baqara