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Title: Much Better Translations Available
Review: This translation leaves out text, mistranslates other text, and has no explanatory footnotes. Even Arabic speakers have trouble understanding the Koran in Arabic when there are no footnotes because, after all, not one word of the text has changed since it was compiled 1300 years ago. (Try reading Shakespeare without footnotes -- and that was only 400-some years ago!)This one is short and cheap, true, but it doesn't accurately convey what the Koran says. The best translation out there is Muhammad Asad's "Message of the Qur'an." Asad was a Polish Jew before his conversion to Islam, and he has great explanatory footnotes and a really accurate translation that's easy for the Western mind to understand without sacrificing meaning, as Dawood's translation does.
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