The Quran

This reader edition is the English translation by J. M. Rodwell, preserved as Project Gutenberg ebook 2800. Rodwell’s translation first appeared in the nineteenth century; the captured source material identifies a 1861 first publication and a later 1876 second edition in its bibliographic notes, but this transcription does not establish which physical printing supplied every reading. G. Margoliouth’s introduction is separate editorial matter.

The Quran itself is an Arabic scripture organized into 114 suras. Rodwell rearranged them by his proposed chronology, a nineteenth-century editorial scheme rather than the order in which Muslims conventionally encounter the suras in the Quran. The reader keeps that historic ordering and segments the English source into paragraphs; those units must not be mistaken for numbered ayat.