Olympia-2015

91. [QUR’ĀN.] [SALE, George, translator.] The Koran, commonly called theAlcoran of Mohammed, translated into English immediately from the OriginalArabic; with explanatory notes taken from the most approved commentators.To which is prefixed a preliminary discourse. London, C. Ackers, 1734.4to, pp. [ii], [4 (dedication to Carteret, loose)], iii-ix, [3], 187, 508, [16]; with onefolding map, 3 engraved genealogical tables (2 double-page) and a double-pageengraved plate with a plan and view of the Temple of Mecca; a fine copy, clean andcrisp, bound in contemporary mottled calf, spine decorated gilt, morocco letteringpiece, red edges, joints starting at head and foot; the Macclesfield copy, withbookplate of the South Library to front pastedown and blindstamp to first threeleaves. £6000First edition of Sale’s translation of the Qur’ān, the first English translationto be based on the original Arabic, one of only fifty copies printed on large,fine paper.Sale’s translation is remarkably accurate and still regarded as the best in anylanguage; it rendered Islam accessible to a far wider readership than in the past,spreading interest beyond the academic parameters of the universities to which ithad been hitherto confined.‘Sale’s careful and unemotional approach in both his preliminary discourse andtranslation secured the fame of his work well into the twentieth century. In 1921Edward Denison Ross claimed that Sale’s version had not been superseded by anysubsequent translation, and that his discourse still remained the best introductionin any European language to the study of Islam. More than fifty years later Sale’sobjectivity still guarded him from criticism in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978)’(Oxford DNB).