Abdullah Yusuf Ali wrote one of the most popular English translations of the Quran and served the British Empire for most of his life - and died alone and forgotten
On a frigid December morning in 1953, a policeman found a half-conscious old man slumped on a street bench in the Westminster area of London. He was in a delirious state and died a day later on December 10.
“Ask any English-speaking Muslim what translation and commentary of the Quran they originally studied, and the chances are that it was the one by Abdullah Yusuf Ali,”Yusuf Ali's work and affiliations solidify his place as a giant of his time.
In his talks and articles throughout the war, he urged fellow Muslims to side with the British, at times doing it so effusively that his rhetoric appeared jingoistic. “We have to look at him in the context of his times. That was a generation when the British claimed superiority over the natives. And then you have somebody who can emerge and beat them at their own game,” says Jamil Sherif, who wrote Yusuf Ali’s biography titled“Yusuf Ali’s approach was to show through his writing that Islam had made major contributions through the ages.
But behind the veneer of his intellect, busy schedule and scholarly importance, he was a man suffering from internal conflicts. Yusuf Ali was a troubled man. He married twice and both relationships ended bitterly. Their divorce in 1911 was particularly painful for Yusuf Ali and he might have hinted at that period in the preface of his Quranic commentary when he wrote: “A man’s life is subject to inner storms...which nearly unseated my reason and made life meaningless.” “These children by their continued ill-will towards me have alienated my affection for them, so much that I confer no benefit on them by this will,” Yusuf Ali later wrote in his will.
It was during this personal crisis that Ali began the monumental work of writing an English translation of the Quran, often working on solitary ocean liner journeys which he took at the behest of the British government. “In his translation of the Quran, published between 1934 and 1937, Yusuf Ali expounded the spiritual side of Islam more than its worldly view,” writes A R Kidwai, a prominent researcher.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to live in camps in neighboring countries after Israel pushed them out of their homes.
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