Inaccuracies about George Sale’s Qur’ān translation

I have to clarify a few points here about a 52 second clip of Dr. Yasir Qadhi, which is about George Sale’s Qur’ān translation, since my PhD is literally on this topic. The short clip has a few factual inaccuracies:

1) YQ says George Sale: “wasn’t a Christian, he was an open minded thinker.” I have to point out that this is not the case. Sale was an Anglican Protestant missionary connected to the Society of Promoting Christian Knowledge, through which he helped to translate the New Testament to Arabic to be sent to Syria. He even wrote before his Qur’ān translation: “The Protestants alone are able to attack the Koran with success (pp. iii-iv)”. Sale even cites Augustine on his title page about how every false doctrine mixes some truth, so clearly he saw his work within a Christian framework.

2) YQ says George Sale: “started translating the Qur’ān primarily based upon Robert of Ketton, the Latin.” That’s not the case. Sale actually slammed Ketton’s work, saying it: “deserves not the name of a translation; the unaccountable liberties therein taken and the numberless faults, both of omission and commission, leaving scarce any resemblance of the original (p. v)”. Sale rather used Ludoviko Marrachi’s Latin translation as one of his two primary sources, the other one being a manuscript of al-Baydawi’s tafsir which is present today in the London Archives, which I examined a few months ago.

3) YQ says the first English translation, attributed to Alexander Ross, was done in 1647. Actually, it was done in 1649, two years after André du Ryer’s French edition (1647). Easy to mix those dates up.

4) YQ says, “the French guy also didn’t speak Arabic that well.” That may be the case, but du Ryer did study Arabic in Egypt, where he served as a diplomat for about 5 years. So he definitely wasn’t a beginner either.

There are a few more details I could add, but these are the main corrections to keep the history straight.