Al-Muntakhab

Al-Muntakhab fi tafsir al-Qur’an al-Karim (“the select interpretation of the Glorious Qur’an”) is an institutional work rather than the project of a single translator. It was compiled by a committee under Egypt’s Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs and aligned with Al-Azhar scholarship, with the first English edition appearing in 1993. A distinctive part of its method is that an Arabic explanatory commentary was written first, then used to guide translators across many languages, so that an official, standardised reading could be carried into English, French, German, and others.

The result is highly interpretive and, by design, wordy. Translation and concise exegesis are merged, so verses are expanded with explanatory glosses rather than rendered tightly, supported by parenthetical insertions, footnotes, and surah introductions; some notes touch on the “scientific” reading of the text. The English register is dated and, by common assessment, awkward in places — a consequence of building the rendering around a pre-written commentary.

Scholars have noted real problems with this approach and its English phrasing, and Al-Azhar later commissioned an entirely new English edition in 2006. As a reading text it has been largely overtaken by clearer Azhari-linked translations such as Abdel Haleem and Mustafa Khattab. Its main interest today is as a clear example of a state-sponsored, standardised Qur’an translation.