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The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, Pickthall, 1930

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A complete English Quran by Marmaduke Pickthall, an English convert to Islam. It includes the passages about the jinn, Gog and Magog, and the youths who slept in the cave, all in a single, readable translation.

Public domain copy

Made byAnonymous (Quran)
TranslatorMarmaduke Pickthall
LanguageEnglish
FileTXT 1.0 MB, EPUB 798 KB
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Where this comes from

This is a public-domain copy. The line below says where the file comes from and why we may host it.

Why we can share it: Reasoning: the work was published in 1930 (archive.org metadata date 1930, publisher New York: A.A. Knopf); under 17 USC 304 US works published in 1930 entered the public domain on 1 January 2026; translator Pickthall died 1936. The archive.org item itself carries no public-domain statement or license field.

Read the story behind it

BeingJinnA second species, made of smokeless fire and hidden from sight, shares the world with us, the Quran says. They eat, marry, die and choose whether to believe; one chapter claims they once sat in listening posts in heaven, until meteors drove them off. What were they trying to overhear?BeingGog and MagogAccording to the Bible and the Quran, a people is penned behind a wall at the edge of the world and will break loose at the end of time. In the 9th century a caliph sent a real expedition to inspect that wall, and its report survives. What did the travelers report?PersonPeople of the Cave (Seven Sleepers)Young believers hide in a cave, and the Quran says they slept "three hundred years and add nine," their dog stretched at the entrance. That odd extra nine matches the gap between 300 solar years and 309 lunar years almost exactly; then one of them walks into town with an old silver coin. What happens next?PersonDhul-QarnaynThe Quran describes a ruler who found the sun setting in a muddy spring, then sealed a people behind a wall. It even gives the recipe: iron heated with bellows until it glows, then covered with poured molten copper. Who was the Two-Horned One, and what was he locking away?

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