Early English Qur’an translator was a lay London solicitor

Evidence

As P. M. Holt has pointed out, Sale ‘was the first notable English Arabist who was not in holy orders’. Moreover he was neither an academic nor a traveller. He was a London solicitor, outside the university system, and he learned Arabic from two Syrian Christians in London. Even so, there was a Christian background to Sale’s Orientalism, as he first worked for the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, checking its translation of the New Testament into Arabic before, in 1734, producing a translation of the Qur’an into English. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 212

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the assumption that serious Orientalist scholarship was an academic or clerical monopoly — connects to themes in Reading The Qur’an and the reception-history literature.