The Quran Made Easy

Essentially, this work is the English version of Mahmudul Hasan’s and Shabbir Ahmad Usmani’s Tafsir-i Usmani in Urdu, and hence a representative Deobandi interpretation of the Qur’an. It is worth adding that the Tafsir-i Usmani itself is an updated and expanded version of Shah [Abd al-Qadir’s Muwaddih al-Qur’an (see my review of its English version The Noble Quran, Lahore, Pakistan, Aalameen Publications, 1994 in the MWBR, 18:3, Spring 1998, pp. 12–18). Shah [Abd al-Qadir was an illustrious son of the renowned Islamic scholar and Sufi revivalist Shah Waliullah, thus the pedigree of this work is impeccably sound, rooted deep into the mainstream Qur’anic scholarship of the Indian subcontinent. This work has been rendered into English by Ismail Ebrahim and Mufti Elias, two traditional scholars based in South Africa, and is published from Pakistan, underscoring as it does the depth and the geographical spread of the Deobandi school.