The Arabist

The Arabist

By Issandr El Amrani and friends.

Amazon and the Quran

You might have noticed that automatically generated Amazon book ads on the sidebar of the site. Lately, it's been displaying a Kindle version of the Quran. If you click through, you'll notice that the authors are listed as Muhammad and Gabriel. (The latter is of course a reference to the Archangel Gabriel.) Which seems a bit weird: the author of the Quran, surely, is God. Of course it would then be difficult to say Muhammad was its editor, since it would imply he might have changed God's revelation. But nice to see Amazon recognizes the existence of angels.

And note that when you look at various versions of the Bible available on Amazon, it lists the author as either the editor (which yields funny results sometimes, such as King James) or the religious foundation that produced that particular version. Perhaps, for non-Arabic versions at least, Amazon should stick with the name of the translator.