Texts of Islam

The Qur'ân, ed. Palmer (SBE9): XXXV. The Chapter of the Angels

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This is a 19th-century English translation of the Qur'an (Surah Fatir, "The Originator"), rendered by E.H. Palmer for Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East series (1880) — a scholarly Victorian project to make non-Christian scriptures accessible to Western readers in a single standardized format. The surah's central theological argument is God's absolute sovereignty and self-sufficiency: He alone creates, sustains, guides, and judges, while all other objects of worship are entirely powerless. A recurring rhetorical pattern pits paired opposites against each other — the living and the dead, light and darkness, the two seas — as evidence that God's distinctions in creation mirror His distinctions in judgment between believers and unbelievers. The text is notably direct about predestination: God "leads astray whom He pleases and guides whom He pleases," rendering the Prophet's warnings effective only for those God has already disposed toward hearing. Judgment scenes are vivid and concrete: the damned cry out from hell to be released and do better, only to be reminded they had a full lifespan and received their warning. Palmer's translation uses archaic English ("ye," "thou," "hath") in keeping with the Victorian convention that elevated religious register, and his footnotes gloss geological and botanical terms with empirical curiosity — marking this as a text shaped as much by the 1880s comparative-religion project as by the source tradition.

The Qur'ân, ed. Palmer (SBE9): XXXV. The Chapter of the Angels

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