this nature." (1) Worse than this, du Ryer wrote an epistle to the reader by way of introduction in which he discussed what he conceived to be the "absurdities" of the Qur’ân, with the avowed objective "that the knowledge of what is contained in this Book, will render that Law contemptible." (2) And because of this objective of the work Alexander Ross made from it the first English translation which was published just two years afterwards, in 1649. Ross’s objective and his adoption of du Ryer’s translation are clearly stated in the title of the translation itself which runs as: The Alcoran of Mahomet, Translated out of the Arabique into French by the Sieur du Ryer, Lord of Malezair, and Resident for the King of France, at Alexandria. And newly Englished, for the satisfaction of all that desire to look into the Turkish vanities. This English translation of Ross was still worse than the French original which he translated. To quote Sale again, Ross, "being utterly unacquainted with the Arabic, and no great master of the French, has added a number of fresh mistakes of his own to those of du Ryer, not to mention the meanness of his language ... " (3) The French translation of du Ryer also fathered a version in Dutch by Glazemaker, published in 1658, another in German by Lange, published in 1688 and another in Russian by Postnikov and Veryovkin, all of which were printed several times throughout the seventeenth century and after.

Thus for more than five hundred years, from the middle of the 12 th to the end of the 17 th century, there were only two basic translations of the Qur’ân, the one in Latin by Robert Ketenensis (1143) and the other in French by du Ryer (1647) from which other translations were made into Italian, German, Dutch, English and Russian. Both these two basic translations and those that emanated from them are, by the admissions of subsequent orientalists themselves, not worth the name of translations and are grossly incorrect and faulty, being vitiated by omissions, commissions and transpositions. All these were also professedly aimed at