It is the accepted scholarly transliteration.
What a buch of concocted BS. The following are from a
brief search on the Koran.
From the Havard Classis Series
Harvard Classics, Vol. 45, Part 5
Chapters from the
Koran
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"The Essential
Koran
Thomas Cleary"
["Thomas Cleary Holding a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University, he is the translator of over fifty volumes of Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, and Islamic texts from Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, Pali and Arabic- including the best-selling Art of War."]
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The Origins of the Koran:
Classic Essays on Islam's Holy Book
Edited by Ibn Warraq; Prometheus Books, 1998
Summarised by Sharon Morad, Leeds
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"
What the Koran Really Says: Language, Text and Commentary
by Ibn Warraq (Editor), Ibn Warraq (Translator)"
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My Mercy Encompasses All
The Koran's Teachings on Compassion, Peace & Love
Shah-Kazemi, Reza (COM)
Berry, Wendell (FRW)
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The Origins of the Koran
Classic Essays on Islam's Holy Book
Warraq, Ibn (EDT)
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The Encyclopaedia of Islam. Leiden: Brill, 1960--
A comprehensive, scholarly examination of the "Kur`an" covering the derivation of the term "kur`an" itself, Muhammad, the history of
The Koran, its structure, the chronology of the text, its language and style, literary forms and major themes,
The Koran in Muslim life and thought, and a bibliography.
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The Koran Interpreted: A Translation
by A J Jarthur John Arberry
This classic, authoritative translation brings the full meaning and power of the sacred book of Islam to Western readers. "Certainly the most beautiful English version, and among those by non-Muslim translators, the one that comes closest to conveying the impressions made on Muslims by the original".--Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Harvard University.
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And just for kicks, from two newspapers
The Washington Times ;
... accidentally stepped on a prisoner's
Koran, copies of Islam's holy text got wet when guards tossed water balloons ... according to the final results of a Pentagon probe. But the investigation ... press about desecration of the Koran here found no credible evidence ... interrogators ever ...
The Washington Post
The U.S. military released new details yesterday about five confirmed cases of U.S. personnel mishandling the Koran at the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, acknowledging that soldiers and interrogators kicked the Muslim holy book, got copies wet, stood on a
Koran during an interrogation and inadvertently sprayed urine on another copy.
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So, while it may be spelled "Qur'an" in some texts, as well as several other ways, it is by no means "
the accepted scholarly transliteration." There is no single accepted scholarly transliteration.
This means it is part of a system by which a person could reconstruct the original Arabic spelling from the English transliteration. And the system is such that a knowledgeable English speaker could produce a pronunciation approximating the standard Arabic just by looking at the transliteration.
Sorry, but there's good disagreement, and from an expert no less.
From Edward M. Cook Ph.D., a doctor of philology, who looked into this very issue
Strictly speaking, a transliteration "Quran" seems at first glance linguistically correct. The root of the word is cognate to Hebrew קרא, and both roots refer to (among other things) reading or audible recitation. The qur'aan is the "reading," that which is read or recited (compare Hebrew מקרא, miqra, "that which is read," the Bible).
Nevertheless, the Arabic sound conventionally transliterated as "Q" indicates a phonemic contrast (to Arabic "K") that does not exist in English. In fact, in English, the grapheme QU always indicates the phonetic sequence /kw/, and English speakers are going to want to import that /kw/ pronunciation into the spelling "Quran," leading to the monstrosity /kwuran/ or the like.
Therefore, to better approximate the actual pronunciation of the word, I wish they would settle on the older standard spelling "Koran." In English, the Arabic /q/ and /k/ are both adequately signaled by English K. And after all, English is what we're speaking here, right? We don't refer to certain foreign capitals as Moskva, Yerushalayim, Bruxelles, or Roma. Nor should we adopt the spelling Quran for the Islamic scripture."
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