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George Sale
GEORGE SALE, a man of extensive learning, and considerable literary talent, very few particulars have been transmitted to us by his contemporaries. He is said to have been born in the county of Kent, in 1697. His education he received at the King's School, Canterbury. He became a student of the Inner Temple. George Sale was an Orientalist and practicing solicitor, best known for his 1734 translation of the Quran into the English. It is known that he trained as a solicitor in his early years but took time off from his legal pursuits, returning at need to his profession. Sale was an early member of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
Sale became seriously ill for eight days before his death, and died at Surrey Street, The Strand, of fever on November 13, 1736. Sale was buried at St. Clement Danes. His family consisted of a wife and five children.
Sale reputedly spent 25 years in Arabia, thus acquiring his knowledge of the Arabic language and customs; this was the basis of Voltaire's statements in the Dictionnaire Philosophique (articles ‘Alcoran,’ ‘Arot and Marot’). On the other hand Harold Lyon Thomson, writing in the Dictionary of National Biography, stated that he never left his native country.[1]
In 1734, Sale published the translation of the Qur'an, dedicated to John Lord Carteret.
Sale's translation of the Qu'ran has been reprinted into modern times. In January 2007, Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the United States Congress, was sworn in using a 1764 edition of Sale's Qur'an, sold to the Library of Congress in 1815 by Thomas Jefferson.
In November 1733 the first translation of the Quran from Arabic into English — a copy of which Jefferson would eventually purchase — appeared in London. Its author, Sale, had learned Arabic in his spare time and had never visited a Muslim