Marked words appear in this translation and in no other English translation of this verse. Common small words and older spellings are not marked. The marks show where the wording differs, not where the meaning does.
Talal Itani· published 2012
And when it is said to them, "Believe as the people have believed," they say, "Shall we believe as the fools have believed?" In fact, it is they who are the fools, but they do not know.
Translation Talal Itani, ClearQuran·Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall1875–1936 · published 1930
And when it is said unto them: believe as the people believe, they say: shall we believe as the foolish believe? are not they indeed the foolish? But they know not
Sources
Translation Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran·Public domain — copyright term expired
Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran·1930 translation, digital edition of unverified printing·None — public domain work
·Public domain — copyright term expired·retrieved 24 Aug 2026
Edward Henry Palmer1840–1882 · published 1880
And when it is said to them, 'Believe as other men believe,' they say, 'Shall we believe as fools believe?' Are not they themselves the fools? and yet they do not know
Sources
Translation Edward Henry Palmer, English translation of the Qur'an·Public domain — copyright term expired
And when it is said to them, "Believe as other men have believed;" they say, "Shall we believe as the fools have believed?" Is it not that they are themselves the fools? But they know it not
Sources
Translation John Medows Rodwell, English translation of the Qur'an·Public domain — copyright term expired
And when one saith unto them, believe ye as others believe; they answer, shall we believe as fools believe? Are not they themselves fools? But they know it not
Sources
Translation George Sale, English translation of the Qur'an·Public domain — copyright term expired
George Sale, English translation of the Qur'an·1734 translation, digital edition of unverified printing·None — public domain work
·Public domain — copyright term expired·retrieved 24 Aug 2026
Other languages (18)Shqip · Albanian
E, kur atyre u thuhet: "Besoni edhe ju siç besuan njerëzit e tjerë", ata thonë: "Vallë, të besojmë sikurse mendjelehtët?" Vini re! Mu ata janë mendjelehtët, por nuk e dinë.
Translated by the team of Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.5
বাংলা · Bengali
আর যখন তাদেরকে বলা হয়, ‘লোকেরা (সাহাবীরা) যেরূপ ঈমান এনেছে’, তোমরা তাদের মত ঈমান আনো’ তখন তারা বলে, ‘আমরা কি ঈমান আনব যেমন নির্বোধেরা ঈমান এনেছে’? সাবধান! নিশ্চয় তারাই নির্বোধ; কিন্তু তারা জানে না।
Translated by the team of Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Dawah Association in Rabwah, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.1.2
Bosanski · Bosnian
Kada im se kaže: "Vjerujte kao što ovi ljudi vjeruju!", oni odgovaraju: "Zar da vjerujemo kao što maloumnici vjeruju!?" A doista su oni maloumnici, ali to oni ne znaju!
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 2.0.4
Hrvatski · Croatian
Kada im se kaže: "Vjerujte kao što ovi ljudi vjeruju!" oni odgovaraju: "Zar da vjerujemo kao što maloumnici vjeruju!?" A doista su oni maloumnici, ali to oni ne znaju!
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.1
Fulfulde · Fulani
So ɓe mbi'aama ngoongɗinee wano yimɓe ɓee ngoongɗiniri nii, ɓe mbi'a mbela min ngoongɗinat wano ɗaayɓe ɓee ngoongɗiniri nii, kono ko kamɓe tigi ngoni ɗaayɓe kono ɓe nganndaa.
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.2
ქართული · Georgian
და როცა მათ (თვალთმაქცებს) უთხრეს: «ირწმუნეთ ისე, როგორც ირწმუნა ხალხმა (საჰაბებმა)», მათ მიუგეს: «ნუთუ ვირწმუნებთ ისე, როგორც ირწმუნეს ჭკუასუსტებმა?»... მაგრამ არა, ჭეშმარიტად, სწორედ ისინი არიან ჭკუასუსტები, თუმცა მათ არ იციან (თუ როგორ ცდომილებაში იმყოფებიან).
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.7
Deutsch · German
Und wenn zu ihnen gesagt wird: „Glaubt, wie die Menschen glauben!“, sagen sie: „Sollen wir denn glauben, wie die Toren glauben?“ Gewiss, genau sie sind doch die Toren, jedoch wissen sie (es) nicht.
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.15
Ελληνικά · Greek
Και όταν λέγεται σε αυτούς: «Πιστέψτε, όπως πίστεψαν οι άνθρωποι (οι σύντροφοι του Μωχάμμαντ).» Απαντούν: «Θέλετε να πιστέψουμε όπως πίστεψαν οι ανόητοι;» Μα, στ’ αλήθεια, αυτοί είναι οι ανόητοι, αλλά δεν το γνωρίζουν.
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.2
हिन्दी · Hindi
तथा[6] जब उनसे कहा जाता है : ईमान लाओ जिस तरह लोग ईमान लाए हैं, तो कहते हैं : क्या हम ईमान लाएँ, जैसे मूर्ख ईमान लाए हैं? सुन लो! निःसंदेह वे स्वयं ही मूर्ख हैं, परंतु वे नहीं जानते।
Translated by Azizul Haq Al-Omari
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.1.5
Italiano · Italian
E se veniva detto loro: “Credete come ha creduto la gente”, rispondevano: “Dovremmo credere come hanno creduto i licenziosi?” È certo che sono loro i licenziosi, ma non lo sanno.
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.2
Lietuvių · Lithuanian
13. O kai jiems (veidmainiams) sakoma: „Tikėkite kaip žmonės (Muchammedo ﷺ pasekėjai – Al-Ansar ir Al-Muhadžirūn) patikėjo!”, jie sako: „Argi mes patikėsime kaip kvailiai patikėjo?“ Iš tiesų, kvailiai – jie, bet to nežino.
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.8
Afaan Oromoo · Oromo
Yeroo "akka namoonni (sahaabaan nabi muhammad s.a.w.) amananitti amanaa" isaaniin jedhame "sila nuti akka gowwaaleen amananitti amannaa?" jedhu. Dhagayaa! dhugumatti isaan isaanumatu gowwoota Garuu isaan hin beekan.
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.0
Русский · Russian
А когда им говорят: «Уверуйте, как уверовали люди», они отвечают: «Неужели мы уверуем, как уверовали глупцы?» Знайте же: воистину, они и есть глупцы, но они не знают.
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.1
Српски · Serbian
Када им се каже: "Верујте као што ови људи верују!" Они одговарају: "Зар да верујемо као што малоумници верују!?" А заиста они су малоумници, али они то не знају!
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.4
Kiswahili · Swahili
Na wanapoambiwa: Aminini kama walivyoamini watu. Husema: "Tuamini kama walivyoamini wapumbavu?" Hakika wao ndio wapumbavu, lakini hawajui tu.
Issued by the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.5
Svenska · Swedish
Och när det sägs till dem: ”Anta tron så som andra människor har antagit tron!”, säger de: ”Ska vi tro på det som de dåraktiga tror på?” Nej, det är de själva som är dåraktiga, men de vet det inte.
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.2
Türkçe · Turkish
Onlara: "Siz de insanların iman ettiği gibi iman edin!" denilince; "Akılsızların iman ettiği gibi mi iman edelim?" derler. Dikkat edin! Asıl akılsızlar kendileridir, fakat bilmezler.
Translated by the team of the Rowwad Translation Center, in cooperation with the Rabwah Dawah Association, the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages, and the IslamHouse.com website.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.4
اردو · Urdu
اور جب ان سے کہا جاتا ہے کہ اور لوگوں (یعنی صحابہ) کی طرح تم بھی ایمان لاؤ تو جواب دیتے ہیں کہ کیا ہم ایسا ایمان ﻻئیں جیسا بیوقوف ﻻئے ہیں[1] ، خبردار ہوجاؤ! یقیناً یہی بیوقوف ہیں، لیکن جانتے نہیں۔[2]
Translated by Muhammad Ibrahim Junagarhi, developed under the supervision of the Rowwad Translation Center. The original translation is available for the purpose of expressing opinion, evaluation, and continuous development.
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.1.3
About these translations
5 cleared translations, newest first, by year of publication, so the modern English comes before the historical ones. That is an ordering by date, not a judgement. Each is shown complete — this platform never excerpts a translation — and each renders under its translator's name. No translation here is marked as the correct one.
Which translations appear here is set by copyright: they are the ones whose rights could be documented and cleared. The selection is not a judgement that these are the best.
About easy-read
Easy-read
Easy-read is a simplified pronunciation,
not authoritative — a rule-by-rule romanisation, not a reading.
Each verse ends in its pause form, as it is said when you stop there. Pauses inside a verse and other tajwid rules are not shown. It is derived from the Tanzil
Simple edition, while the Arabic above is the
Uthmani edition; both are cleared, but they are not the
same edition and their orthography differs.
Talal Itani2012 And when they come across those who believe, they say, "We believe"; but when they are alone with their devils, they say, "We are with you; we were only ridiculing."
Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall1930 And when they fall in with those who believe, they say: We believe; but when they go apart to their devils they declare: Lo! we are with you; verily we did but mock
Edward Henry Palmer1880 And when they meet those who believe, they say, 'We do believe;' but when they go aside with their devils, they say, 'We are with you; we were but mocking
John Medows Rodwell1861 And when they meet the faithful they say, "We believe;" but when they are apart with their Satans they say, "Verily we hold with you, and at them we only mock
George Sale1734 When they meet those who believe, they say, we do believe: But when they retire privately to their devils, they say, we really hold with you, and only mock at those people
These figures count the words the translations share. They measure wording, not meaning, and they do not say which translation is right.
Derived measure: mean pairwise Jaccard distance over the
lowercased word sets of the 5 renderings above —
0.46 on a scale
where 0 means identical wording and 1 means no shared words. It is
computed, not judged.
The page says a verse is worded differently only above the cut below. The cut is a stated convention, not a property of the text, and it can be changed.
The cut
0.644
Share of measured verses above it
33%
Verses above it
2,079
Verses measured
6,236
Edward Henry Palmer · George Sale0.61
Talal Itani · George Sale0.58
Edward Henry Palmer · Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall0.52
John Medows Rodwell · George Sale0.52
Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall · George Sale0.50
Talal Itani · Edward Henry Palmer0.45
Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall · John Medows Rodwell0.41
Talal Itani · Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall0.38
Edward Henry Palmer · John Medows Rodwell0.33
Talal Itani · John Medows Rodwell0.30
One bar per pair of renderings, longest bar for the pair
sharing fewest words. Every pair is shown; none is singled out.
Method Wording differences — derived 13 September 2026
Method
Mean pairwise Jaccard distance over the lowercased word sets of the cleared translations of each verse. A verse is marked as worded differently when its score falls in the top third of the corpus — the cut set out in Analysis details.
As at
13 September 2026, 10:56 UTC
Gate
verify/divergence_gate.py re-derives and fails on drift
The platform does not say which is right, and does not
characterise what the difference means. The renderings are placed
together so the difference is visible; reading it is the reader's work.
7 sources
stand behind this page. Each is listed once, in the order the page first
cites it, with the licence it was cleared under and what was actually read.
Nothing on this page rests on a source that is not here.
Source Tanzil Qur'an text (Uthmani) · Uthmani, Version 1.1
Hafs/Kufan verse numbering, 6236 ayahs. The bismillah is delivered as a separate `bismillah` attribute on ayah 1 and is NOT fused into the ayah text. 112 surahs carry one: every surah except al-Fatiha, where the bismillah is ayah 1:1 itself, and at-Tawba, which has none. Sourced from the XML output; the plain-text output of the same release DOES fuse it, which is defect D1.
CLEARED. Licence read verbatim from the block embedded in this very file. Ingested exactly as shipped: no normalisation, no stripping of marks, no Unicode recomposition.
Parsed structurally from the EPUB: an h3 names the surah, one p per verse with its number in its own span. An unnumbered p is the basmala and is not a verse, except in surah 1 where the basmala IS verse 1. 112 unnumbered paragraphs were found, which is 114 surahs less surah 1 and surah 9. Text is stored VERBATIM: NFC normalisation and XML entity unescaping only, because CC BY-ND forbids modification.
CLEARED on a licence read first-hand from the translator's own download page, not from an aggregator. Tanzil also hosts this translation, but under a blanket "non-commercial purposes only" term that directs the user to the translator or publisher for permission - a hosting disclaimer, not a grant - so the grant was taken from the licensor directly. The "God" edition was ingested; ClearQuran also publishes an "Allah" edition, differing in how the divine name is rendered, which is not ingested.
CLEARED ON THE WORK, WITH TWO RECORDED CAVEATS ON THIS COPY. (1) Rights basis is the expired copyright term, NOT the redistributing repository's licence. That repository dedicates its contents to the public domain under the Unlicense while also redistributing plainly in-copyright translations (Abdel Haleem, Saheeh International, The Study Quran), so it is dedicating rights it cannot hold and its blanket grant is not relied upon here. (2) The file declares its own upstream as tanzil.net, and Tanzil attaches a non-commercial condition to its TRANSLATION distributions, though not to its Qur'anic text. Since Pickthall's copyright has expired, nobody holds rights in these words and no licence is required from anyone; Tanzil's terms are a contract binding those who download from Tanzil, which we did not. The chain is nonetheless not spotless and Anwar may prefer a clean digitisation of the 1930 printing. NOT VERIFIED: that this digital text matches the 1930 first printing rather than a later revised edition. No page images were collated. Recorded as unverified rather than presented as established. SERVED TEXT DIFFERS FROM THE CITED FILE AT ONE VERSE, 37:97: the file reads "red-hotfire" (a glued token, also in Gutenberg #16955); the served row reads "red-hot fire", restored 2026-09-13 from Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran (London: George Allen & Unwin, printed for Alfred A. Knopf; 1930), p. 460, XXXVII 97 - scan archive.org in.ernet.dli.2015.216140, PDF page 475; banked data/derivation-sources/pickthall-1930-dli-2015.216140-text.pdf (sha256 70e81146c97fa3a590243a82e04e349108546074787e2551a78c616202138870) on Anwar Malik's grant.
Hafs/Kufan verse numbering, 6236 verses, keyed to mushaf order. The
bismillah is not fused into ayah 1: 1:1 carries it and no other verse
does. Verified against content check C3 at ingest.
CLEARED ON THE WORK. Term expired by every measure. The digital edition's upstream is not stated by the redistributor and the printing is unverified. No statement of purpose is recorded for Palmer because none was sourced from his own preface in this pass; nothing is asserted on his behalf.
Hafs/Kufan verse numbering, 6236 verses, keyed to mushaf order. The
bismillah is not fused into ayah 1: 1:1 carries it and no other verse
does. Verified against content check C3 at ingest.
CLEARED ON THE WORK. Term expired by every measure. TWO edition caveats. (1) The upstream is not stated by the redistributor. (2) Rodwell's own edition PRESENTS THE SURAHS IN HIS OWN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER, not the mushaf order — he says so in his preface. This digital text is keyed to mushaf order, so it derives from a restored-order printing (such as the Everyman edition) rather than from Rodwell's own arrangement. Which printing is not stated and has not been established.
Hafs/Kufan verse numbering, 6236 verses, keyed to mushaf order. The
bismillah is not fused into ayah 1: 1:1 carries it and no other verse
does. Verified against content check C3 at ingest.
CLEARED ON THE WORK. Term expired by every measure. The digital edition's upstream is NOT STATED by the redistributor, so the printing it represents is unverified; Sale's text was reprinted and re-edited many times between 1734 and 1900. Recorded as unverified rather than assumed to be the first edition.
Hafs/Kufan verse numbering, 6236 ayahs. The bismillah is delivered as a separate `bismillah` attribute on ayah 1 and is NOT fused into the ayah text. 112 surahs carry one: every surah except al-Fatiha, where the bismillah is ayah 1:1 itself, and at-Tawba, which has none. Sourced from the XML output; the plain-text output of the same release DOES fuse it, which is defect D1.
CLEARED. Parallel edition, held in ayah_text_variants. It sits alongside the Uthmani spine for search normalisation and is never used to correct it.