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
Had We willed, We would have made of you angels to be successors on earth.
Translation Talal Itani, ClearQuran·Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall1875–1936 · published 1930
And had We willed We could have set among you angels to be viceroys in the earth
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 if we please we can make of you angels in the earth to succeed you
Sources
Translation Edward Henry Palmer, English translation of the Qur'an·Public domain — copyright term expired
If we pleased, verily We could from your selvesproduce angels, to succeed you in the earth
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
Sikur të donim, në vend tuajin do të kishim bërë në Tokë melekë, që t'ju trashëgonin.
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 হে আদম সন্তান! আমি যদি চাইতাম, তবে আমি তোমাদের পরিবর্তে ফিরিশতাদেরকে সৃষ্টি করে (দুনিয়াতে) পাঠাতাম, যারা জমিনে তোমাদের উত্তরাধিকার হতো।
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
A da hoćemo, Mi bismo učinili da vas na Zemlji meleci naslijede.
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
A da hoćemo, Mi bismo učinili da vas na Zemlji anđeli naslijede.
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
Si Moen kaajuno, Min waɗtitirayno on Malaa'ika, ko lomtoo ka leydi.
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 ჩვენ რომ გვენება, დედამიწაზე თქვენს ადგილას ანგელოზებს დავადგენდით, რომლებიც თქვენს ნაცვლად მემკვიდრეები იქნებოდნენ.
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 Wir wollten, könnten Wir euch gewiss zu Engeln machen, die zu Statthaltern auf der Erde würden.
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
Αν θέλουμε, (θα σας καταστρέψουμε όλους και) θα σας αντικαταστήσουμε με Αγγέλους, που θα σας διαδεχτούν στη γη (και θα λατρεύουν τον Αλλάχ χωρίς να αποδίδουν σ' Αυτόν εταίρους στη λατρεία).
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
और यदि हम चाहें तो अवश्य तुम्हारे स्थान पर फ़रिश्तों को बना दें, जो धरती में उत्ताराधिकारी हों।
Translated by Azizul Haq Al-Omari
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.1.5
Italiano · Italian
E se volessimo, avremmo fatto di voi stessi angeli in terra che procreano.
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
60. Ir būtų buvus tokia Mūsų Valia, Mes būtume [sunaikinę jus, (žmones), visus, ir] privertę angelus pakeisti jus žemėje.
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.
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
И если бы Мы пожелали, Мы бы сделали вместо вас ангелов, чтобы они сменили вас на земле.
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
А да хоћемо, Ми бисмо учинили да вас на Земљи наследе анђели;
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 tungelipenda, tungeliwafanyia miongoni mwenu Malaika katika ardhi wakifuatana.
Issued by the Islamic Content Service Association in Languages
From QuranEnc.com, version 1.0.5
Svenska · Swedish
Och om vi hade velat, skulle vi ha satt änglar att efterträda på jorden i ert ställe.
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
Eğer dileseydik, yeryüzünde sizin yerinize geçecek melekler var ederdik.
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
اگر ہم چاہتے تو تمہارے عوض فرشتے کردیتے جو زمین میں جانشینی کرتے.[1]
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.
Easy-read (simplified)waqaaloo a'aalihatunaa khayrun am huwa maa daraboohu laka illaa jadalan bal hum qawmun khasimoon
DIN 31635waqālū ʾaʾālihatunā ḫayrun ʾam huwa mā ḍarabūhu laka ʾillā ǧadalan bal hum qawmun ḫaṣimūna
The translators word this verse differently
Talal Itani2012 They said, "Are our gods better, or he?" They cited him only for argument. In fact, they are a quarrelsome people.
Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall1930 And say: Are our gods better, or is he? They raise not the objection save for argument. Nay! but they are a contentious folk
Edward Henry Palmer1880 and said, 'Are our gods better, or is he?' They did not set it forth to thee save for wrangling. Nay, but they are a contentious people
John Medows Rodwell1861 And they said, "Are our gods or is he the better?" They put this forth to thee only in the spirit of dispute. Yea, they are a contentious people
George Sale1734 and they said, are our gods better, or he? They have proposed this instance unto Thee no otherwise than for an occasion of dispute. Yea, they are contentious men
DIN 31635ʾin huwa ʾillā ʿabdun ʾanʿamnā ʿalayhi waǧaʿalnāhu maṯalan libanī ʾisrāʾīla
Talal Itani2012 He was just a servant whom We blessed, and We made him an example for the Children of Israel.
Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall1930 He is nothing but a slave on whom We bestowed favour, and We made him a pattern for the Children of Israel
Edward Henry Palmer1880 He is but a servant whom we have been gracious to, and we have made him an example for the children of Israel
John Medows Rodwell1861 Jesus is no more than a servant whom we favoured, and proposed as an instance of divine power to the children of Israel
George Sale1734 Jesus is no other than a servant, whom We favoured with the gift of prophecy; and We appointed him for an example unto the the children of Israel
Talal Itani2012 He is a portent of the Hour, so have no doubt about it, and follow Me. This is a straight way.
Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall1930 And lo! verily there is knowledge of the Hour. So doubt ye not concerning it, but follow Me. This is the right path
Edward Henry Palmer1880 And, verily, he is a sign of the Hour. Doubt not then concerning it, but follow this right way
John Medows Rodwell1861 And he shall be a sign of the last hour; doubt not then of it, and follow ye me: this is the right way
George Sale1734 And he shall be a sign of the approach of the last hour; wherefore doubt not thereof. And follow Me: This is the right way
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 —
0.66 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
Talal Itani · George Sale0.80
Talal Itani · John Medows Rodwell0.74
Talal Itani · Edward Henry Palmer0.73
Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall · John Medows Rodwell0.71
Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall · George Sale0.67
Edward Henry Palmer · Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall0.64
Edward Henry Palmer · John Medows Rodwell0.62
Edward Henry Palmer · George Sale0.57
Talal Itani · Mohammed Marmaduke William Pickthall0.57
John Medows Rodwell · George Sale0.52
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.