Yusuf Ali's work and affiliations solidify his place as a giant of his time. “Ask any English-speaking Muslim what translation and commentary of the Quran they originally studied, and the chances are that it was the one by Abdullah Yusuf Ali,” writes a commentator. More than 200 editions of it have been published so far, making it perhaps the most read commentary in any non-Arabic language. Generations of Muslims in English-speaking countries have grown up reading Yusuf Ali’s interpretation of the Quran. “It pains me to think that so able and eminent a gentleman should have met with so pathetic an end,” Mirza Abul Hassan Ispahani, Pakistan’s High Commissioner in London, wrote in a letter to his prime minister two days later. When the news reached Pakistan’s embassy in London, it dispatched someone to pay for his last rites. He died alone, homeless, and with no one by his side. That man was Abdullah Yusuf Ali, the famous 20th-century translator of the Quran.
He was in a delirious state and died a day later on December 10. On a frigid December morning in 1953, a policeman found a half-conscious old man slumped on a street bench in the Westminster area of London. Abdullah Yusuf Ali wrote perhaps the most famous translation of the Quran but he also supported the British against the Ottomans and died a lonely man.
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