Abdullah Yusuf Ali (1872-1953) was born in Bombay and educated first at Wilson College there, where a religious education alongside his schooling had him memorise the Qur'an as a boy. A first-class BA in English literature from the University of Bombay in 1891 won him a Presidency scholarship to Britain, where he read law at St John's College, Cambridge, graduating with a BA and LLB in 1895 and returning to India that same year with a post in the Indian Civil Service.
He spent nearly two decades in the ICS — as a magistrate and revenue officer, then as a judge, and later as Deputy Secretary in the Government of India's Finance Department — before resigning in 1914 and settling in Britain. There he became a trustee of the Shah Jehan Mosque in Woking and of the East London Mosque fund, was appointed CBE in 1917 for his wartime work, and lectured in Hindustani at the School of Oriental Studies. He returned to India in the 1920s and 1930s as Principal of Islamia College, Lahore, and it was across these years, more than a decade in the making, that he wrote out the Qur'an in English with his own explanatory notes.
The translation appeared in thirty serial parts between 1934 and 1937, the first issued on 4 April 1934, under the title "The Holy Qur'an: Text, Translation and Commentary," published by Shaik Muhammad Ashraf of Lahore; a combined one-volume edition followed in 1938, with a revised edition in 1939-1940. Alongside Pickthall's, it became one of the two most widely read English Qur'an translations of the twentieth century, known above all for the scale of its footnotes, and has been reissued, and in places reworked by other hands, in some thirty further printings since — including an Amana Publications edition distributed in North America from 1977 and a Saudi-sponsored revision of the 1980s.
What is digitised here, via alquran.cloud, is the translation text itself rather than Yusuf Ali's accompanying commentary, offered in this corpus as a second English companion to [[Q-AR|the Uthmani Arabic text]], alongside [[Q-EN|Pickthall's]] of 1930. It was one of only two English renderings a survey of available translations found unambiguously free to use — Pickthall's and this one — though "unambiguously" needs a caveat here: the work is public domain in the European Union and in Pakistan, where Yusuf Ali died and first published, but a pro-forma copyright registered in the United States in 1996 is held to run there until 2033.