N.J. Dawood

Nessim Joseph Dawood (27 August 1927 – 20 November 2014) was an Iraqi translator, who is best known for his translation of the Quran. Nessim Joseph Dawood was born in Baghdad to a Jewish family.[1] His family name was Yehuda, but in the Iraqi tradition his legal name consisted of his own given name, plus those of his father and paternal grandfather, “Nessim Yousef [Joseph] David.” He changed "David" to "Dawood" when he was granted British nationality in the 1940s. His nom de plume was N.J. Dawood. Bilingual in Arabic and English, he started tutoring schoolmates in English. He came to England as an Iraq state scholar in 1945, and studied English Literature and Classical Arabic at the University of London in the first cohort of students to resume normal university studies after the Second World War