ABSTRACT
This research explores the ideological implications of the first translation of the Koran into English, Alexander Ross’s The Alcoran of Mahomet. The major argument is that Ross’s translation was made out of resentment with the Commonwealth government, most notably Oliver Cromwell with whom the translator settles account for his beheading of Charles I, who offered him royal patronage. Deploying a historicist-dialogic approach inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin’s Dostoevsky’s Poetics and Rabelais and his World, we contend that Ross polemically makes Oliver Cromwell wear the Prophet Muhammed’s mantel and “sword of Islam” to discredit him as a heretic, a “cobbler” of an illegitimate government guilty of regicide.
Keywords: Alexander Ross, Oliver Cromwell, the Prophet Muhammed, Polemics.