Muhammad Muhsin Khan Biography

Dr. Muhammad Muhsin Khan was a Pakistani-Saudi physician, scholar, and translator best known for producing the first complete English translation of Sahih al-Bukhari and for co-translating the Qur'an into English with Shaykh Muhammad Taqi al-Din al-Hilali — a translation widely known as the Hilali-Khan or Noble Qur'an, distributed in millions of copies through the King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Qur'an in Madinah. Born in 1346 AH / 1927 CE in Kasur in the Punjab, his family traced its origins to the Kheshgi Pashtun tribe of Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Trained as a physician, Dr. Khan earned his MBBS from the University of the Punjab in Lahore and a Diploma in Chest Diseases from the University of Wales. He moved to Saudi Arabia in the early years of the kingdom under King Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud and served for fifteen years as Director of El-Sadad Hospital for Chest Diseases in Ta'if before relocating to Madinah, where he became Chief of the Department of Chest Diseases at the King's Hospital and later Director of the Islamic University of Madinah's clinic. Encouraged by Shaykh Ibn Baz to devote his English fluency to the service of Islamic scholarship, he embarked on the translation of Sahih al-Bukhari and the Qur'an under the supervision of the scholars of Madinah.

His nine-volume Sahih al-Bukhari translation became the standard English rendition for generations of English-speaking Muslims and non-Muslim researchers alike. The Hilali-Khan Qur'an, while widely circulated through Saudi state patronage, has also been the subject of scholarly debate over its interpretive approach and parenthetical insertions. Dr. Khan died in Madinah on 14 July 2021 / 1442 AH at the age of 94 and was buried at Jannat al-Baqi'.