[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.
According to his introduction, Dawood decided to "ignore the division of the tales into nights" and removed the poems because he thought they were "devoid of literary merit".
Geert Jan van Gelder, Professor Emeritus at the University of Oxford and an expert on Classical Arabic literature, has called Dawood's translation "unsatisfactory, to put it mildly".
[5] Lane and E. V. Rieu, the editor of Penguin Classics, proposed a new translation of the Koran, which at that time was largely unknown to British readers.
[7] Dawood greatly admired the Koran's eloquence and powerful rhetoric, describing it in his introduction as "not only one of the most influential books of prophetic literature but also a literary masterpiece in its own right"[8] and his translation endeavoured to do justice to both.
Dawood has also edited and abridged the Muqaddimah of the great philosopher-historian Ibn Khaldun, published by Princeton University Press, and described by Mark Zuckerberg as "one of the 23 books everyone should read".