Laleh Bakhtiar

Iranian-American Islamic and Sufi scholar, author, translator, and psychologist noted as the first American woman to translate the Quran into English. She produced a gender-neutral translation, The Sublime Quran, and challenged the status quo on the Arabic word daraba, traditionally translated as "beat" — a word that she said has been used as justification of abuse of Muslim women.

Bakhtiar married her Iranian husband, architect Nader Ardalan, in 1960, while she was a nondenominational Christian; she eventually converted to Islam in 1964. She eventually divorced Ardalan in 1976 and returned to the U.S. in 1988, where she received her Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico in educational psychology. She moved to Chicago in 1992, and was a Nationally Certified Counselor. She died on 18 October 2020 at age 82 in Chicago from myelodysplastic syndrome. Her older brother was Jamshid Bakhtiar (1934-2022), better known as Jim, a psychiatrist.