The Sacred Books of the East was a general title of a set of 50 volumes of religious texts published between 1879 and 1910, all translated into English by 19th century scholars the supervision of Friederich Max Müller (1823-1900).

Müller (1823-1900) was a German-born Orientalist who lived and studied in England for most of his life. He moved to London in his early twenties to study Sanskrit texts in the collection of the East India Company before joining the University of Oxford. He was elected to a life fellowship at All Souls' College and in 1868 became Oxford's first Professor of Comparative Philology. He resigned from this post to become the general editor of the sacred texts translation project.

This translation of the Quran (1880) was made by the English Orientalist and explorer Edward Henry Palmer (1840-82), then Professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge.