Divine Discourses

About Divine Discourses

Divine Discourses is a platform for personal, evidence-based study of the Qur'an: read each surah as one coherent discourse, verify every claim against a labeled source, and build your own understanding directly from the text.

The site's coherence-based method draws on the Association of Quranic Understanding (quranicunderstanding.com) and the wider Farahi-Islahi-Mir tradition of reading each surah as a unified composition. The lineage referenced is intellectual, not a verified teacher-student chain.

Completely new to the Qur'an?

Welcome — no background is assumed here. The Qur'an is composed of 114 units called surahs, from a few lines to many pages long. This site's premise is that each surah reads best as one coherent discourse — a single address with a beginning, a claim, and a resolution — rather than as a string of isolated quotations. That is a claim you can test for yourself, whatever you believe: pick a short surah on the Read page (al-'Asr, at three verses, takes a minute), read it whole, and see whether it holds together as one argument. Every number and label you meet along the way links to its source, so nothing asks to be taken on trust.

About Dr. Khan

Dr. Irfan Ahmad Khan (1931–2018) was born in India. A science graduate of Aligarh Muslim University, he studied Qur'an and classical Arabic at Rampur before completing an MA in philosophy in 1958. He taught Western philosophy, Indian religions, and Muslim theology in India from 1958 to 1973, and edited the journal Islamic Thought in the early 1960s. He moved to the United States in 1974 for doctoral work at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was a founding trustee of the Parliament of the World's Religions and of the International Committee for the Peace Council, and founding president of the World Council of Muslims for Interfaith Relations. He directed the Association of Quranic Understanding, where his weekly tafsir lessons and published writings developed a coherence-based reading of the Qur'an.

His published works in English include Reflections on the Qur'an (Islamic Foundation UK, 2005), an exegetical study of the first two chapters, and An Exercise in Understanding the Qur'an (Association for Quranic Understanding, 2013, ISBN 9781567447736), an outline study of the last thirty surahs that demonstrates his coherence-based method across a substantial portion of the text. The 2013 work carries a foreword by Mustansir Mir, author of Coherence in the Qur'an and a leading English-language scholar of the Farahi-Islahi exegetical tradition.

Why this exists

Khan emphasized that every reader builds their own direct and personal relationship with the Qur'an. He did not place himself within a single school. He drew on coherence-based reading developed by Farahi, Islahi, and Mir, on classical tafsir, on linguistic and historical scholarship, and on decades of his own reading. He taught that the Qur'an speaks to every human being, and that the believer's task is to engage it directly.

Every believer builds his or her own direct and personal relationship with the Book. From Irfan Ahmad Khan, Reflections on the Qur'an (Islamic Foundation UK, 2005). ●

This site gathers tools that support that engagement: roots, words, structure, patterns, frequency, and translation comparison. Every claim is labeled so readers can calibrate their confidence and triangulate independently.

Editorial standards

• Every claim is labeled ●, ○, or ~.
• Interpretation remains the reader's work. Sources are surfaced, citations linked, and no verse is told what it means. Where the site does curate — grouping roots under theme titles, offering short working glosses — that curation is editorial, and it is labeled Nuanced rather than presented as data.
• Numerical claims that depend on a specific counting rule are marked with the counting note.
• Sources excluded: polemic, anonymous, and unsourced commentary.

The name

"Divine Discourses" follows Khan's translation of khitab (plural khitabat) as God's address to the hearer, the unit he held to be the proper basis of Qur'anic reading.

Privacy and data

No analytics, no cookies, no tracking. Visitor preferences (depth level, translations, theme), reading progress, a cache of already-fetched verse text, pinned references, reader-authored worksheets, and study notes are saved in your browser's local storage and are never sent by this site. They are deliberately kept in separate stores so clearing display settings cannot erase writing unexpectedly.

Three outside services can be contacted, and only these three. Verse text and translations come from api.alquran.cloud. Word-by-word meanings, when you open them, come from api.quran.com. Recitation audio is streamed from cdn.islamic.network. Nothing else is permitted: the site's content security policy names exactly these hosts, so a fourth would be blocked by your browser rather than silently allowed. Like any direct web request, each provider receives technical connection information such as your IP address and browser headers. What the request carries is the surah, verse, selected edition, or chosen reciter, and nothing else: not your notes, not your preferences, not your reading history. Previously loaded passages are cached in your browser, and the bundled Arabic word data provides a limited offline fallback. You can use the site's bundled research pages without enabling accounts, analytics, or advertising services because none exist.

Trust, access, and accountability

Trust should be inspectable, not requested. Use the routes below to verify the work, ask for correction, or report a barrier. This is a young, single-maintainer project; these are public commitments, not a claim of independent certification.

Accessibility statement

The intended baseline is WCAG 2.2 Level AA and an equivalent core study journey for keyboard, screen-reader, low-vision, reduced-motion, mobile, and low-bandwidth readers. The site uses semantic landmarks, a skip link, keyboard-operable navigation, visible focus, self-hosted fonts, and text alternatives alongside many data views. A subset of this is enforced mechanically on every change: the repository's browser audit checks each page's rendered markup for a sound heading outline, a programmatic label on every form control, no keyboard traps inside hidden regions, image text alternatives, and a 4.5:1 contrast ratio for every text color in every palette, in light and dark. The project has still not completed an independent conformance audit; charts, mixed Arabic/English reading order, dynamic citations, and high zoom remain priority manual-test areas.

If something prevents study, please report the barrier. The maintainer aims to acknowledge access-blocking and source-integrity reports within two working days, then publish a fix, workaround, or candid status update within ten working days. These targets may be revised transparently as the project's capacity changes.

Mission

Divine Discourses exists so that anyone — an independent student of the Qur'an, a teacher preparing a lesson, a skeptical reader who wants claims they can check — can engage the text directly, one surah at a time, with structural evidence they can verify rather than assertions they must trust. The outcome it works toward is simple to state: readers equipped to test the coherence of a discourse for themselves, with every supporting figure traceable to a named source.

The site is built to last cheaply and openly: static pages, data bundled with the code, near-zero hosting cost, everything under an open-source license. It is also honest about what it is today — a young project with a single maintainer. Against that, its method and every build step are documented in a public maintainer's guide written so that any future contributor could carry it forward.

Citing this site

Every page footer has a Cite link that produces a ready-made reference for that page in Chicago, APA, and BibTeX form, including the release version. To cite the site as a whole:

Divine Discourses, version 1.2.0. 2026. https://divinediscourses.org.

Machine-readable citation metadata lives in CITATION.cff, and citations.bib carries BibTeX for the site, each downloadable dataset, and all the works the site itself cites. Cite computed figures with the release version: the datasets are regenerated deterministically, so a version names an exact set of numbers. The underlying corpora keep their own citations, listed in full on Sources.

Contribute

What this project needs is not money but careful work, and three kinds especially. Corrections — if any claim, citation, or count on this site is wrong, say so via GitHub issues; every correction is logged publicly on the changelog. Transcription — Khan's published outlines cover the last thirty surahs (85 to 114), and most still await careful transcription into the exercises. Each outline is one entry in data/exercises.json, transcribed from the book and never paraphrased, so every exercise stays traceable to its published source. Scholarly review — if you work in Qur'anic studies or Arabic linguistics and are willing to review the site's method pages against their sources, that scrutiny would be received with gratitude and acted on in public.

Maintained by

This site is designed and maintained by Saeb, Khan's grandson, in his memory. Corrections, citations, and source contributions are welcome via the GitHub repository at github.com/saebchicago/qurandiscourses.