About Divine Discourses
Divine Discourses is a platform for personal, evidence-based study of the Qur'an, in memory of Dr. Irfan Ahmad Khan (1931–2018).
The site is built to serve direct engagement with the Qur'an in the intellectual tradition of Dr. Khan, founding scholar of the Association of Quranic Understanding (quranicunderstanding.com). The lineage referenced is intellectual, not a verified teacher-student chain.
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.
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 ~.
- No commentary is generated. Sources are surfaced, citations linked, and the reader does the engagement.
- Numerical claims that depend on a specific counting rule are marked with the counting note.
- Sources excluded: polemic, anonymous, unsourced, and AI-generated 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
No analytics, no cookies, no tracking. Visitor preferences (depth level, translations, theme) are saved in your browser's local storage, are never sent anywhere, and can be cleared anytime with the Clear preferences button in Settings (the gear icon).
Maintained by
This site is maintained by Saeb, Khan's grandson, with AI coding assistance. Corrections, citations, and source contributions are welcome via the GitHub repository at github.com/saebchicago/qurandiscourses.