Divine Discourses

2026

July

• Arabic word display corrected sitewide. The Buckwalter→Arabic conversion table (scripts/build-leeds.js) was missing 14 characters used by the Leeds corpus's extended Quranic-Uthmani encoding (^ # : @ " [ ; , . ! - + %). Unmapped characters had been passed through literally instead of becoming the diacritic they stood for, so roughly 15% of words sitewide displayed a stray ASCII character in place of a mark — for example al-Fatihah 1:7 read "ٱلضَّا^لِّينَ" instead of "ٱلضَّآلِّينَ" wherever word-by-word Arabic is shown (Read at Scholar depth, Roots' derived-forms panel, Numbers' fawatih list). The 14-character mapping was verified byte-for-byte against an independent conversion script for the identical source file before being applied. 11,434 morphology word entries and 215 root-summary lemma entries were corrected; data/roots-index.json, data/root-analytics/, and data/rhetorical-features.json were regenerated from the corrected data.
• Word-token count corrected. 77,430 to 77,429 on Sources, Credits, and README. The Leeds corpus total is 77,429 tokens, of which 49,967 carry a root (the rest are particles, pronouns, and other unrooted forms); Roots' per-root count explainer previously conflated "total tokens searched" with "rooted tokens" and has been reworded to state both figures.
• Site renamed to "Divine Discourses." "Discourses" renders Khan's translation of khitab, speaker-to-hearer address; "Divine" makes explicit what was previously one click deep on About — that the khitab in question is God's address to the hearer. Applied across every page's title, header, and footer. The deployed domain and GitHub repository name are unchanged.
• Themes expanded from 10 to 33 life-theme gateways. Added gratitude, guidance and light, fear and hope, truthfulness and falsehood, charity, death, paradise, hellfire, wisdom, pilgrimage, fasting, anger and restraint, love, trust in God, arrogance and humility, brotherhood and community, sincerity, tyranny, covenant and fulfillment, effort and striving, certainty and doubt, joy and sorrow, and blessing. Every root was checked against data/roots-summary.json before being added, and every theme was confirmed to compute at least two passages under the site's existing lexical-clustering rule.
• Two long-standing citations made browsable. Patterns' "direct address... in 89 verses" and Numbers' "29 surahs... 14 unique [fawatih] combinations" had been cited but never shown. Both are now computed mechanically from the bundled morphology (literal lemma and part-of-speech matching, not interpretation) via a new scripts/build-rhetorical-features.mjs, and both computed totals matched the existing citations exactly before the reveal-lists shipped. Patterns also gained a per-surah browser for the existing Mishkat cross-reference data, previously only visible one verse at a time on Read.
• Local reading-progress memory added. The existing browser-only preferences object now also remembers last-read verse position and which exercises have been attempted, surfaced as a dismissible "continue where you left off" card on the homepage. Same privacy posture as every other preference: never transmitted, cleared by the existing "Clear preferences" button.
• Duplicate citation-popover bug fixed. assets/app.js carried a second, independent implementation of the citation-badge popover that duplicated assets/cite-badge.js and bound to the same badges. Clicking any citation badge briefly opened two overlapping popovers; the dead app.js copy has been removed.
• UI restructure for AQU launch. Primary nav consolidated from 14 pills into four accessible dropdown groups (Study, Analyze, Learn, About). Homepage inverted: Ask search above the fold with rotating example placeholders; interstitial "This is not Google" tour modal removed. Read page opens to a welcome card with example entry links instead of a cold error. Validation gains a "How we verify" block with one worked example per label type (Verified, Pending, Nuanced) reusing published claims from Numbers and Sources.
• Glossary expanded. Four terms added: root, morphology, triangulate, period distribution. Each is now available inline site-wide via the tap-and-keyboard popover. Coherence registered as an alias to the existing nazm entry.
• Organization name standardized on "of." References throughout the site now read "Association of Quranic Understanding," matching the organization's page title, its website at quranicunderstanding.com, and the audit brief for this launch. Supersedes the May decision to standardize on "for." The book-publisher citation in the biographical section of the About page and in the al-Asr exercise attribution has been updated in kind; the ISBN registration itself is unchanged.
• Passage Compare added. Compare page gains a Passages mode alongside the existing Roots mode. Select two or three passages (surah + verse range up to 30 ayat each) and load to see side-by-side Arabic text, one translation, and a shared-roots table sorted by frequency. Very common roots (corpus total > 1,000) are excluded by default with a toggle to include them. Method disclosure: "Computed from Leeds Quranic Arabic Corpus v0.4: roots present in each selected passage, intersected. Lexical overlap only; shared vocabulary does not by itself establish thematic connection." Shareable URL encodes passage references (e.g. ?mode=passages&p1=2:255&p2=59:22-24).

May

• Surah length statistics corrected. Mean updated from 54.6 to 54.7 verses per surah. Median updated from 30 to 39 verses. Both errors traced to incorrect aggregation method; recomputed directly against Leeds corpus.
• y-w-m count reframed as Nuanced. Earlier showed 475; corpus.quran.com lists 405 for the nominal yawm, while broader counts including the compound yawma-idhin reach 475. Both counts now shown with explanation.
• k-w-n count corrected. 1,361 to 1,390 after triangulation against corpus.quran.com via multiple independent lookups.
• r-b-b count corrected. 975 to 980 after corpus.quran.com triangulation.
• b-h-r count corrected. 41 to 42 after Leeds verification.
• Iltifat attribution expanded. The al-Fatihah 1:5 grammatical shift note now credits classical attestation in al-Suyuti's al-Itqan alongside modern scholarship by Abdel Haleem (BSOAS 1992). Earlier version credited Haleem only.
• Organization name reviewed. The parent organization uses both "Association of Quranic Understanding" (in its page title and some documents) and "Association for Quranic Understanding" (on its banner and in most published references). Independent obituaries unanimously use "for." The site previously claimed to standardize on "of"; the more honest treatment is to note the variation. References on this site now use "Association for Quranic Understanding," matching the more common external usage.
• Khan biography expanded. The About page now documents Khan's full academic and interfaith record: Aligarh and Rampur education, UIC doctoral work, Parliament of the World's Religions trusteeship, WCMIR presidency, AQU directorship.
• Khan's 2013 work added. An Exercise in Understanding the Qur'an (AQU, ISBN 9781567447736) now cited alongside Reflections on the Qur'an. Foreword by Mustansir Mir noted.
• Leeds Corpus bundled. 6,236 verses, 77,430 words, 1,642 roots now available as static JSON. Word-by-word morphology live on Read at Scholar depth. GPL compliance via NOTICE.md.
• Site launch. Initial deployment of 13 pages.