Divine Discourses

Credits

A one-screen summary of what built this site. For the full reference list, see Sources.

Data

  • Quranic Arabic Corpus v0.4 (Leeds). Kais Dukes, 2009–2017. Morphological annotation of all 77,429 word-units. GPL licensed. corpus.quran.com
  • Tanzil Uthmani Arabic text (Version 1.1). Bundled with this site as a verbatim copy of Tanzil's own file. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, verbatim copies only, notice retained: Tanzil's terms on the Arabic text itself, not on the English translations below.
  • English translations. Served via the same API, each from its own original publisher or rights holder — Saheeh International, Pickthall, Yusuf Ali, and the others listed in full on Sources. The API states no blanket license for these editions; where a translation's own publication states one (public domain, for the older ones), it is recorded there per edition rather than assumed here.
  • Egyptian Standard (Cairo 1924) revelation order. Public-domain reference for the four-period chronology.

Audio

  • Recitation audio. Served per verse by Islamic Network's CDN (cdn.islamic.network) and streamed directly by the reader's browser; this site stores and redistributes none of it. Five reciters are offered — Mahmoud al-Husary, Mohamed al-Minshawi, Abdul Basit, Sudais, and Shuraim — chosen from the microphone button beside any verse. The recordings' own licensing is the CDN's to state, not this project's, and it has not stated it: ○ Pending until it does. See Sources.
  • Word timings. ~ The word highlighted as a verse is recited on Read comes from quran-align by Collin Fair, whose data files are licensed CC BY 4.0. They were made for the everyayah.com recordings, so they are used only for a reciter whose timings are measured to fit the recordings Read plays. At present none of the five passes that test (see data/recitation/word-timings-report.json), so no words are highlighted for any reciter.
  • English translation audio. The English leg of Listen mode on the Read page. The edition is en.walk, which alquran.cloud's registry names “Ibrahim Walk”, read verse by verse — checked against the API on 16 September 2026, and served by the CDN from its 192 kbps directory. Ibrahim Walk's recording reads Saheeh International: the same registry says so of a companion edition that names him, and everyayah.com, a separate site that also hosts per-ayah recitation audio, files it under a directory named for that translation — both checked the same day. Not yet established is that the CDN's en.walk file is that same recording (its clips differ in size from everyayah.com's), so Read does not pair it with Saheeh International automatically. Also not established is the licensing: neither the registry nor the CDN states who holds the recording or on what terms, so this project credits no one for it and claims no license. The Sources entry stays ○ Pending on that ground alone.

Scholarly lineage

  • Hamid al-Din al-Farahi (1863–1930). Founder of the coherence-based (nazm) reading tradition.
  • Amin Ahsan Islahi (1904–1997). Student of Farahi, author of Tadabbur-i-Qur'an.
  • Mustansir Mir. Leading English-language scholar of Farahi-Islahi coherence reading. Coherence in the Qur'an, American Trust Publications. Wrote the foreword to Khan's 2013 An Exercise.
  • Irfan Ahmad Khan (1931–2018). Founding director of the Association of Quranic Understanding. The principal influence behind this site.

Typography

Typefaces are self-hosted rather than loaded from a font CDN, so each is redistributed with the site under its own license, with the license text bundled beside the font files — see NOTICE.md.

Build

  • Static site, hosted on Netlify.
  • Build script written in Node.js with no external dependencies. See scripts/build-leeds.js.
  • Site source: github.com/saebchicago/qurandiscourses.
  • Designed and maintained by Saeb, Dr. Khan's grandson.

Contributors

Everyone whose accepted work shapes the site, from data/contributors.json. Your name lands here with your first merged contribution; see Contribute.

  • Saeb A. Ahsan: Maintainer; transcription of Dr. Khan's published outlines and glosses

Privacy

  • Page visits are counted with privacy-restricted Google Analytics, which you can turn off. See Analytics.
  • Preferences, reading progress, passage cache, pinned references, reader-authored worksheets, and study notes are saved in the browser's local storage and are not sent by the site. Each reader-authored store has its own clear control so changing display settings cannot erase writing unexpectedly.
  • The site makes API calls to alquran.cloud for verse text and translations, and streams recitation audio per verse from cdn.islamic.network as it plays — including, in the Read page's Listen mode, one request per verse for as long as the sitting runs. Requests contain the selected passage, edition, and reciter, not notes or preferences; as with any direct web request, the provider receives connection data such as the visitor's IP address and browser headers. See Privacy and data.