Divine Discourses

Toward direct engagement with the Qur'an

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-tokens. GPL licensed. corpus.quran.com
  • Tanzil Uthmani text and translations. Served via the alquran.cloud API. CC BY-ND 3.0.
  • Egyptian Standard (Cairo 1924) revelation order. Public-domain reference for the four-period chronology.
  • Mishkat Mutashabihat corpus. Alhassan777 / Threadwork. Verse-to-verse cross-reference data drawn from 13 classical Islamic books of mutashabihat scholarship (1,905 verse nodes, 3,294 directed edges). Stored in this site as data/qursim/, a legacy folder name kept from an earlier citation of the QurSim corpus (Sharaf and Atwell, LREC 2012); QurSim's canonical source (corpus.quran.com/qursim.jsp) is no longer accessible, so the data was replaced with Mishkat's. See Sources for the full note. License pending: not published in the source repository at time of writing. github.com/Alhassan777/Mishkat

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

  • No analytics. No tracking. No cookies.
  • 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. Requests contain the selected passage and edition, 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.