This page sets out how the material on this site is produced, where it comes from, and what we do when we get something wrong.
The Qur’anic text is never edited
The Arabic, the transliteration and both English translations are reproduced exactly as published. They are not corrected, modernised, abridged or paraphrased. If you find a discrepancy between what appears here and a printed edition, that is a fault worth reporting and we will investigate it.
The Arabic is the Uthmani text from Tanzil. The English is Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s original 1934–1938 translation and Marmaduke Pickthall’s of 1930, both in the public domain.
The introductions are original writing
Everything above the verses on a surah page — the introduction — is written for this site. It is clearly separated from the translated text so that no reader can mistake one for the other.
Introductions aim to do four things: say what the surah is about, place it in the chronology of revelation, describe how it is structured, and point out what is distinctive about it. They are written for a general reader rather than for specialists.
How disagreement is handled
Classical scholars did not agree about everything, including basic questions such as whether a given surah is Meccan or Medinan. Where a genuine disagreement exists, the introduction says so and identifies the majority position rather than presenting one view as settled fact.
Where an interpretation is contested, it is attributed rather than asserted. “Commentators have held” means something different from “this means,” and the distinction is kept deliberately.
What this site does not do
- It does not issue fatwas or religious rulings.
- It does not adjudicate between schools of law or theology.
- It does not claim that any English rendering is the Qur’an. A translation is a translation.
- It does not present its introductions as scholarship, peer-reviewed or otherwise.
Corrections
Errors of fact, mistranslation of a classical source, or a misplaced attribution are worth fixing and will be fixed on the page itself rather than quietly overwritten. If you find one, we would rather hear about it than not.
Independence
The site may carry advertising to cover its costs. Advertising has no influence on what is written or how. No sponsored content is published, and no advertiser sees an introduction before it goes up.
Typographical corrections to the translations
The Arabic text is never altered. The English translations are reproduced as their translators wrote them, and we do not modernise, paraphrase or soften them.
One narrow exception exists, and we record it here rather than leave it unstated. The digitised texts we build from occasionally carry a scanning error, and where a reading is plainly a corruption rather than a translator’s choice, we restore what the translator actually published. We have made exactly one such correction. At 78:40 our source read “Would that I were (metre) dust”; Yusuf Ali wrote “(mere) dust”, an interpolation he uses in the same way elsewhere, including at 96:2. The word metre occurs nowhere else in his translation. A scan of all 6,236 verses found no other defect of this kind.
If you find a reading that looks wrong, please tell us. We would rather be corrected than be quietly inaccurate.