Sacred-texts Hypertext Bible Islam
Arabic (Unicode) Palmer Part I (SBE06) Palmer Part II (SBE09) Yusuf Ali/Arabic Yusuf Ali English Pickthall Rodwell
The Qur'an (also known as the Koran) is the primary sacred text of Islam. Devout Muslims believe that only an Arabic version of this text is the actual Qur'an, so please be aware of this. This page links together a number of versions of the Qur'an: the text in Unicode, the text in Arabic using embedded gifs with the Yusuf Ali translation, the Yusuf Ali in a standalone English version, the 1880 Palmer English version, the 1876 Rodwell version, and the more recent Pickthall English version. The books of the Qur'an (or Surahs, in Arabic) are given standardized names in this hypertext, consisting of the name of the surah in Arabic and an English translation (where feasible) of the name of the Surah. The Palmer text is a key part of the Sacred Books of the East: it is very definitely in the public domain. The Rodwell text is the other version which is in the public domain; the primary drawback is that the Surahs are not in the usual order: for this reason we have named each file in Rodwell by the canonical number. The Pickthall text is more literary and certainly more readable, and is probably a better version for citation purposes. The Yusuf Ali text is probably the best for modern readers.
Please note that there are alternate titles for several of the Surahs; the titles are not considered part of the canonical, revealed Qur'an. Notably, Surah 17 is known both as Al-Isra, typically translated The Night Journey and Bani Israel, typically translated The Children of Israel.
NAME tags
which you can use to link to specific locations if you wish.
It was not possible to mechanically identify the verse breakdown
in the Palmer and Rodwell text, so it is only possible to link to a particular
Surah of these versions.
The verse anchors are in the format xxx_yyy
where xxx is the three digit
zero-prefixed number of the Surah (shown below in the first column)
and yyy is the three digit zero-prefixed verse number.
Therefore to link to the Pickthall text of Surah 54,
verse 23, you would use the following HTML tag:
If you have any questions about the name of a specific 'anchor' you can view the page source in your browser and find the specific<A HREF="http://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/pick/054.htm#054_023"> . . . </A>
NAME tag fairly easily.
You are welcome to link to these files as much as you want and
don't need to ask permission to do so.