What is the Quran? And What is the Quran Browser?

The Holy Quran is to Muslims what the Bible is to Christians and Jews. It is sacred scripture. For Muslims, the Quran is a transcript of God's words, uttered by his messenger Muhammad the prophet, beginning in what Christians would date as the year 610 A.D. (Jewish year of creation 4370/71).

Despite the Quran's importance for Islam, knowledge of it in the West remains dim at best. The purpose of the Quran Browser is to help fill this gap.

What the Quran Browser does is provide a simple, powerful interface for exploring the Quran in English translation - in a way that's not possible with traditional books. Using the Quran Browser, you can retrieve passages by their sura (i.e., chapter) and ayya (i.e., verse number; e.g., al-Baqara 2:62). You can also retrieve passages by keyword (e.g., righteous), word-part (e.g., eous), or word-pattern (e.g., (bount|plent)eous). You can even do fancy things like perform logical ands, ors, and nots on groups of passages, jump from translation to translation, and restrict your retrievals to individual books or chapters.

Start with the basic interface, and work your way up to the advanced one. You can even incorporate the Quran Browser, indirectly, into your own Web pages, turning your favorite Quranic passages into hypertext links using a special Connector Form.

The Quran Browser caters to all ideological points of view (or to none, depending on how you look at it). Use it for historical or literary research, for education, or for personal study. Even if you're just curious, come and take a look!

Richard L. Goerwitz