Tanzil Project

From Tanzil

Tanzil is a quranic project launched in early 2007 to produce a highly verified precise quran text to be used in quranic websites and applications. Our mission in the Tanzil project is to produce a standard quran text and serve as a reliable source for this standard text on the web.

Contents 1 Why Tanzil? 2 Typos in the existing quran texts 3 How precise is Tanzil text? 4 Do you need to replace your text? 5 Who is using Tanzil?

Why Tanzil?

Since the appearance of the first digital copy of the holy quran, there has been substantial efforts to produce an accurate quran text in a simple script, but due to some difficulties (some of which are mentioned below), these efforts have been unsuccessful in many of the cases, and unfortunately, the simple quran texts currently used in the majority of quranic websites and applications have lots of errors and typos.

The erroneous quran texts have been so rapidly spread over the Internet that nowadays finding the correct form of quranic verses has become almost impossible without referring to a verified printed manuscript. For example, if one searches Google for the verse 38 of Sura Al-Ghalam which reads إِنَّ لَكُمْ فِيهِ لَمَا تَخَيَّرُونَ, the first result that he or she will get is a wrong form ending with the word يَتَخَيَّرُونَ as shown in the picture to the right.

This terrible situation made us to launch the Tanzil project to produce a highly verified error-free quran text, and make this text available to the quranic websites and applications to prevent further spreading of the erroneous quran texts.

Typos in the existing quran texts

Many of the quran texts publicly available on the web suffer from lots of typos, mainly due to the following facts:

Missing Diacritics

A popular quran text which is widely used in websites and applications is based on an old diacritic-less copy of the quran into which diacritics are manually added over time by some volunteers. Unfortunately, the diacritics added to this text are incomplete and have tons of typos.

Text Conversion

Printed copies of the holy quran are usually published in Uthmani script, while electronic copies of the quran are commonly prepared in the simple (Imla'ei) script. The conversion between these two text types has been the source of many inconsistencies and typos in the digital texts.

Technical Difficulties

The common Arabic character sets used in web-pages and applications to encode quran texts lack some of the essential diacritics and symbols needed. For example, the widely used Arabic encoding called "Windows-1256" does not have any code-point for small-alef which is needed to represent a complete quran text.

How precise is Tanzil text?

In the Tanzil project, we have integrated several works previously done in various quranic projects to obtain a unified quran text, and brought the text to a high level of accuracy by passing it through several manual and automatic verification phases. The lengthy work that leads to the final Tanzil quran text is summarized in the following three steps:

Automatic Text Extraction

At this step, a collection of quran texts from various resources (including quranic web-sites and applications) is collected, and a program is developed to convert each text to a canonical format. The canonical texts are then analyzed and carefully compared to extract a base quran text.

Manual Verification

In this step, the base quran text is examined by a group of volunteers against the Madina Mushaf, and a checksum for each letter and diacritic is calculated to verify the accuracy of the base text.

Rule-Based Verification

In this step, a program is developed to verify the text using a set of grammatical and recitation rules. Besides verifying the base text in a high level of accuracy, the program produced a set of quran texts all derived automatically from the base text.

We have extensively used the help of a group of experts including Quran Specialists an Ulama in order to assure the correctness and preciseness of the obtained quran texts. The quran texts produced are now under a careful versioning system to enable keeping track of updates made to the texts. Furthermore, a mailing list is devoted to inform users about critical updates.

Do you need to replace your text?

To see if your quran text is erroneous, simply do the following checks:

1. If your text has some of the typos listed here or here, then your text is highly inaccurate. You need to replace your text immediately by one of the Tanzil quran texts.
2. If your text has one of the typos or missing diacritics listed here, then you need to replace it with Tanzil simple text as soon as possible to remove any deficiencies.
3. If your text doesn't have any of the typos listed above, but it has no small-alef (e.g., in the words الرَّحْمَن and إِلَه), then you'd better replace your text with Tanzil text to prevent any errors in reading quran.

You can obtain a copy of Tanzil quran text at the project download page.

Who is using Tanzil?

An incomplete list of websites and applications using Tanzil quran text is available here.