The open variant atlas of the Quran.
Seven ways of counting the verses. The layers of the script, from the seventh-century skeleton to the printed page. The canonical transmissions, the earliest manuscripts, and the digital encodings every app and website silently depends on - under one lens, in your browser, machine-readable underneath. A living, peer-reviewed atlas of a thousand years of documented scholarship, explorable for the first time.
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Copies of the Quran around the world agree to a degree no other ancient text comes close to. But the tradition's own scholars carefully documented small differences - in how verses are numbered, how certain letters are written, and how the text is printed and digitized today. Those records have been locked away in classical Arabic books for a thousand years. We have turned them into a free, interactive website where anyone - student, scholar, or simply curious - can open any chapter and see exactly what varies, what does not, and who recorded it. Every fact linked to its source. Nothing sold, nothing hidden, no side taken.
What the tradition recorded
The Quran's scholars were so exact that they documented every place the written tradition varies: where the counting schools of Kufa, Basra, Damascus, Homs, Mecca, and Medina divide the verses differently; which strokes of the script belong to the original skeleton and which were notation added by later hands; where the canonical transmissions differ by a letter. Those records fill classical works like al-Dani's al-Bayan and Ibn Abi Dawud's Kitab al-Masahif.
Today that scholarship sits in printed Arabic and manuscript, admired and unusable. It has never existed as open data. There is, as far as we have found, no interactive tool anywhere that lets a reader actually see it. That is the whole of what we are building.
The lens
Open any surah. Switch on the layers, like an astronomer changing filters. Everything cited to its classical source, one tap down.
The seven verse-counting schools, side by side. Slide from Kufa to Homs and watch the verse boundaries move, with the classical entry for each boundary a tap away, and every school's running total computed live.
Every character tinted by its stratum: the seventh-century consonantal skeleton in one tone, later vocalization in another, modern print convention in a third. See the rasm inside the printed page.
The canonical riwayat - Hafs, Warsh, Qalun and onward - superimposed. Differences glow. Tap one and the atlas tells you its type, its age, and its source, and what stands identical beneath it.
Real folios of the earliest witnesses - Birmingham, the Codex Parisino-petropolitanus, the Blue Qur'an and more - openly licensed, shown against the printed record on a timeline from the seventh century. Each tied to the institution that holds it.
The layer nobody documents: how digital editions differ. Seven Unicode codepoints for one alif, diverging word boundaries, invisible marks - the silent choices inside every Quran app and website, cataloged at last, edition by edition.
Select any letters, any scope, and see the counts under every documented convention at once - not one number, but the honest spread the tradition supports. A count is a fact about text plus convention. Here, the convention is always visible.
See exactly what is live and what is next on the coverage & roadmap.
Who it is for
Students and teachers of tajwid, qira'at, and the Quranic sciences, who have never had a visual companion to the classical tables. Academics in Quranic studies and digital humanities, who get versioned, citable datasets and an open API. Translators and app builders, who get the reference for edition differences. And anyone, of any belief or none, who has ever asked "do copies of the Quran differ?" and deserves the documented answer instead of a shouting match: yes, in bounded, honored, fascinating ways the tradition itself recorded - and no, not where it is so often claimed.
A living database, reviewed in the open
The atlas is not a book that ships once. It is a living, versioned database with the mechanics of good science built in: every entry carries its citation and a provenance grade; every addition passes open peer review in public; every release is frozen, hashed, and citable, so a claim made against version 1.4 can be checked against version 1.4 forever. Disagreements between authorities are recorded as data, never resolved by us.
An open call, from day one: if you are a scholar of the qira'at, the 'adad literature, or the rasm; a librarian or institution holding manuscript materials or transcriptions; a maintainer of a digital edition; or a graduate student who can read the classical tables - the atlas is built for your contributions and credits every one by name. The review process, contributor guide, and data schemas will be public from the first release. Write to us now and help shape them.
How we work
Independent. This is independent research by one person. No institution, no funding body, no organization behind it, and no agenda except the record itself.
Open source, open data. Code under MIT, the catalog under CC-BY. Everything reproducible offline. The data is the gift, and a gift belongs to everyone.
Free, forever. No price, no accounts required to read, no ads, nothing to unlock. Knowledge of this text is not for sale here.
Cited, always. The atlas asserts documentation, not doctrine. Every variant names its classical source. Where scholars disagree, we record the disagreement - we never resolve it.
Honest about numbers. Claims about numerical patterns get a dedicated instrument with hard rules: methods registered before counting, every result published with its alternatives, misses kept forever. Our own history made that lesson permanent - read the story.
Follow the atlas as it grows
Rare, substantial updates as the atlas grows - new datasets, new readings and manuscripts, the open call for scholarly reviewers. No noise. No account needed. Leave with one click, any time.
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Contact us
Questions, corrections, offers of scholarly help, institutional partnerships, or anything else - this lands directly with me. You can also email contact@quranrecords.com.