Welcome to the Atlas.
One written text; a thousand years of careful notes on exactly what varies in it and what does not. This atlas turns those notes into something you can open and see — every claim cited to its source. Here is everything inside, and where to start.
The sections
How the verses are counted.
The Quran's text is one. Its verse numbering is not: the classical scholars of six cities counted the āyāt in slightly different ways, all preserved, all documented. Here they are, side by side.
The counting schools
Seven reckonings recorded in the classical ʿadad literature. The totals differ only in where a verse boundary falls — never in the words. The Kūfan reckoning is the one printed in most muṣḥafs today, and is the per-surah baseline used below.
Counted straight from the six riwāyāt computed · reproducible
The totals above are the classical figures. We also carry the full verse-by-verse text of six riwāyāt — and each one numbers its own āyāt. So the counts here are computed directly from that text, with no transcription in between. Same-city readings agree — Warsh and Qālūn (Madīnah) both total 6214; Qunbul and al-Bazzī (Mecca) both total 6220 — the regional ʿadad reckoning showing through the raw data. Pick a sūra to see each reading's āyah count; any difference from Ḥafṣ is highlighted.
Structural divisions documented
Verse-numbering is one way to cut the text. The tradition carries several others — some fixed and universal, some edition-specific. A few (rukūʿ, pages, the number of sajdas) genuinely vary by convention, and are marked as such.
The 114 surahs canonical counts
Per-surah counts shown are the Kūfan reckoning, grounded in canonical metadata. Surahs where the schools are documented to diverge are flagged. Click any surah.
The Counting Lab.
A count is never just a fact about the text — it is a fact about the text plus a convention. This instrument makes the convention visible, so any numerical claim can be reproduced and stress-tested in the open.
1 · Verse totals, honestly
The single most-cited number about the Quran — how many verses it has — is not one number. Across the documented schools it spans a range.
2 · The freedom, measured
Enter a divisor and watch how many of the seven documented verse totals it divides evenly. This is the exact freedom the 74:30 audit quantified — a pattern can be genuinely present and still hang entirely on which convention you pick.
3 · Letters, and the freedom in a count
Select the grounded text and watch the letter count move as you change what you count. This is how a letter-based claim is built — and how sensitive it is.
4 · Reproduce & stress-test a claim
Numerical claims are documented here as claims — reproduced faithfully, then tested against the freedom the documented variables allow. A claim is never allowed to edit the text.
Rashad Khalifa · remove Sūrat al-Tawbah 9:128–129
Claim (1970s–80s): the last two verses of Sūrah 9 are not part of the Quran and should be removed, because they break a proposed 19-based count. Rejected by mainstream Sunnī and Shīʿī scholarship; unsupported by any manuscript, qirāʾa, or ʿadad school — every documented textual tradition includes them.
The documented record points the other way: Ibn Kathīr, citing the Ṣaḥīḥ, notes these closing verses were the written attestation Zayd b. Thābit located with Khuzaymah b. Thābit during the compilation, and reports them among the last revealed — a note about collection, not doubt. documented
The Basmalah has 19 letters
The starting point of the whole "Code 19" literature. Reproducible from the grounded text — and, as the letter counter above shows, true under one specific counting convention and not others. That fragility is the point: use the counter to see which convention yields 19.
Word count = letter count = 39,349
The 74:30 Project's crown finding, and the one that outlived its own adversarial audit. Across the twenty-nine disconnected-letter chapters, a single number — 39,349 — is at once their total word count and their total letter count, factoring as 19² × 109 (nineteen squared times the 29th prime). Requiring words and letters to agree is a far stricter test than counting letters alone.
Held to its own rules, the project measured what survives once the fitting freedom is accounted for: a residue of genuine surprise on the order of 1-in-80 to 1-in-400 — suggestive, unexplained, and honestly short of miracle-grade. It rides on specific edition choices, which the atlas will let you vary. Read the story → documented finding
The strata of the script.
One printed verse is really historical layers stacked: the consonantal skeleton (rasm) written first, and the vowel marks and notation added by later hands. Peel them back.
Printed canonical
Consonantal skeleton — vowel marks removed
Layer map — base letters vs added notation
The layer nobody documents.
The same verse, inside a computer, is not one thing. Its codepoints, its normalization, even its length depend on silent choices in every app and font. Here they are, exposed.
Three lengths of one verse
Same text, three honest answers — because "length" itself is a convention.
Normalization — NFC vs NFD
The alif family present
Codepoints
Read the Qurʾān.
Read any sūra straight through — the Arabic beside a translation in your language — and bookmark the āyāt you want to keep. Over a hundred translations across dozens of languages.
The readings, transmitted.
One consonantal text; several canonical ways of reciting it. Ten readings (qirāʾāt), each carried by two named transmitters (riwāyāt), were accepted as authentic. Almost every printed muṣḥaf today is one of them.
The ten canonical readings
Where the readings came from
A documented difference
The differences are real but bounded — vowelling, hamza, elongation (madd), a few consonant points, the basmalah between sūras. The most-cited single example:
Compare the readings for any verse
Six riwāyāt as real text, differences from Ḥafṣ highlighted. (Readings can number the verses differently — itself a documented ʿadad variation — so the same number can point to a shifted āya.)
The earliest witnesses.
Before print, the text was carried in parchment and ink. A handful of very early codices survive — the physical evidence behind every claim about how faithfully the text was transmitted. Below are real folios from the oldest and most important witnesses, each openly licensed and one click from its full record.
Search the whole text.
Every verse, searchable at once — in the Arabic or in any translation. A concordance for the entire Qurʾān: find where a word or an idea appears, then open any hit in Compare.
Method, and how to read the grades.
The atlas asserts documentation, not doctrine. Everything carries a provenance grade, a citation, and a version — so a claim made against one release can be checked against that release forever.
Provenance grades
canonical Grounded in verified data from quran.ai / quran.com — the canonical text, per-surah structure, and metadata. Reproducible against the source.
documented Reported in the classical literature and widely cited, with primary-source line-citation being added (e.g. the ʿadad totals, the collection reports, the reading differences).
seed Reserved for any claim not yet verified against a source. The catalog currently carries none — every item on display is canonical or documented.
How the atlas works
Every lens is computation or citation over grounded text — never assertion from memory. Where the scholars disagree, the disagreement is recorded as data; it is never resolved here. Numerical claims live in the Counting Lab as claims: reproduced faithfully, stress-tested against the freedom the documented variables allow, and never permitted to edit the text.
A quick glossary
The handful of terms worth knowing. Switch to Beginner in the top bar for plain-language explanations throughout.
Open, versioned, free
Code under MIT, the catalog under CC-BY. Each release is frozen and citable. Corrections and scholarly contributions — especially on the ʿadad tables, the qirāʾāt differences, and manuscript alignments — are the whole point. Write to the team →
Open API
Every lens is powered by a small, same-origin JSON API you can call directly — for research, replication, or building your own tools. All endpoints are GET, CORS-open, and edge-cached. No key required.
| Endpoint | What it returns | Example |
|---|---|---|
| /api/verse | One āya in five orthographies (Uthmānī, Imlāʾī, IndoPak, simple) | ?key=2:255 |
| /api/reading | Full verified text of a riwāya (list mode with no query) | ?riwaya=warsh |
| /api/counts | Per-sūra āya counts + totals across the six riwāyāt | /api/counts |
| /api/translation | 126 translations (list); a verse in chosen editions | ?key=2:255&ids=131 |
| /api/tafsir | 20 exegetical works (list); a verse in a chosen tafsir | ?key=2:255&id=169 |
| /api/words | Word-by-word Arabic, transliteration, and English gloss | ?key=2:255 |
| /api/search | Full-text concordance over Arabic + translations | ?q=mercy |
Underlying sources: Quran.com / Quran Foundation API, KFGQPC (King Fahd Complex) via jsDelivr, Tanzil. Please cite them, and the Atlas version, in published work — the Cite button in Compare generates a ready reference.
Sources & research.
A working bibliography and link index for everything the atlas draws on — the classical primary sources, the digital text projects, the manuscript archives, and the academic apparatus. A node you can start from.
Compare any verse
Pick any āya and set any two of its written forms against each other — mushaf Uthmānī, modern Imlāʾī, IndoPak, or the bare rasm skeleton. Same reading (Ḥafṣ); the words match, only the writing differs. Every difference is highlighted, character by character.
Tick a reading to add this verse in that transmission. Differences from Ḥafṣ are highlighted. (Readings can number verses differently, so the same number may point to a slightly shifted āya — flagged where it happens.)
Tafsīr is verse-by-verse scholarly commentary. Pick an edition and add it to the view; add more than one to compare how they read the same verse.
Every word of this verse, in order, with its transliteration and a short English gloss beneath. The Arabic is the Uthmānī script of the Ḥafṣ reading (the same verse shown above); it updates whenever you change the verse. This is a word-level study aid — for a flowing translation, use the Translation panel above.
Hear this exact verse recited. Choose a reciter and press play; the audio follows whichever verse you have selected above.