TRANSLITERATION QUR'AN - INTRODUCTION

VERY IMPORTANT NOTICE 

In the name of Allah the Beneficent The Merciful

Dear Readers,

The World Wide Web  better known as the Internet, with its plethora of social-media tools like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Yahoo Answers and Black Berry Messenger etc, have drastically changed the way we conduct our lives, to the point that many Truth Seekers and some  fooolhardy Muslims are seeking religious advice on the WWW. This website named "Imam Yahoo" was specifically setup to inform Muslims and Truth Seekers in general, that answers about Islam are in abundance on the Internet, but that these answers may not always be correct, and at times written by non-Muslims and purposefully biased against Islam, in order to trick and mislead unsuspecting Muslims. Sites like Hub Pages, Helium and Squidoo and several others, invites their member writers, Muslim or not, to write on Islamic topics, the bulk of whom do their article research on the WWW.  I therefore urge you to rather contact the  Imams,  Muftis, Sheikhs, Islamic scholars and Maulanas at your local local Masjid for the correct answers to your questions. If not, you could be Googling your way out of the fold of Islam.

Islam is a religion of International appeal, boasting substantially more than one billion adherents worldwide, all of whom accept Allah (SWT) as Rabb (God, Lord, Master, Sustainer,  Nourisher) and Muhammad (SAW) as His Nabiy (prophet) and messenger. As a whole Muslims accept Qur'an as revelation and the narrations of the companions of the prophet as Hadeeth. This blog is about the Qur'an and Hadeeth specifically aimed at those foolhardy Muslims aforementioned but with the explicit request that they verify whatever they read here, just as a precaution of correctness.

Transliteration Qur’an 

This Transliteration of the Qur’an in my successive blogs  is a gift to everyone, especially to those who wish to read or learn the Qur’an but have no grounding in Arabic.  It is absolutely free and is distributed in a blog format with the sole purpose of helping those persons unfamiliar with Arabic script to be able to enunciate it. However, I need to emphasize that this Transliteration Qur’an  is not and should never be construed as a substitute for an original Mushaf (Arabic Qur’an).

This transliteration comes very close to sounding like the written Qur'anic Arabic yet it would be beneficial to secure the  assistance of an Arabic speaker, a Qari, or anyone else, well versed with Al-Qur’an  to further guide you. Persistence, perseverance and repetition is the key to learning and the best place to start, is by practicing Arabic  pronunciation which is fully explained in legend that can be found on  blog 4. In the legend, numbers are specifically  used to represent some Arabic characters foreign to the English language and  it is imperative that you understand  this before commencing on the task of reading the transliterated text.

I urge the reader not to tamper or distort this text since it was a labour of love that took  several hundred man hours to complete. I humbly request from those who takes benefit from this Transliteration Qur’an to remember me in their  prayers. I will  likewise, remember you in mine and  I will beseech Allah SWA to guide you in your endeavours  to read and learn Al-Quran, il-Kareem  in its original Arabic script and enable you practice its recitation in your daily prayers.

FYI

The Qur’an is divided into  30 equal parts known as a Juz and in some circles a Sipara. There are a total of 6236 verse in the Qur’an and I will be presenting them in bite size chunks - a few verses of text at a time, essentially  known as a Ruku. Most chapters are divided into several rukus  and some chapters consist of only one. There are 114 chapters in the Qur’an ranging from as many as 286 verses, to a few as 3 verses long and are listed immediately below.

Continued on blog 2.