The Qur’an, read through thirty-seven commentaries

One agreed reading for every one of the 6,236 ayat, built by asking thirty-seven editions of twenty-nine classical and modern commentaries what they share, and writing only that. This package is being sent to you before anything is published, because the work has a known weakness and one pair of eyes is not enough.

The six questions we are asking you

1. Is the “similarities only” rule the right one?
   Every reading states what the commentaries share. Where they conflict, the reading is silent - it never adjudicates, and never writes “some say”. This keeps one ummah on one page. It also means a reader is not told that a dispute exists. Is that trade acceptable, and are there ayat where silence itself misleads?
2. Is the selection of 37 works balanced?
   They were not selected - they were what two public APIs carried. No scholarly criterion was ever written down, because none was applied, so 37 is a fact about what was machine-readable in 2026 rather than a judgement about which commentaries matter. Sunni and Shi’i works sit in one list, ordered by the author’s death date alone, with no sectarian label anywhere on the page. Are any major works missing? Is any tradition over- or under-weighted?
3. Do the readings carry the limits the commentaries attach?
   This is the known weakness and we are actively repairing it. A gate now compares every reading against the claims that three or more editions assert, and it has already found 53 dropped elements in ten test ayat - for example, at 4:34 five editions qualify the striking as ghayr mubarriḥ, non-injurious, and the reading did not say so. Which other ayat should we check first?
4. Is Tanwir al-Miqbas rightly included?
   Its attribution to Ibn ‘Abbas is disputed. It is included and labelled, not excluded. Is that the right call for a work of this kind?
5. Does counting a translation as a separate work double-count?
   Ibn Kathir appears in Arabic, English and Urdu. They are listed as three editions because they are three texts that can differ. Does that inflate the sense of how many independent voices are present?
6. Where does a sparse work create a false impression?
   Some works comment on only part of the Qur’an. On an ayah where a work is silent, the page says so. Is that disclosure sufficient?

How to send comments back

How it was built, in five lines

Works not yet included — and the commitment to add them

Start here

Also in this package

All 114 surahs