About Nur

Nur is a free Quran reader for the web: the full text in Uthmani script with English translation, transliteration and verse-by-verse recitation, alongside prayer times, the qibla and the Hijri date. It runs in a browser, installs to a home screen, and keeps working without a connection. There is no account to create, nothing to pay for, and no advertising.

It is an independent project, built and maintained by Syed Muzakkir. Corrections, questions and bug reports are welcome at nurequran.app@gmail.com.

Reading

All 114 surahs in Uthmani script, with a choice of eight English translations — Saheeh International, Abdul Haleem, Usmani, Yusuf Ali, Pickthall, Hilali & Khan, Maududi and Bridges’ — plus optional transliteration and verse-level commentary from Ibn Kathir.

A juz opens as a juz. Juz 2 begins at verse 142 of Al-Baqarah, so linking to it as a surah page lands you halfway down a chapter with 141 verses of the previous juz above you. Each juz here holds exactly its own verses, first to last, across every surah it touches, and names each surah as it begins.

Read in continuous scroll or a page at a time, paginated by the real mushaf page rather than an arbitrary chunk. Bookmarks store the verse text as it was saved, so they render instantly and offline, and a continue-reading card returns you to where you stopped.

Search matches an English name, its meaning, the Arabic or the number, and folds away the differences that stop a search working: الفاتحه finds الفاتحة, and “al fatiha”, “Al-Fatihah” and “alfatihah” all reach the same surah.

Recitation

Twelve reciters, with one audio file per ayah — which is what keeps the recitation in step with the page. The verse being recited is highlighted and scrolled to, and in page mode the view turns to follow it.

Repeat a verse or a whole surah, set the speed between 0.5× and 2× — the slow half is the point, since following the Arabic word by word needs it far more often than speeding up does — switch reciter without losing your place, and control playback from the lock screen. On a phone all of that lives behind the ••• button in the player.

Prayer times, qibla and the Hijri date

Prayer times are calculated on your device from a latitude and a longitude, using the adhan.js astronomy library. Nothing is looked up and nothing is sent; the page works with no connection at all.

The calculation method defaults to what the country’s own authority publishes — Karachi angles and Hanafi Asr across the subcontinent, Diyanet in Turkey, ISNA in North America — because a single worldwide default puts Asr more than an hour early for a large part of the world. Sixteen methods, three Asr settings and a high-latitude rule for summer nights above 48° are there if you disagree with the default.

The time zone is resolved from the coordinates rather than from your device clock, so Makkah’s times are Makkah’s times on a phone in India. The qibla shows a fixed bearing from north everywhere, and becomes a live needle on a device with a magnetometer.

Nur can also notify you at each prayer, and play the adhan, with each prayer switched on or off on its own. What it will not do is promise more than a website can keep: alerts arrive while Nur is open or recently used, and the adhan can only play while it is open, because no page can make a sound from a browser that is closed. There is a separate opt-in for closed-browser alerts, and the Privacy section below says exactly what that one sends.

It works offline

The Arabic text, the Pickthall translation and the transliteration for all 6,236 ayat ship inside the app, along with the surah index and the juz list. The index and any surah you have opened read with no connection at all, and Settings can pull down the rest in one go.

Other translations, commentary and recitation still need a connection. When there is none and a different translation was selected, the reader says so rather than quietly showing you a different one.

Privacy

Nur has no accounts, no advertising, no analytics and no cookies. Nothing you read here is reported anywhere.

Your settings, bookmarks and last-read position are held by your own browser on your own device. If you use prayer times, your coordinates stay there too — the whole calculation happens locally, so there is nothing to send.

In normal use the app contacts three hosts and no others: api.quran.com for text, translations and commentary, and verses.quran.com and mirrors.quranicaudio.com for recitation audio. That is not a promise made in prose alone — a test in the project records every outbound request the app makes and fails if a host outside that list appears.

There is exactly one thing that can change that, and it is off unless you turn it on. Prayer alerts arrive on their own while Nur is open or recently used, and that needs nothing but your own browser. Being notified with the browser fully closed is different: no website can wake itself, so something that is already awake has to know when your prayers are. If you switch that on, your position — rounded to about a kilometre — and your calculation method are sent to the scheduler that does it, and nothing else: no name, no account, no identifier of ours, and none of what you read. Switching it off deletes the record. The same test asserts that with the option off the app makes no outbound POST at all.

Where the content comes from

• The verses, translations, transliteration and recitation come from the Quran.com API.
• The translation bundled for offline reading is Marmaduke Pickthall’s. It was not chosen on merit — it is bundled because its copyright status is unambiguous: Pickthall died in 1936, so the work is long in the public domain and can be redistributed inside an app. The other seven are fetched from the API rather than shipped.
• Prayer-time astronomy is adhan.js by Batoul Apps, under the MIT licence.
• Time zone boundaries are derived from OpenStreetMap data, under the ODbL. The attribution is carried on the Times page itself, where the data is used.
• The Arabic typefaces are Amiri Quran and Scheherazade New, and the interface is set in Plus Jakarta Sans — all under the SIL Open Font Licence.

A note on accuracy

The Quranic text and the translations are shown as Quran.com publishes them; a correction to those belongs upstream, with the source.

Prayer times are a calculation, not an announcement. They follow the convention named at the foot of the Times page, and a mosque near you may pray to a different one for reasons that are entirely legitimate. Where the two disagree, follow your mosque.