Zekr

I've been plodding along through my Ramadan reading of the Qu'ran, fighting off sleep (sorry), when it suddenly occurred to me that all three great religions of the Middle East don't actually read the Torah, the New Testament, the Qu'ran, so much as they sing it. These books are meant to be sung, they are ecstatic poetry! Even in the United States among Christians, you very seldom hear the Bible read aloud in anything like a normal everyday voice. And the farther South you go, the tighter the yodel.

So... if you want to hear the Qu'ran recited, with all its music intact, you either visit your local mosque, or you download Zekr, which includes the full Arabic text of the Qu'ran and a number of English (and other) translations, presented in bilingual form. The recitations work better on some computers than others. Ubuntu isn't quite up to speed yet, because of issues with streaming audio, I presume. Mac and Windows, and maybe other Linuxes, seem to work ok.

How to hear the Qur'an

Zekr 0.7.0 beta 1 is a really nifty Qur'an study tool for the Linux desktop. The name means "Message," the same way "Gospel" refers to the Bible.

It seems to be a work in progress, but already it includes the full Qur'anic text in Arabic, transliterations, well-known competent translations into several languages including English, and perhaps its nicest feature, recitation.

Most of us average Western infidels who have tried to approach the Qur'an have eventually been baffled by it, because of questions about translation and cultural context certainly, but mostly because the deep vertical dimension of the human voice has been missing — nearly all of the poetry, in other words.

Zekr attempts to fill the gap. There are online and offline recitations which plug in for listening. The 0.7.0 beta 1 version has nearly automatic download and installation, which is an improvement; however, it does lack some features which the 0.5.1.dfsg-1 stable Hardy Heron distribution had — in particular, Search within the text of translations. [Update: Search in translation may be coming back in beta 2, according to the author. (Thanks, Mohsen!)]

The usual Islamic disclaimers about possible typos in the electronic text of the Qur'an and virtually certain human errors in the translations ("since translation is impossible, anyway") do apply. E.g., Shakir's translation seems to have a missing word in Sura 97, Aya 2: "And what will make you comprehend what the grand night " (sic)[is?] In any case, Zekr is pretty good and getting better, even if it's not feature complete yet.

Also comes in Macintosh and Windows.