Shabbir’s Blog

Firstly, I’d like to thank Ehsan, for his comment, which pointed me towards this excellent - and Open Source - project - Zekr.

Zekr is, to put it simply, an Open Platform Quran Study Tool - meaning that it works on almost all operating systems, from Linux, to Windows, to MacOS - and since the source code is available, if required it can be ported to other less well known operating systems.

According to it’s official site, Zekr, was originally developed by Mohsen Saboorian (you can check out Mohsen’s Blog here - it is however, mainly in Farsi), a student at Tehran University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, which is part of the University’s overall Engineering Faculty. Mohsen is studying Software Engineering at an undergraduate level (BSc), the following people have also had a hand in helping with the language packs as well as providing Mohsen with useful feedback so as to enhance the project.  The following people have helped with the Zekr project:

• Ari R. Fikri (Indonesian language pack)
• Younes Moumen (Basic French and Arabic language packs)
• Riyad Preukschas (German language pack)
• Michael Kalinin (Russian language pack + Russian translations)
• Omar sm (Critical typo reports)
• Aydin Tarık Zengin (Turkish language pack + Turkish translation)
• H N Jafar (Malay language pack)
• Erik van Luxzenburg (Initial Dutch language pack)
• Muhammad Bashir Al-Noimi (Arabic language pack)
• Dangiislam.org (Kurdish language pack)
• Mohsin Shafeeque Hijazee (Urdu language pack)
• Nedim Hadžić (Bosnian language pack)
• Alma Aganović (Help on Bosnian language pack + Korkut translation)
• Johan Laenen (Dutch language pack)
• Zabeehkhan (Pashto language pack)
• Fareed A. Bashirov (Tatar language pack + Tatar translation)
• Mohammad Mehdi Saboorian (useful feedbacks)
• Ali Rastegar (Mac port + Mac maintainer)
• Mohammad Derakhshani (Ubuntu package maintainer)
• Hamid Zarrabi-Zadeh (Quran text automatic verification)

The software has been released under the GNU GPL License, and more information can be found on the software’s release notes.  The Zekr Project can also be found at sourceforge.

The most current (stable) version of Zekr that is available is Zekr 0.6.6 (Released on October 6, 2007), and it’s release notes can be found here.  There was however, a special Ramadhan Version, which can be downloaded from here.  The Ramadhan Version focused more on Quranic Recitation, and as a result it includes lightweight Flash MP3 play to Quranic recitation files (online or offline) according to the note on the website.  The release notes for the Ramadhan Version - which is really Zekr 0.6.5 - can be found here.

You can find a comprehensive series of screenshots, which effectively give you a walkthrough the application on the Zekr Website. 

The complete software development map for Zekr can be found here.

This is an awesome application, very stable, and it just works - just like Ehsan said:

In my opinion it is fast and works very smoothly. There are a bunch of translations to download (even Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi’s(HA) Farsi translation!) and best of all the search option works like a charm.

Completely spot on.

I would recommend this project to anyone, and incidentally, I wonder if it would be possible to add other books to the Zekr Engine, books such as Mafatih al-Jinan, Sahifa as-Sajjadiyyah, and others?  You could even incorporate various tafaseer (Exegeses) of the Quran, and even have books like Nahj ul-Balagha incorporated into it.  How awesome is that!! In theory, all it would require is the actual content of the books, in the appropriate format, hmm, this could be one to have a serious think about.

This really is an awesome project, and I ask that everyone spread the word about Zekr!

Warm Regards,

Shabbir.