Re: License Islamic Holy material

[Abdalla Alothman <abdalla at pheye dot net>]

On Monday 09 October 2006 05:14 am, Meor Ridzuan Meor Yahaya wrote:
> Salam,

wa'alaikum asalam

> > Beside: The Holy Quran is under the public domain. Not sure how can one
> > re-license that.
>
> That is why I created the text that I use not from existing text. I've
> released it only once, but forgot under which license. Basically the
> text I use is not under public domain, and different with all other
> text, it has full diacritics marks, and the spelling is compliant with
> Rasm Uthmany, as far as I know (except for few characters, like yeh vs
> alef maksura).

Different standards exist to represent the Quran in textual format (yes, the
Quran also comes in other formats as well -- it's a format-free source). The
advantage of the 'uthmani rasm is its ability to guide the reader with all its
tajweed symbols. But for computation, the another standard: al-rasm
al-imlaa-ee is much efficient and poses less burdens (i.e., the user doesn't
have to worry about enter a certain auxiliary symbol in a search, and the
programmer doesn't need to worry about handling these symbols).

An electronic muSS-Haff with the 'uthmani rasm would be great for
publications, and visual projects. For computation, I would certainly
favor the imlaa-ee rasm for its simplicity for the user and the programmer.

Arrasm al-'uthmani is a representation that has been around for centuries.
Reproducing it and licensing it shocks my mind a bit. It's more like producing
the wheel from scratch and then patenting the design. By the time Arabic
OCR is spread, and when the special symbols in the Quran get their values
in a certain character code, licesing such things becomes useless. Anyone can
obtain a similar content from the maSaHif; this would certainly make such
license worthless. Licesing is best associated with what our minds produce,
not what others produced.

At the end, we remind that the Quran is a qurr-aan, it's a recital; It's not
a writal (kutbaan?).

Different cryptographic schemes, like message digests and PKC, are
more than enough to secure the validity of the contents of the Quran.
As for errors, they are possible. But they can't go unnoticed.

Salam,
Abdalla Alothman