Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!cmaguire
From: cmaguire@phoenix.princeton.edu (Camm Maguire)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.islam
Subject: Re: Machine readable Qur'an
Message-ID: <1752@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 3 Dec 89 00:22:24 GMT
Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu
Reply-To: cmaguire@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Camm Maguire)
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 47
Approved: naim@eecs.nwu.edu (Naim Abdullah)


	Greetings! Thanks for the informative post!  I wonder if I
might ask a few other questions of the Islamic scholars in this
group:

>Salaam.  Wilson Bishai, lecturer of Arabic at Harvard, has entered the
>Qur'an (with diacritics <tashkyl>) on the Apple II in the early 80's.
>You might want to get in touch with him to find out if he can
>distribute it.  He was waiting for Al-Azhar to authenticate his copy.

	1) Does anyone know of a machine readable English
translation of the Qur'an?  Is there an English translation widely
considered as "standard" among Muslims, analogous to the King James
Version of the Bible?


>I know that there are machine readable copies of the hadith (sayings
>of the Prophet (peace be upon him)). Somebody in London had entered
>the hadith into a database program on an IBM PC. I saw a demo of it: you
>entered some keywords and it would retrieve all hadith on that topic.
>This whole system was for sale and it was demo'ed for the late Gen. Ziaul Haq
>of Pakistan. He was suitably impressed and ordered the Ministry of Religious
>Affairs to buy a couple of copies.
>
	2) Do you know how to get in touch with this person?  

	3) Can the hadith be classified into groups of varying
authenticity?  Does there exist such a classification that is widely
accepted among Islamic scholars? 

	4) Is there basic agreement on what constitutes the hadith
(i.e. are the hadith a closed body of literature?)  Can a complete
set of the hadith be found in any book? (I have only seen selections
published before.)  Is the above computer copy "complete"?  

	5) Specifically, I've been looking for a particular hadith
for some time.  The Prophet (may peace be upon Him) is reported to
have given the number of Prophets of the past as either 124,000 or
144,000.  Some hadith give the first figure, some the second.
Momen's book on Shi'ih Islam gives these figures on p.177 but does
not cite a reference.  Does anyone know where I can find these
sayings?


Many Thanks!

Camm