All 114 surahs in the Uthmani script, with Pickthall’s English, Tafsir al-Jalalayn and tajweed in colour. All of it is inside the app, so it opens with or without a connection. Only recitation goes online, when you press play or save a surah.
The Uthmani text of the Tanzil Project, copied letter for letter. It is part of the app rather than fetched from anywhere, so a surah opens straight away.
One box at the top of the surah list, and it understands three kinds of search.
By name, with or without “al-”. Hyphens and apostrophes don’t matter, and the meaning works too: “kahf”, “Al Kahf” and “the cave” all find Al-Kahf. So do its number and its name in Arabic.
Type 2:255 and the first result takes you straight there. 2 255 and 2.255 work as well.
Three letters or more, looked for in Pickthall’s English, or in the Arabic if you type in Arabic. The Arabic search ignores vowel marks and the different forms of alif, so الحمد finds ٱلْحَمْدُ.
If more than 50 verses match, you see the first 50 and how many there are in all.
An English translation under each verse, and a classical commentary in Arabic a tap away.
Say: He is Allah, the One!
Marmaduke Pickthall’s The Meaning of the Glorious Koran (1930) sits beneath each verse, as Tanzil publishes it.
The classical commentary, digitised by Quranpedia. Tap the book beside a verse and its commentary opens just beneath it.
Turn on Tajweed at the top of a surah and the letters take the colours of the familiar colour-coded mushafs: grey for letters you don’t pronounce, gold to dark red for the lengths of madd, green for ghunnah and blue for qalqalah. A key sits above the verses.
Press a colour to see only that colour.
بِسْمِ ٱللَّهِ ٱلرَّحْمَٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ
لِإِيلَٰفِ قُرَيْشٍ
106:1For the taming of Qureysh.
إِۦلَٰفِهِمْ رِحْلَةَ ٱلشِّتَآءِ وَٱلصَّيْفِ
106:2For their taming (We cause) the caravans to set forth in winter and summer.
فَلْيَعْبُدُوا۟ رَبَّ هَٰذَا ٱلْبَيْتِ
106:3So let them worship the Lord of this House,
ٱلَّذِىٓ أَطْعَمَهُم مِّن جُوعٍ وَءَامَنَهُم مِّنْ خَوْفٍۭ
106:4Who hath fed them against hunger and hath made them safe from fear.
Tajweed starts off. Turn it on once and it stays on for every surah.
With a reciter whose words light up, the word being recited gets a soft background, so its colours stay as they are.
The same seven colours, in shades chosen to read well on a dark page.
The tajweed data marks 18 rules. Khalis groups them into seven colours, and these are the words of Quraysh that carry each one.
Hamzat al-wasl, lam shamsiyyah, silent letters, and idghaam without ghunnah, mutajanisayn and mutaqaribayn
ٱلشِّتَآءِ106:2 وَٱلصَّيْفِ106:2 فَلْيَعْبُدُوا۟106:3 ٱلْبَيْتِ106:3
Madd of two counts
لِإِيلَٰفِ106:1 إِۦلَٰفِهِمْ106:2 هَٰذَا106:3
Madd of two, four or six counts, and madd munfasil
قُرَيْشٍ106:1 وَٱلصَّيْفِ106:2 ٱلْبَيْتِ106:3 ٱلَّذِىٓ106:4 خَوْفٍۭ106:4
Madd muttasil
ٱلشِّتَآءِ106:2
Madd of six counts
None in Quraysh. The first in the Quran is in Al-Fatihah: ٱلضَّآلِّينَ1:7
Ghunnah, idghaam with ghunnah, ikhfa, iqlab, ikhfa shafawi and idghaam shafawi
أَطْعَمَهُم106:4 مِّن106:4 جُوعٍ106:4 وَءَامَنَهُم106:4 مِّنْ106:4
Qalqalah
أَطْعَمَهُم106:4
Press play beside any verse, or Listen at the top of a surah, and the recitation carries on from there to the end of the surah. Mishary Alafasy recites until you choose someone else.
| Reciter | Words light up |
|---|---|
| Mishary Alafasy | Yes |
| Mohamed Siddiq al-Minshawi | Yes |
| Abu Bakr ash-Shaatree | Yes |
| Hani ar-Rifai | Yes |
| Abdur-Rahman as-Sudais | No |
| Mahmoud Khalil al-Husary | No |
With four of them, each word lights up as it is recited, so you can follow along.
Slower to learn, quicker to revise. The pitch stays the same, so a reciter still sounds like themselves, and the highlighting keeps time.
Hear each verse again before moving on, or keep one verse going until you stop it.
Play from where you start to a verse you choose, then stop, or go round that passage again.
It keeps playing with the screen locked or while you use another app, with the surah, verse and reciter on the Lock Screen controls. On iPhone it plays even with the phone set to silent.
Download a surah for the reciter you have chosen and it plays from your phone, with no connection at all. You can stop a download partway, and remove it later.
A small bar floats over the Quran screens while a recitation plays. It shows the verse and the reciter, the speed when it isn’t normal, and “offline” for a saved surah, with buttons for the previous and next verse, pause, these settings, and stop.
The one time this part of Khalis goes online. Reading, the English, the tafsir, tajweed and search all work from the app itself. Recitation is streamed, a verse at a time, from the free Islamic Network library (cdn.islamic.network) when you press play, or downloaded from there when you save a surah. Each request is simply for that verse’s recording.
No. The Arabic text, Pickthall’s English, Tafsir al-Jalalayn, the tajweed colours and the search are all inside the app. Only recitation is streamed, and a surah you have downloaded plays without a connection too.
Pickthall’s is the one English translation in Khalis today. You can turn it off to read the Arabic on its own.
The word timings come from quran-align by Collin Fair. Khalis uses them for the four reciters whose recordings, as streamed, are byte for byte the ones the timings were made from: Alafasy, al-Minshawi, ash-Shaatree and ar-Rifai. The as-Sudais timings in that release are damaged, so they aren’t used. As-Sudais and al-Husary play verse by verse, without the highlighting.
On your phone, with the rest of what Khalis keeps. They go into a backup file if you make one, and on iPhone, with iCloud sync turned on, they follow you to your other Apple devices. Downloaded recitations stay on the phone that saved them.
No. It is the Tanzil Project’s Uthmani text, copied verbatim, as Tanzil’s terms ask. Where the Basmala opens a surah, Khalis shows it on its own line above the first verse, as a printed mushaf does, but the words are Tanzil’s.
Quran textUthmani script from the Tanzil Project, used verbatim under CC BY 3.0. The juz follow the standard Madani division, as Tanzil publishes it.
English translationMarmaduke Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran (1930), via Tanzil.
TafsirTafsir al-Jalalayn, by Jalal al-Din al-Mahalli and Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, digitised by Quranpedia.
Tajweed coloursquran-tajweed by Collin Fair, CC BY 4.0. Khalis groups its rules into seven colours, and has moved each marked range onto Tanzil’s current text, which writes a few marks differently from the 2017 text the data was made from.
RecitationsStreamed from the Islamic Network library, free for non-commercial use, with each reciter credited.
Word timingsquran-align by Collin Fair, CC BY 4.0.