The Next Chapter In The Qur’an Gateway Story

Welcome to Qur’an Gateway! This article will serve as a state-of-the-platform report, to answer questions and let you know what you can expect in the coming days.

In 2017, I and my co-creator(s) introduced Qur’an Gateway for the first time publicly at the annual meeting of the International Qur’anic Studies Association in Boston. The panel discussion at which we demonstrated the platform was met with wide approval from those in attendance. At a reception following, we fielded questions and continued the demonstration of this powerful new scholarly resource. Among the attendees were two representatives of Al-Azhar in Cairo, who had apparently been sent with the express purpose of assessing our work. At that reception, one of these men congratulated me personally on the accomplishment and gave words of affirmation.

Subsequent to that launch, Qur’an Gateway grew into a trusted tool that offered as an e-resource at Oxford, Harvard, University of Notre Dame, Hebrew University, University of Indiana, and at other academic institutions.

Today, following its brief public availability late last year, we are pleased to announce the soft re-launch of the Qur’an Gateway research tool.

Qur’an Gateway began—even before it had a name—in discussions as I entered the final stretch before my doctoral defense. I and some colleagues hoped to create a tool that would be used by researchers and academics, as well as laypeople, to undertake study of the Quran as an object of history. On this occasion, I will restate and confirm Qur’an Gateway's guiding principles:

1. Trustworthy and honest. The edifice of knowledge is only sound if it is rigorous. We will account for bias. Novel theories are welcome, but unproven claims must be appropriately qualified until tested.
2. Critical. We provide tools for robust scholarship on the Quran. No question or line of inquiry is off limits. We do not operate within constraints of reverence or a priori assumptions about the Qur’an's origins.
3. Attribution. Credit for research is a professional courtesy. Unless by mutual agreement, denial of credit—especially to a principal investigator—is a form of stolen valor. Academics who participate with Qur’an Gateway can expect to be appropriately credited for their work. In line with this principle, Qur’an Gateway and our contributors should be appropriately cited when referenced in papers or other published works. Please see citation guidelines elsewhere on this site.

Where has Qur’an Gateway been?

The Qur’an Gateway database and most of its materials were assigned to me in a legal settlement that took effect in late 2021. At that time, the website went offline and was divided up. As a condition of the settlement, I required my colleagues to place part of the code into the public domain—as has now been done. The rest of the materials had to be reconstituted into a usable form, and doing so without a team and with use of personal funds, alongside other research and publication projects, takes time.

Some of the search and analysis functionalities are not exactly as I remember them. Why?

Although the underlying resources (most notably, from my perspective, the Quran Manuscript Change Database ["QMCD"] that I built beginning in late 2014) are alive and well, Qur’an Gateway is merely an interface to help users access those resources and conveniently reference them. The interface functionality is under ongoing development. Now, a selection of the thousands of entries in the manuscript change database are available to you once again, even as the look and feel of the tool is being improved. We thank you for your patience as we retool and take Qur’an Gateway to the next level to serve your research and study needs for many years to come. Please "pardon our dust"—and let us know of errors, omissions, or anything not functioning properly, by emailing us at admin@qurangateway.org.

Please note that curating the site, including manuscript correction records, is an ongoing process. If you find errors, please let us know. Thank you.

How can I help?

Our team needs developers and researchers. If you are interested in being part of this project, please contact us at admin@qurangateway.org.

From the start, Qur’an Gateway was a for-profit project with an academic purpose. Development of the tool occurred with help from generous donors, to whom I remain grateful and whose contribution we hope to continue to honor by carrying this project into its next phase. Once it was officially launched, Qur’an Gateway became additionally supported by subscribers and institutional partners. Although now you can enjoy Qur’an Gateway, in the coming days we will begin, once again, to offer a subscription membership and hope that you will help this project by signing up.

If you would like to support (and speed) my work directly (which includes development of this project, among others), you can find a giving link at danielbrubaker.com.

I am personally grateful to all the individual users—including institutional users such as Oxford University (Qur’an Gateway's first institutional customer), the Hebrew University, Harvard University, University of Indiana, University of Notre Dame, and others—who have supported Qur’an Gateway and brought us to this moment. Thank you.