31 March 2026 / 12. Shawal 1447
Discovering Sacred Texts
In January 2019, Shaykh Mohammed Ali Ismail, the Deputy Head of Islamic Education, met the British Library to discuss a project called Discovering Sacred Texts, which The World Federation will be supporting. The project will launch online in September 2019 and is aimed primarily at students and teachers of GCSE and A level Religious Education, but is also intended to appeal to a general audience.
It will feature around 240 digitised sacred texts from the Library’s collections. Multiple faiths are covered, and the digitised collection items will be contextualised with articles written by curators, academics, and faith leaders, as well as with video content and teachers’ resources.
More information about the project can be found at https://www.bl.uk/projects/discovering-sacred-texts.
During the visit, Shaykh Mohammed Ali also had the opportunity to look through some of the very earliest Qur’ans in the world, including the Ma’il Qur’an pictured immediately below which dates back to the eighth century.
The present work is an annotated translation of the thirty-first edition, published in 2014 by the Qum office of al-Sayyid al-Sistani. Shaykh Mohammed Ali Ismail deserves to be commended for successfully completing this challenging task.
