Islam

Distillation of Islam (Quran) — Decision Record

This README fixes which text and which translation are distilled, and who reviewed the choices.

Tradition

• Slug: islam-quran
• Tradition / family: Islam — the Quran as primary scripture. (The Sunnah/Hadith and the schools of fiqh are noted as later, principle-bearing layers but are not distilled here; they would be separate Stage-B sources.)
• Primary frame in one sentence: submission (islām) to the one God (Allāh), who is merciful and just, made known through a chain of prophets and a final recited revelation, lived out in worship, justice, and community (ummah) in view of the Day of Reckoning.

Canon selection (what is included, and why)

Text	Included?	Rationale
The Quran (114 suras)	yes (whole canon)	The single primary scripture of Islam; full-canon commitment
Sunnah / Hadith	noted, not distilled	Authoritative for practice but a distinct corpus; would be a separate future source
Tafsīr / fiqh (exegesis, jurisprudence)	noted	Interpretive tradition; consulted only where it fixes a verse's standard reference

• Full-canon commitment: yes. This pass: principle-level extraction across the whole Quran, suras grouped into 9 thematic batches (the books/ files). Future expansion (flagged, not done): per-ayah fine-grained extraction sura-by-sura.

Translation policy

• Named translation: J. M. Rodwell, The Koran, translated from the Arabic (London, 1861; with an introduction by G. Margoliouth in the cited reprint). Public domain.
• Access: Project Gutenberg #3434 (plain text).
• Why this translation: unambiguously public-domain, a complete and scholarly Victorian rendering, fetched as raw plaintext (not via summarizing tools). Caveats: (a) 1861 diction ("the Compassionate, the Merciful" for al-Raḥmān al-Raḥīm; "alms" for zakāt; "piety/fear of God" for taqwā); (b) Rodwell re-orders the suras into his conjectured chronological order (shown in his bracketed numerals), which this distillation ignores — all citations use the canonical Arabic sura number (the Roman numeral Rodwell prints first, which matches the standard muṣḥaf).
• Citation form: Q <sura>:<ayah> using the canonical (standard Ḥafṣ) sura and verse numbering — e.g. Q 1:1, Q 2:255, Q 112:1. Rodwell does not print inline ayah numbers, so ayah numbers are supplied from the standard numbering for well-located, famous verses; ranges given where the boundary is approximate. Exact per-ayah verification is a future task.
• Untranslatable terms to preserve: tawḥīd, taqwā, īmān, islām, ummah, zakāt, ṣalāt, raḥma, ʿadl, fiṭra, khalīfa, amāna, fiṭra, jihād (effort/struggle), ṣabr (patient endurance). Rodwell's English is glossed against these.
• Quote accuracy: char-for-char verified against Gutenberg #3434 (Rodwell). See quote-audit-islam-quran.md — PASS (64 anchors; 12 substantive drifts restored to Rodwell verbatim).

Sensitivity: the doctrine of untranslatability (iʿjāz)

Islam holds that the Quran is the literal, uncreated speech of God in Arabic, and that it is, strictly, untranslatable: any rendering into another language is a human interpretation (tafsīr), never "the Quran." Rodwell himself rearranges and editorializes. Therefore this entire distillation is explicitly framed as one structured reading of one English interpretation, not as the Quran and not as authoritative. It must not be presented to a Muslim family as the text itself; it points back to the Arabic and to qualified teachers.

Reviewer / standpoint

• Within-tradition reviewer: none secured.
• Therefore: this output is "one structured reading, not authoritative" and the reviewer gap is flagged.

Structure for this tradition

• Atomic unit ("books/"): a thematic batch of suras (e.g. "Tawḥīd & the short Meccan suras," "The legal Medinan suras"). 9 batches cover all 114 suras. Verses cited as Q <sura>:<ayah>.
• Internal convergence layer?: not used in this pass (single text, single translation). A convergence pass could apply if the Sunnah is pooled as an independent source in the future.
• Sensitivity boundaries: verses on warfare, gender, and ḥudūd punishments are noted where they bear on principles but are handled with explicit context-flags, not extracted as compass inputs for families.

Files

File	Status
Methodology	done
Index and traceability (all 114 suras mapped to 9 batches)	done
Per-batch extractions	done — principle-level, with verbatim ayah anchors
Core principles	done — 17 core principles
Structural analysis	done
Rooted compass	done

Whole-canon, principle level: complete. Per-ayah, sura-by-sura expansion: not started.