The Qur’an as iPhone App

MS

Years ago I had a discussion with a friend about whether reading John Keats on the back of a cereal box during breakfast would change the poetry. My idea was that certain texts require specific contexts. The novel requires private space. Romantic poetry needs more attention than a cursory glance between bites of Cornflakes. On the other hand it’s easy to find simple and entertaining texts perfectly fitting for the context implied by a cereal box. Changes in technology have brought about widespread experimentation in the presentation of texts. A recent example is the development of an “app” for the Qur’an on iphone or ipod touch.

The first thing to recognize about this app is its literalness when it comes to making the Qur’an available on this platform. The idea has not been to re-make the Qur’an for a new age. Or to rethink what the experience of a book could be like. Instead the app has a “cover” that mimics an actual book. It allows for page turning with a finger.. accompanied by an image of a page getting flipped. There is likewise a table of contents and the possibility of looking things up by “page number.” Every effort is made to give you the feeling that you have a little book in the 3×5 device.

This video makes explicit the effort to make the app just like a book:

Note the cutting back and forth between Qur’an and app. At the end there’s this image of an iphone in the form of a Qur’an. In effect the iphone becomes a sacred text. Lots of interesting questions: how should one treat an iphone if it’s a Qur’an? Does it demand the respect of a “real” Qur’an? It would seem that the drift of this bookifying of the iphone would be to transfer some of the sacredness of the Qur’an to the device. This would only be strengthened by the ability to load other Islamic apps onto it (hadith, prayer times, Islamic podcasts).

I suspect one reason the iphone can take the role of a book is that the Qur’an already exists in so many handy pocket versions. On buses or in the subway in Cairo it’s not unusual to see a religious man moving his mouth silently as he reads from a tiny pocket Qur’an. This widespread acceptance of the Qur’an as a text that can (and should) be read on the move and around lots of people must pave the way for the use of the iPhone as a portable Qur’an.

I am somewhat disappointed that the Qur’an isn’t made to break out of the book format. It’s an odd book anyways.. since it began as recitations from the mouth of Muhammad and then was compiled from the memories of those who had known him. The argument could be made that the book format of the Qur’an obscures the earliest experience of the revelations. The capability of adding audio in addition to the ability of ordering the sections in novel ways (chronological, thematic) could add up to a quite different Qur’an. But the gravitational pull of the book as traditionally conceived is too hard to break away from.. for now.

MS