About

WhyAllah is a small project to make the 99 Names of Allah — الأَسْمَاءُ الْحُسْنَى, al-asmā' al-ḥusnā — readable. The Quran is a sacred text, but most online readers bury the Names under a list of surahs, or display Arabic and English as two columns of almost-the-same-looking text.

This reader does the opposite. The Names are the home. Open one. See the Arabic, see the English, see every verse where the Quran uses it. No ads, no popups, no tracking, no images of the divine.

What we believe, working on this

• The Quran is sacred text. We do not paraphrase, fabricate, or generate it. The Arabic is from Quran.com (Uthmani with full tashkeel). The English is Saheeh International, the standard contemporary translation.
• Names of Allah don't all appear in the Quran as nouns. Some are attributes derived from divine actions described in the Quran. We tag each verse as direct (the exact form appears) or concept (the verb or related root is used), following the classical tradition of al-Ghazali and Ibn al-Qayyim.
• Design is part of reverence. Sacred text deserves careful typography, not stock fonts and gradients. We use Amiri for Arabic, Fraunces for display, Inter for body — all free, all chosen for legibility at the sizes a reader actually uses.
• No images of the divine. Islamic tradition forbids it. We use typography, layout, and quiet accents. Nothing more.

The technical bits

WhyAllah is a static site, built with Astro. All 6,236 verses are pre-rendered as HTML at build time. The site is fast, the URLs are stable, and the entire thing can be served from any static host.

For the names-to-verses mapping, we use a hybrid approach: direct Arabic word match for names that appear in the Quran as nouns, and a hand-curated verbal/concept map for names that come from hadith. See the sources page for details.