Faith to Go

The iPod touch and iPhone are no longer just about music and movies (or the deafness and squinted eyes they undoubtedly cause with prolonged use). A slew of Islamic applications available at the iTunes App Store now give every Muslim with an Apple product in their pockets the chance to make their faith even more mobile than it was before.

One of the most popular applications is iQuran, a portable version of the Holy Qur’an that is offered in two different versions in the iTunes App Store. The free app of the iQuran only contains the Arabic text and English translation of Surah Al-Baqara. However, the $10.99 iQuran Pro contains the entire Qur’an and numerous extra features, such as transliteration into a variety of languages (from French and Spanish to Indonesian and Urdu) as well as recitations made by various Islamic scholars.

Another Islamic application is iPray. Made by the same company that developed iQuran, iPray allows you to find the weekly prayer times for thousands of locations in 252 countries around the world. iPray can also show you the qibla from the city or town for which your prayer times have been set, and even allows you to download and choose which athan you would like to hear when it is time to pray. While the free version of this app works just fine for daily use and lets you save up to two cities in its database, the $2.99 iPray Pro boasts several improvements on the basic design of the app and also allows you to save as many cities as you like.

The makers of iQuran and iPray, Guided Ways Technology Ltd., also have several other Islamic-themed applications, including:

a) iZakah, a free app that allows you to calculate the zakah you owe and track how much zakah you have given in the past, and

b) iSubha, a $1.99 app that digitizes the ever-popular Islamic prayer beads while adding several important features that human memory and wooden beads can’t quite accommodate, such as a database of popular phrases used while praying as well as a history of all previous praying sessions.

If the prospect of a portable Qur’an and athan aren’t selling points in and of themselves, these applications have also been designed to combine both practicality and beauty, making them all the more appealing to use and (hopefully) reuse on your iPod touch or iPhone. In fact, the benefit of these applications can be summed up best by one satisfied Muslimah who commented on the iQuran app page in the iTunes App Store:

“Anytime I get bored [while] I’m playing on my iTouch, I always go to this app and start reading the Qur’an from where I left off last time. … For any other app I would have given this 4 stars, but this app boosted up my [faith in Islam] so much that I can’t possibly do that.”

Find all of the applications featured in this article here.