Egypt firm launches Islamic studies software

A suite of Islamic programmes, covering everything from Islamic law to a lexicon of terms in the Holy Quran, has been launched at Gitex 2000 by the Cairo-based company Harf Information Technology.
According to Suleiman Al Mayman, executive director of Harf Information Technology, the programmes, which are easy to use, fill an important niche in the Arabic electronic library for Islamic studies.
"The programmes deal with Islamic matters in one of the most comprehensive ways ever seen," Al Mayman said.
"We have succeeded in releasing The Stories of the Prophets software for children using fonts and methods that will be very attractive to this important target audience in the Islamic community.
The programmes launched this year include the first lexicon of the terms of the Holy Quran ("Al Fazh Al Quran") with desktop publishing, an advanced service which Harf provides to the Islamic user and to Quran researches.
This software, designed utilising Web CD technologies, allows the use of Personal Web Server technology, with a full index of the entire terms of the Holy Quran while linking them with the letters of the lexicon and morphologic search using Harf computational linguistics.
The programme displays a full review of the subjects where each word of the Quran appears and provides detailed information about each Surah where the selected words appear as well as providing an audio recital of the relevant Quranic verses. The programme has been reviewed and approved by the Azhar.
"The Stories of the Prophets" series for children aims to develop their Islamic knowledge and instill in them Islamic values in a narrative form.
Each story in the series relies on multi-media technologies to display the story events using animation, dialogue and by specifying all the Quranic verses related to each prophet's story. The programme also plays an audio recital of the relevant verses, an explanation of the difficult terminology and an exposition of the lessons learned using pictures.
Among the tools used in this series is a collection of songs which depict the events of each story to imprint its events in the child's memory, in addition to integrating a collection of games into each story to develop powers of perception.
Another new programme is Al Mushaf for desktop publishing, developed to allow automatic publishing of Quranic text with the added benefit of full formatting. The user is able to add text of the verses in Uthmanic calligraphy to normal documents and files while retaining the original characters and formats of the beautiful Uthmanic script.
The programme also allows publishing of the entire Quran as a Microsoft document with easy modification of word formats and the possibility of playing an audio recitation of the Quranic text during the copying process.
The history of Islam is another programme displayed by Harf at Gitex 2000, which incorporates the latest desktop publishing technologies to give the user access to the events recorded in Islamic history over a period of 1000 years.
Another programme, "Mufasir Al Ahlam" ("The Interpreter of Dreams"), offers an interpretation of dreams based on a methodological approach that relies on the related Quranic text and their interpretation ("Tafsir").