Almost nothing in Alsabeel was made by Alsabeel. The text, the commentaries, the timings, the typefaces and the recordings were made by other people, and most of them are free to use only on the condition that they are credited. This page is that credit, and it is kept accurate rather than short.
The app carries the same credits inside it, in the Sources panel at the foot of Settings, and the full licence notices are kept in its database.
The text of the Quran
King Fahd Glorious Quran Printing Complex — Uthmanic Hafs, data set v18
The text of all 6,236 ayahs as the Madani mushaf prints them, with each ayah's page, line and juz. It is what you read in the app, and what the mushaf pages are laid out from.
Terms: published by the Complex for this use. The typeface that comes with it is shipped byte for byte as published, because the Complex does not permit its font to be modified — a check in the build proves the file has not changed. qurancomplex.gov.sa
Tanzil — the Uthmani text and the Quran metadata
Used to check the Complex's text letter by letter: all 6,236 ayahs agree once the two spelling conventions are folded together, and the three places where only a space falls differently are listed by name in the build. Tanzil also supplies the surah names and the ruku, manzil and hizb structure.
Terms: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 — verbatim copying, with credit and a link. tanzil.net
Translation and commentary
Saheeh International — English translation
The translation shown under an ayah, and the text English search looks in. Obtained from Tanzil.
Terms: Tanzil's translation terms — non-commercial use, crediting the translator and linking Tanzil. This is one of the reasons Alsabeel is free and carries no advertising. tanzil.net/trans/en.sahih
Tafsir al-Muyassar — Arabic commentary
By the King Fahd Glorious Quran Printing Complex. Obtained from Tanzil.
Al-Mukhtasar fi Tafsir al-Quran al-Karim — English commentary
By the Tafsir Center for Quranic Studies, in the English edition published by the Encyclopedia of the Noble Quran (QuranEnc.com), downloaded on 20 September 2026. It is the commentary an English reader is offered.
Terms: QuranEnc permits the translations to be re-published unmodified, crediting the publisher and QuranEnc.com. The commentary is shipped as it came: the only thing not shown is the printed edition's block numbers, because the app numbers every ayah itself. QuranEnc publishes no version number for this edition, so the download date stands in its place, and the whole notice is kept beside the text in the app. quranenc.com · tafsir.net
Tajweed colouring
alquran.cloud — the quran-tajweed edition
The annotated text the tajweed rules are read from. Only the markup is used: the letters underneath are checked against the Complex's own, letter by letter, and the colours are then drawn over the Complex's text rather than this one.
Terms: free for non-commercial use with attribution, and the text may not be altered. It is not altered; it is not even displayed. alquran.cloud
Word-by-word timings
quran-align — Collin Fair
The timings that let the app follow a reciter word by word, for eleven of the recitations. Each file ships as released, pinned to the checksum its release lists.
Every recitation in the app is streamed from EveryAyah, ayah by ayah, and is not copied onto any host of ours. Fourteen Arabic recitations by eleven reciters, and one English reading:
Mahmoud Khalil Al-Husary, in his ordinary reading and his teaching reading; Abdul Basit Abdus-Samad, murattal and mujawwad; Mohamed Siddiq Al-Minshawi, murattal and mujawwad; Maher Al-Muaiqly; Abdurrahman As-Sudais; Sa'ud Ash-Shuraym; Abu Bakr Ash-Shatri; Yasser Ad-Dussary; Nasser Al-Qatami; Hani Ar-Rifai; Mohamed Al-Tablawi; and the Saheeh International English translation read by Ibrahim Walk.
Terms: EveryAyah asks for a credit and a link back, which the app gives in the player and in its Sources footer. The recordings themselves are never altered or re-published; playback speed is the listener's own setting on their own device. everyayah.com
The call to prayer
Seventy-nine recorded calls ship with the app, and you choose one for each prayer. Four of them were published by the people who made them, under licences that are named below; the other seventy-five were not, and they have an entry of their own after those four. Three of the four were shortened and the fourth was left whole: one opens on a little over a minute of an Amman morning before the muadhin begins, one on eleven seconds of a Kuala Lumpur park, and one runs on past the end of the call into the congregation. All four were then brought to a common loudness with a flat gain — a gain and not a compressor, so that each call keeps the dynamics the muadhin gave it — and no prayer arrives louder than another. Nothing else was done to them. The short call you hear in a notification is twenty-seven seconds cut from the first recording below.
Asim Javed — Islamic Center of Rockland, New York
The first and second calls to the Friday prayer of 17 May 2024, recorded and published by the mosque whose muadhin he is.
Terms: CC0 1.0 Universal. The mosque has put the recordings into the public domain and asks for nothing in return, not even this credit; it is given because a voice should be named. The first call was cut at its end, at 195.5 seconds, where the call finishes and the congregation begins; the second is complete, because nothing in it wanted cutting. the first call · the second call · the licence
Amman, Jordan — recorded by Eric Desjeux
The first call of the morning in Amman, with the city waking behind it, published through radio aporee's soundscape archive, where each recordist licenses his own recording.
Terms: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Free to use and to adapt, on the condition that the recordist is credited, the licence is named, its text is linked, and any change to the recording is stated. This one was changed: the muadhin begins a little over a minute into the original, which is where the app's copy starts, and the end was cut before the recording fades. That credit is a condition of using it, not a courtesy. archive.org/details/aporee_66016_76323 · the licence
Masjid KLCC, Kuala Lumpur — recorded by brycefegley
The midday call, recorded in the open air outside the mosque and published by the person who made the recording, under the name they publish under.
Seventy-five recordings that carry no licence at all
The rest of the call-to-prayer library. Seventy-four of them are calls from mosques, radio archives and broadcasts across the Muslim world, gathered by somebody else and uploaded to archive.org on 18 June 2012 by a private individual; they are listed in the app under the names that collection gave them, which are usually a city, a mosque or a reciter. The seventy-fifth was supplied by the app's author, from a page on SoundCloud where it is posted as the call of Shaykh Maruf Muhammad Rashad al-Sharif by محمد قاسم الحواوره; it is the one the app uses for Maghrib unless you choose another. Alsabeel recorded none of them, commissioned none of them, and claims nothing in any of them.
Terms: none. Neither source states a licence or makes a rights claim; in both cases the person who posted the recording is not the person who made it; and some of those that remain are studio work by named reciters. Being hosted on archive.org is not a licence, being posted on SoundCloud is not a licence, and this page will not pretend that either is. They ship because the publisher of this app decided that they should, knowing all of that. the collection on archive.org · the page on SoundCloud
Withdrawn on 20 September 2026: eleven further recordings from the same 2012 collection were in this library and are not in it now — five by Abdul Basit Abdus-Samad, two by Muhammad Siddiq al-Minshawi, and one each by Muhammad Rifat, Mahmoud Ali al-Banna, Mahmoud Khalil al-Hussary and Mustafa Ismail. They were the recordings in the collection whose rights holder can actually be named and written to: the Cairo studio recitations that the Egyptian Radio and Television Union holds in its own archive at Maspero and serves from its Quran radio site as encrypted streams, under no published terms of any kind. The files are gone from the app, and the build refuses to take them back — it knows all eleven by checksum, so a restored backup cannot reinstate one, and by number, so a fresh encoding of the same recording cannot either.
The six reciters are named here rather than left as "several reciters" for a plain reason: this page exists so that a rights holder can find his own work on it, and a family, a mosque or a broadcaster looking for one of these voices should be able to read in a single line that it is no longer in the app, instead of having to write and ask. Three of the six are named elsewhere on this page anyway, as reciters of the Quran recitations the app streams.
What the withdrawal was not: it was not a finding that those eleven were unlawful and the rest are safe. It turned on which rights holder can be identified and reached, not on whose claim is strongest; the fourteen recordings from the two Harams, whose custodian's published terms forbid copying or redistributing anything without written approval, were not touched by it at all. The seventy-five that remain stand exactly where they stood on the day before: no licence, no permission, nothing claimed. Nothing on this page became licensed when those eleven went, and it would be a misreading of this entry to think so.
One more recording left, and for a different reason: on 21 September 2026 a call from Algeria was removed from the app because it is too noisy to listen to. That is a judgement about the recording's sound and nothing else. No rights holder asked for it, and it should not be counted with the eleven above or read as saying anything about who owns what.
If you hold rights in one of these recordings — if you are the muadhin, the mosque, the broadcaster, or the family of a reciter whose voice is here — write to [email protected] and it will be removed from the next release, as those eleven were. Nothing more than your word will be asked of you.
Four is the whole of what a long search could license, and two recordings that would have made it six were left behind on purpose. Both are calls to prayer on Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, and both were fetched and measured before being refused: one runs thirty-seven seconds and carries the call in only the first twenty-three of them, which is a fragment and not a recitation, and the other was recorded so far from the mosque that the call barely rises above the street. Had either been taken, ShareAlike would have come with it. Shortening a recording makes a new work out of it, and a new work made from a ShareAlike recording must itself be offered under ShareAlike — the licence named, the author credited, its text linked, and the change stated — for as long as it travels. That is a duty a page like this one can carry, but not a duty a notification sound can carry, because a lock screen has nowhere to print a credit. It is why the short call is cut from a recording whose maker asks for nothing at all.
Adhkar
fitrahive/dua-dhikr
The morning, evening and daily remembrances, their Arabic text, their transliteration, their English rendering and their citations. Taken from one pinned commit of the repository, so that what ships can be reproduced exactly.
The Arabic titles and the Arabic form of each citation were written for this app; they are plain descriptive labels, not text taken from another dataset. Where a source supplies no citation, none is shown.
Terms: the MIT licence, and the licence text itself is shipped and checked by the build. The English translation is part of the same repository under the same licence; the repository names no separate translator and states no separate copyright for it, which is recorded here rather than dressed up as a credit nobody gave. github.com/fitrahive/dua-dhikr
Alsabeel's adhkar are not the whole of Hisn al-Muslim, and the reason is this licence. Of every candidate considered, this was the only one carrying real, stated terms; a fuller collection whose copyright nobody can establish is worth less than a smaller one that may honestly be given away.
Typefaces
KFGQPC Uthmanic Hafs, v18
The mushaf's own face, and the only one the printed page is set in, because its lines are laid out to it.
Terms: from the King Fahd Glorious Quran Printing Complex, shipped unmodified. qurancomplex.gov.sa
Amiri Quran 1.003
Copyright 2010–2022 The Amiri Project Authors. A reading face you can choose, and the source of the one glyph no KFGQPC font maps: the bismillah ligature.
The full text of each Open Font License ships inside the app, beside the font it covers.
Prayer times
adhan — Batoul Apps
The solar geometry behind every prayer time in the app. It was chosen deliberately: it is the implementation most prayer apps are validated against, and a subtle error in this arithmetic is a religious problem, not merely a bug.
All three are used under the Pexels License, which asks for no credit; they are credited here and in the app's theme picker anyway. The Al-Aqsa theme shows the Dome of the Rock, which stands within the Al-Aqsa compound; the Qibli Mosque itself has the grey dome.
The software it is built on
Alsabeel is a React Native app built with Expo, and it uses a number of open-source libraries beyond the ones named above — almost all of them under the MIT licence, whose only condition is that the licence travels with the code. It does.
If something here is wrong
If you hold rights in anything named on this page and the credit or the terms are wrong, or you would rather your work were not used, write to [email protected] and it will be corrected or removed. That is not a formality: the whole app was assembled on the rule that a source with a real licence and less content beats a fuller one whose terms nobody can establish.