Most citation guides assume your primary source is in the same language as your paper. The Quran is not. A common pattern in Arabic-language theses is pasting English Yusuf Ali translations because nobody told the writer they could cite the Uthmani directly. The mirror pattern shows up in English Islamic studies work: transliterating سورة as "Surah Al-Baqara" because the writer wasn't sure modern Word handles Arabic script. (It does, fine, since about 2010.)
This is the bidirectional reality every researcher who works with the Quran runs into eventually. The style guide is in English. The primary source is in Arabic. The journal might want either, or both. Your committee may have an opinion you haven't been told.
I run Nuss, an Arabic-first writing tool with a Quran insertion command built in, and citation questions are the most common kind of email I get from researchers. So I sat down with the actual editions of APA 7, MLA 9, the Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition, and the Arabic journal guidelines from ajsrp.com and a handful of university journals, and wrote down the answers in one place. This is that page.
For the broader picture of how AI fits into Arabic academic work, the long version is over in Academic Writing in Arabic with AI.
The unique problem: a primary source older than every style guide
Style guides were built for modern, attributable, copyrighted works. The Quran is none of those. There is no author in the modern sense, no publisher of the original, no edition number. What you do have, and what every style guide eventually settles on, is:
- A standardized chapter and verse numbering system (used worldwide).
- A translator, if you're quoting in English.
- A specific printed or digital edition, if you're being meticulous.
All three major style guides treat the Quran as a "classical religious work", which puts it in a special category alongside the Bible. The good news: the rules are simpler than for modern works. The bad news: every guide writes them slightly differently, and the Arabic-language journals have their own conventions that the English guides ignore entirely.
How do you cite the Quran in APA 7?
APA 7 treats religious texts as having no human author for citation purposes. The Quran itself is not in the reference list as "Anonymous"; rather, the specific edition or translation is, with the translator as author.
In-text citation:
(Qur'an 2:255)
You can also write it out: (Qur'an, Sūrat al-Baqara 2:255) if the chapter name matters to your argument. Spell "Qur'an" consistently throughout, using whichever transliteration style your journal prefers (Qur'an, Quran, or Koran, though Koran is dated).
Reference list entry (translation):
Abdel Haleem, M. A. S. (Trans.). (2004). The Qur'an: A new translation. Oxford University Press.
If you used the Arabic Uthmani text directly, cite the printed mushaf you used:
The Holy Qur'an (Uthmani script). (1984). King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Qur'an.
Two things APA gets wrong for Arabic researchers, and you should know:
- APA doesn't have an in-text format for citing the chapter name alongside the number. Most journals will accept it anyway. Check with your editor before fighting it.
- APA wants the date of the translation, not "n.d." This trips people up. Yusuf Ali's translation has a date (1934, originally); use it.
How do you cite the Quran in MLA 9?
MLA 9 gives religious works a small but important rule: the title of the work is italicized when you're citing a specific published edition, but the work in the abstract (the Quran as a divine text) is not.
So in-text:
(Qur'an 2:255)
But in your works cited, the italicized edition:
The Qur'an. Translated by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem, Oxford UP, 2004.
If you cite multiple translations across the paper (a common case in comparative Islamic studies), use a short identifier in-text to disambiguate:
(Qur'an [Abdel Haleem] 2:255)
(Qur'an [Pickthall] 2:255)
MLA's flexibility on this is genuinely helpful: it expects you to identify the translation when it matters. Use that flexibility, especially in tafsīr-comparison papers.
How do you cite the Quran in Chicago / Turabian style?
Chicago Manual of Style handles the Quran under section 14.241 (notes-bibliography style) and 15.55 (author-date). Both are valid, and journals will tell you which they want.
Notes-bibliography (humanities default):
First footnote:
1. Qur'an 2:255 (Abdel Haleem trans.).
Subsequent footnotes:
4. Qur'an 5:32.
Bibliography entry:
The Qur'an. Translated by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Author-date (social sciences in Chicago): mirrors APA closely. (Qur'an 2:255) in-text, with the translation in the references list.
Chicago is the most common choice for Islamic studies journals based in North America. It tolerates the chapter-name form (Qur'an, al-Baqara 2:255) without complaint, which APA does not.
How do you cite the Quran in Arabic-language academic journals?
This is where every English style guide falls silent. Arabic academic journals, including ajsrp.com (Arab Journal of Sciences and Research Publishing), the major university journals from King Saud, Al-Azhar, and Umm al-Qura, and most Sharia faculty publications, follow a different convention. The version I see most often:
In-text, in the body, immediately after the verse text:
﴿ٱلَّذِينَ يُؤْمِنُونَ بِٱلْغَيْبِ﴾ (البقرة: ٣)
Note the ornamental Quranic brackets ﴿ ﴾ around the verse and the chapter name in Arabic. The verse number uses Arabic-Indic digits in most journals (٣), though some accept Western digits (3). Confirm with the journal.
Footnote (if the journal uses footnotes for sources):
سورة البقرة، الآية ٣.
If your Arabic paper quotes from a tafsīr or translation rather than the Uthmani directly, the tafsīr is cited separately as a book, and the verse is cited as above for the Quranic text itself.
What ajsrp.com explicitly requires (per their author guidelines page): use the Uthmani script, place the verse in the Quranic brackets, and cite chapter-name + verse-number in Arabic. Translations of Quran into English are not standard primary sources in an Arabic journal; they belong only if you're explicitly comparing translations.
When you cite multiple translations in one paper
Comparative work, especially in translation studies or tafsīr analysis, often requires citing several translators side by side. The cleanest approach:
- Pick a "default" translation and cite it as the standard. Identify it in your methodology section or in a footnote on first reference.
- For deviations, name the translator inline or in a short bracket.
- Add all translations to your bibliography in alphabetical order by translator surname.
A worked example:
"Throughout this paper, Quranic translations follow Abdel Haleem (2004) unless otherwise noted. Where Pickthall (1930) or Yusuf Ali (1934) is used, the translator is named inline."
That sentence saves you from cluttering every in-text citation. Journals love it. Reviewers love it more.
Should you include the Arabic Uthmani script alongside a Quran citation?
A practical question: do you actually put the Arabic verse in your English-language paper? Three rules from experience:
- If the argument turns on a specific word or grammatical feature, include the Uthmani. A discussion of iʿrāb in a verse without the Arabic is incomplete.
- If you're paraphrasing or citing the meaning generally, the English translation alone is enough. Don't pad the paper with Arabic that doesn't serve the argument.
- If you do include Arabic, include it correctly. That means Uthmani script (not modern simplified Arabic), the verse markers, and preferably the ornamental brackets. A garbled copy-paste from a non-Uthmani source signals carelessness to any reviewer who reads Arabic.
This is where your editor matters more than you'd think. RTL handling, Arabic font fallback, and bidirectional text in mixed-language paragraphs are not solved problems in every word processor. The full story on why your editor's RTL handling matters when you mix Arabic verses with English prose is in Why RTL Direction Matters in Writing Tools.
The tooling problem: inserting verses cleanly
Here's the workflow failure I see most often: a researcher writes a great paragraph, opens Quran.com in a separate tab, copies a verse, pastes it into the document. The paste either drops the ornamental brackets, breaks the RTL flow of the paragraph, or imports a font that doesn't match the rest of the document. Then they manually retype it. Multiply that by 40 verses in a thesis and you have an afternoon eaten by formatting.
The reason I built Quran insertion into Nuss as a first-class feature: the verse should arrive in your document the way you'd write it. Uthmani script. Verse number. Proper RTL embedding. And, optionally, the canonical chapter-and-verse citation already attached for you to format into your house style.
You can use any tool you like for this. The point is: paste-from-browser is the most common citation-formatting hazard in Arabic-English research papers, and it's worth solving once and then forgetting.
Cheat sheet: copy-paste templates
For when you just want the line that works.
APA 7 in-text: (Qur'an 2:255)
APA 7 reference: Abdel Haleem, M. A. S. (Trans.). (2004). The Qur'an: A new translation. Oxford University Press.
MLA 9 in-text: (Qur'an 2:255) or (Qur'an [Abdel Haleem] 2:255)
MLA 9 works cited: The Qur'an. Translated by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem, Oxford UP, 2004.
Chicago footnote (first): Qur'an 2:255 (Abdel Haleem trans.).
Chicago bibliography: The Qur'an. Translated by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Arabic-language journal (in-text): ﴿نصّ الآية﴾ (البقرة: ٢٥٥)
Arabic-language journal (footnote): سورة البقرة، الآية ٢٥٥.
Save the block. Reuse it. The fifteen minutes you spend formatting your first citation correctly saves you an afternoon over the course of a paper.
A note on transliteration
Three accepted transliteration systems show up in academic work: ALA-LC (used by the Library of Congress), DIN 31635 (used in much European scholarship), and IJMES (International Journal of Middle East Studies). Pick one and use it consistently. Don't mix Qur'an in one paragraph and Qurʾān in the next. Reviewers notice, and inconsistency reads as carelessness even when it's just absent-mindedness.
If you work with Islamic studies texts at scale, an editor that supports Arabic side-by-side with English without forcing you to switch keyboards every two seconds is not a luxury, it's a productivity multiplier. That's the broader argument made in our guide to AI tools for Arabic writers.
The honest takeaway
Citing the Quran is not hard. It's just inconsistent across the major style guides, and the Arabic-language conventions are invisible to most English-language tools. Once you've internalized the three or four template lines above, you can cite a verse correctly in any style in under a minute.
What takes the time is the formatting around the citation: keeping the Uthmani script intact, keeping the bidirectional text from breaking your paragraph, keeping translator attribution consistent across a 90-page thesis. Solve those once, with a tool that handles Arabic as a first-class citizen, and the citation itself becomes a non-issue.
If you want to try the Quran insertion command and bilingual editor that prompted this guide, nuss.ink is free without a credit card.