بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ

BismillahBot is a bot on Telegram to explore the Holy Qur'an.

Table of Contents

• Usage
• Installation
  • Data files
  • Updating
• License

Use the bot by messaging Bismillahbot on Telegram. For every verse the bot has an English translation from Imam Ahmad Raza, audio recitation by Shaykh Mahmoud Khalil al-Husary, and exegesis (tafsir) from Tafsir al-Jalalayn. The translation and tafsir are available anywhere on Telegram via inline mode, just start a text with @BismillahBot (for example, type @BismillahBot 1:1 in any chat). A conversation looks like:

You can run your own instance of BismillahBot. First you need to request a bot username and token. You also need a Unix-like system to run the bot on. BismillahBot is running on a Debian server. The following gets the code, and installs the dependencies on Debian/Ubuntu in a virtualenv:

sudo apt install redis-server git python3-pip python3-dev virtualenv
git clone https://github.com/rahiel/BismillahBot.git
cd BismillahBot/
virtualenv -p python3 venv
. venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt --upgrade

In the same directory you should define a secret.py with the token you got from the BotFather:

TOKEN = "<your-token-here>"

Disable group chats for the bot by sending the BotFather the /setjoingroups command and customize the bot further.

The bot serves Quranic data collected from several projects. These are necessary for the bot to function. Run the following in the bot's directory to get the data:

wget "http://tanzil.net/trans/en.ahmedraza"
wget "http://tanzil.net/res/text/metadata/quran-data.xml"
wget "http://www.altafsir.com/Books/Al_Jalalain_Eng.pdf"
pdftotext -nopgbrk Al_Jalalain_Eng.pdf
wget "http://www.everyayah.com/data/Husary_128kbps/000_versebyverse.zip"
unzip -d Husary 000_versebyverse.zip
wget "http://www.everyayah.com/data/quranpngs/000_images.zip"
unzip -d quran_images 000_images.zip

We do some post-processing on the images. First we remove the empty area's from the edges with ImageMagick and GNU parallel:

cd quran_images/
parallel "echo {}; convert {} -trim {}" ::: *.png

Then we optimize the images with pngout:

parallel "pngout {}" ::: *.png

You could use other data files, like other translations or audio recitations. These choices are currently hardcoded in the bot, so file an issue if you'd like to use different data.

If all went fine you can now run the bot with python bismillah.py.

The bot (and dependencies) can be updated by running the following in its directory:

git pull
. venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt -U

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.