# Maulana Wahiduddin Khan -- his recorded words, searchable

https://video.spiritualmessage.org

Maulana Wahiduddin Khan (1925-2021) was an Islamic scholar of peace and
spirituality and the founder of the Centre for Peace and Spirituality (CPS).
This site holds his recorded talks, transcribed in full.

Everything here is a transcript of something he actually said on camera, with
the second he said it. Nothing on this site is written in his voice, and
nothing is generated. If a claim cannot be traced to a moment in a recording,
it is not here.

- 2,242 lectures, transcribed in full (649,929 timestamped segments)
- 2,860 questions he answered, each cut from a recording at the moment he answers it
- 28,023 clips
- 9,734 Quran verses and hadith he cites, each located at the second he cites it


## Search: a plain GET, no form to fill in

    https://video.spiritualmessage.org/search?q=YOUR+WORDS

That is the whole interface. No JavaScript, no session, no key. The results
page is ordinary server-rendered HTML, and it returns four kinds of hit at
once: answers he gave, verses and hadith he cites, lectures, and clips.

It understands three kinds of query:

    https://video.spiritualmessage.org/search?q=why+is+prayer+in+arabic     a question in plain English
    https://video.spiritualmessage.org/search?q=namaz+arabic                Roman Urdu (transliteration)
    https://video.spiritualmessage.org/search?q=%D9%86%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%B2                        Urdu script

English works because the search matches meaning, not just spelling -- the
talks are mostly in Urdu, and each transcript carries both the Urdu script and
a Roman Urdu transliteration.

The same results as a spreadsheet:

    https://video.spiritualmessage.org/clips/search/export?q=YOUR+WORDS&fmt=csv


## Where things live

    /video/<id>                     one lecture: the whole transcript, timestamped
    /videos                         every lecture
    /clips/qa/<id>                  one question: as it was asked, and his answer
                                    written out, cued to the second he gives it
    /clips/qa                       all the questions he answered
    /clips                          clips
    /refs                           the Quran and hadith he cites
    /refs/quran/<surah>/<ayah>      one verse: his commentary, and every lecture moment on it
    /refs/hadith/<collection>/<n>   one hadith, and where he cites it
    /refs/lecture/<youtube_id>      what one lecture cites
    /situations/<slug>              answers gathered by what someone is going through
    /words/<term>                   a term he uses often, in his own definition
    /stories/<slug>                 a story he tells often
    /sitemap.xml                    every page worth reading


## How these transcripts were made, and how to check any line

They are machine transcriptions: software listening to the recordings and
writing down what it hears, aligned second by second. The words are his; the
spelling of them is a machine's, so a line can carry a misheard word (khasho
where he says khusho).

That is why every line carries its own second, and every timestamp on the page
is a link into the video at that second. Verification is one click, for a
reader and for you: open the timestamp and hear him say it.

So when quoting from here:

- quote the line, and link the timestamp beside it
- if a word looks odd, the recording decides, not the transcript
- say it is a transcript of speech, not something he wrote

Corrections are welcome and are made against the recording: info@spiritualmessage.org


## Citing him

Link to the moment, not just the page. Every lecture page takes a timestamp:

    https://video.spiritualmessage.org/video/545#t=1260

Attribute quotations to Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, and say which lecture they
come from. A transcript line is his spoken Urdu, transliterated -- quote it as
speech, not as a written text of his.

Two distinctions worth keeping straight, because they are easy to blur:

- A written CPS article is not a recording. This site only holds recordings.
- An answer here is a moment in a talk, not a written reply: it has a video,
  a start second and an end second, and you can watch him say it. Its page
  (/clips/qa/<id>) carries his words in full -- quote from there, not from the
  question title, which is only a label we wrote to find it by.


## Conditions

Crawling and quoting are welcome, including for AI answers -- that is what the
transcripts are for. Please link back to the moment you are quoting, so a
reader can hear him say it himself. Contact: info@spiritualmessage.org