How IlmHive sets transliteration, italicisation, honorifics, citations and dates. A short reference to the register the site uses across every article.
Every article on IlmHive holds itself to one editorial register. Transliterations are set with the diacritics that recover what was lost when the words first reached English; technical Arabic terms are italicised; book titles are italicised on every occurrence; honorifics are minimised but never contracted to (saw) or (pbuh); citations are short and consistent. The discipline is not for its own sake — a single-author study archive lives or dies by whether a careful reader can trust that ḥadīth here means the same thing as ḥadīth there. The notes below are the rules we apply to make that possible.
We use the IJMES system — the transliteration standard of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, used by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and most English-language academic Islamic-studies publishing. IJMES uses macrons (ā ī ū) for long vowels, dots-below (ḥ ṣ ḍ ṭ ẓ) for the emphatic and pharyngeal consonants, and the modifier letters ʿ (ayn, U+02BF) and ʾ (hamzah, U+02BE) — neither of which is an apostrophe. Other systems exist (DIN 31635, used by Brill's Encyclopaedia of Islam, replaces the digraphs dh kh sh th with single letters ḏ ḫ š ṯ), but IJMES is the most familiar to English readers and easier to type and search; we have no reason to diverge.
| Letter | Sound | In a word |
|---|---|---|
| ā | long alif | Qurʾān |
| ī | long yāʾ | Tafsīr |
| ū | long wāw | uṣūl |
| ḥ | ḥāʾ | ḥadīth |
| ṣ | ṣād | Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī |
| ḍ | ḍād | ramaḍān |
| ṭ | ṭāʾ | al-Suyūṭī |
| ẓ | ẓāʾ | Ẓuhr |
| ʿ | ayn — modifier letter | ʿAqīdah, Saʿīd |
| ʾ | hamzah — modifier letter | Qurʾān, āyāt |
| Common rendering | IlmHive |
|---|---|
| Hadith | Ḥadīth |
| Qur'an | Qurʾān |
| 'Umar | ʿUmar |
| Sahih al-Bukhari | Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī |
| Tafseer / tajweed | Tafsīr / tajwīd |
| as-Suyuti / at-Tirmidhi | al-Suyūṭī / al-Tirmidhī |
Technical Arabic terms are italicised on every occurrence and stay lowercase mid-sentence: ḥadīth, isnād, matn, ṣaḥīḥ, qiyās. Book titles are italicised on every occurrence: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, Tahdhīb al-Tahdhīb, Nukhbat al-Fikr, al-Bayqūniyyah. Proper nouns — people, places, tribes, schools, dynasties — stay roman: Imām al-Bukhārī, Ibn Ḥajar, Quraysh, Ḥanafīs.
Italicised Arabic terms keep their capital at the start of a sentence or list item. Mutawātir ḥadīth are those transmitted by so many narrators that fabrication is impossible; mid-sentence the same term is lowercased — “a mutawātir ḥadīth is one that…”.
A handful of Arabic-derived terms have settled English forms and are left as such: zakat (lowercase, no italics), bismillāh (no italics, except as part of a longer formula), ulema (no italics; singular ʿālim), Bedouin, Ẓuhr, Ramadan. Dynasty names take Anglicised plurals without italics: Almohads, Almoravids, Umayyads, Abbasids, Ashʿarites, Fatimids.
After every mention of the Prophet, the Messenger, the Messenger of Allāh, or the proper name Muḥammad, the glyph ﷺ (the unicode ligature for ṣallā Allāhu ʿalayhi wa sallam — “may Allāh bless him and grant him peace”) is set once. We do not use the contractions (saw), (SAW), or (pbuh). Honorifics are minimised in academic prose; in devotional writing they are used more often but never repeated to the point of distraction.
For Companions, (raḍ. ʿanhu) / (raḍ. ʿanhā) / (raḍ. ʿanhum) follows the named individual once at first mention, not on every appearance.
Qurʾān verses are cited by sūrah name and chapter:verse: Sūrat al-Anʿām 6:72, Sūrat al-Fātiḥah 1:1–7 (en-dash for verse ranges). Translations are set in italics, with square brackets for translator interpolations and rounded brackets for the Arabic term inserted after the English.
Ḥadīth are cited by collection title and number, in note-style short form: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 1, Sunan Abī Dāwūd 4607, Jāmiʿ al-Tirmidhī 3686. We do not use the academic volume/hadith form (2/1,234) on the site; that register belongs to print editions.
Always hyphenated, never with sun-letter assimilation: al-Suyūṭī, al-Tirmidhī, al-Shāfiʿī, al-Nawawī — never as-Suyūṭī, at-Tirmidhī, etc. Lowercase except at the start of a sentence or title. Dropped for non-Arab names (Mawdūdī, not al-Mawdūdī). Where the English article reads more naturally we drop the Arabic one — “the Quraysh”, “the Qurʾān and the Sunnah”, never “the al-Quraysh”.
UK English throughout: colour, honour, realise, criticise, centre, defence. We do not use the Oxford / serial comma — “apples, oranges and pears”, not “apples, oranges, and pears”.
Numbers from one to ninety-nine are spelled out; numerals are used from 100. Dates take the cardinal form in day-month-year order: 3 November 1968, never 3rd November 1968 or November 3, 1968. Plural decades are written without an apostrophe: 1960s, not 1960's. Centuries are spelled out: the first century, the nineteenth century.
Hijrī and Gregorian dates appear in that order, separated by a forward slash: 1409/1989. Era markers render in small caps: 41 AH, 622 CE, BC, BH. We use CE, never AD. The lunar months follow the conventional short forms: Rabīʿ I / Rabīʿ II, Jumādā I / Jumādā II, with Muḥarram, Ramaḍān, etc. spelled as expected.
Two deliberate departures, named here so a careful reader does not mistake them for sloppiness:
Everything else follows the academic mainstream — IJMES transliteration, italicised technical terms and book titles, the Prophetic glyph, en-dashes for ranges, no Oxford comma, dates in day-month-year cardinal form.
