Doha, April 11 (QNA) - Almost 25 years ago, Islamweb.net affiliated with the Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs emerged as the first Arab portal to introduce Islam, its heritage, culture and civilization at the global level.

Launched in 1998, the pioneering website was confined to the fatwa in an attempt to create a religious window for Muslims around the world on the internet to spread the correct Islamic faith and sharia, clarify the correct image of Islam and Muslims, care for all Muslim issues, and explain Islam correctly to non-Muslims.

The Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs, with the support of the General Directorate of Endowments, was keen to develop the website's form and content to maintain its global position as one of the Islamic websites and to continue its leadership in providing meaningful Islamic content according to standards that respond to developments in the world of digital technology.

Over 25 years, Islamweb.net has developed into a comprehensive Islamic portal which taught millions of people about Islam and Islamic culture. It included sections of the Noble Qur'an and medical, social, educational, youth and psychological consultations, audios and articles.

The website's content was also introduced in six live languages spoken by most of the world's population - Arabic, English, French, Spanish, German, and Indonesian.

The consultations section currently includes about 200,000 medical, psychological, social and other consultations, while the fatwa section recorded nearly 300,000 different fatwas, in addition to various cultural articles that exceeded 70,000 articles.

The audio section includes more than half a million audio files, distributed over Quranic recordings, lectures, lessons, explanations, religious chants, educational materials, Friday sermons and audiobooks.

The website includes more than 8 million pages that achieved more than two billion views.

Islamweb's library is considered one of the world's largest digital libraries, as it covers the majors of Sharia sciences with its various branches, such as acts of worship, transactions and Sharia etiquette, in addition to the principles of jurisprudence, interpretation of the Holy Qur'an and hadith.

The digital library is characterized by the ease of browsing in a manner that allows the user to access partial information for the various sharia sciences, by hyperlinking the contents of the library, as well as excellence in research through indexes, and the graduation of hadiths by attributing them to their sources, and other features.

In 2022, the website launched the library application, which contains more than 700,000 pages, 30,000 subject titles, two million subject links, and more than 400,000 transcripts of hadiths. In 2021, the Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs (Awqaf) launched the audio application on smart devices, after the great success achieved by the audio section, which attracts millions of visitors annually.

One of the website's important apps is Nusuk application for tablets and smart phones, which is a program that specializes in explaining the rituals of Hajj and Umrah with modern educational means and interactive methods. It contains a full explanation of the rituals of Hajj and Umrah, and an interactive map showing the rituals and the direction of the pilgrims in the holy sites, as well as video scenes of Hajj, and audio files of a number of scholars and lecturers on Hajj and Umrah.

Islamweb also launched applications for fatwas, consultations, an encyclopedia of Islamic biography and history, interpretation of the Qur'an in Spanish, and an encyclopedia of hadith. It seeks to launch many applications for smart phones, and to provide the Internet with qualitative legal materials in six languages.

In the context of caring for people with disabilities, the website worked on launching and developing the Deaf Project, which spreads religious awareness in sign language.

The project includes a wide range of various visual files and their translation in Arabic and international sign languages for all categories of the deaf, in order to transform the website into a basic reference for the deaf in the Arab and Islamic world and all countries of the world, within the framework of the continuous development plan for the deaf website in Islamweb, and its interest in the category of people with special needs.

Islamweb has proven its global leadership over the past years, and its achievements recorded a global echo, which strengthened its ability to continue and develop, as it won multiple awards, the most important of which was the award for the best e-learning product at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis in 2005.

It won for the second time the World Summit on Information Society Award for high-quality products as the best interactive educational entertainment website for Arabic-speaking children (Venice 2007). At the level of the GCC countries, it earned the award for the best website in terms of content at the regional level in 2009 during the first GCC e-Government Conference in Oman.

(QNA)