Notes

Qalam — The Notes System in Al-Islam

"Nun. By the pen and what they inscribe." — Surah Al-Qalam, 68:1

Qalam (القلم, the pen) is the note editor built into Al Islam. It is a full rich-text environment designed specifically for Islamic study: lecture notes, tafsir summaries, khutbah points, memorization trackers, personal reflections, and du'a lists — with first-class support for Quran references, hadith citations, Arabic script, and the honorifics that belong in this kind of writing.

This guide covers everything: where notes live, how the editor works, every formatting tool it offers, the Islamic writing features, and the plain-text format that keeps your notes yours.

Table of contents

1. The idea behind Qalam
2. Where your notes live
3. The editor at a glance
4. The writing surface
5. Writing and formatting
6. Text styles reference
7. Structure: headings, lists, quotes, and more
8. Tables
9. Islamic writing tools
10. Drawings
11. Callouts and collapsible sections
12. Links, images, and tags
13. Reading mode
14. Working faster
15. Voice dictation
16. Intelligence in your notes
17. Personalizing the editor
18. Sharing and exporting
19. Smart tags
20. The plain-text format, in full
21. Frequently asked questions

The idea behind Qalam

A note editor has to balance two things: rich formatting, and writing that stays yours — readable anywhere, in any app, for as long as you keep it. Qalam is built on one rule that gives you both:

Everything you write is stored as readable, plain text.

Every heading, every highlight, every table, every Quran reference chip, even every freehand drawing is recorded in a human-readable text form. If you copied a note out of the app and opened it in any plain-text editor, you would see your complete note — formatting and all — written in a light, standard notation. Paste it back, and it comes alive again exactly as it was.

This has real consequences for you:

• Your notes stay yours. There is no private file format. The text is the note.
• Notes survive everything. App updates, device changes, backups, exports — plain text passes through all of them untouched.
• Notes are compatible with the wider world. The notation is based on Markdown, the same convention used across the writing and publishing world, extended carefully where Islamic content needs more.
• Nothing is lost between versions. Anything the app does not recognise in a note is shown and kept exactly as it is.

You do not need to know or care about any of this to use Qalam — the editor does all the formatting for you with buttons and menus. But it is the foundation everything else in this guide rests on.

Where your notes live

Qalam is woven into Collections, the app's personal library. There are two ways notes appear there:

Notes attached to saved items

Every item in your collections — a saved ayah, a bookmarked hadith, a folder — can carry its own note. Use it for context: why you saved this ayah, what the teacher said about this hadith, what a folder is for.

To write or read an item's note:

1. Long-press the item (or open selection mode) and select it.
2. Choose Notes from the action bar.
3. The Qalam editor opens with that item's note.

Items that carry a note show a small indicator dot on their card, and the note's content appears as a preview line so you can recognize it at a glance.

Standalone note items

A note can also be an item in its own right — a page that lives in your collection tree like any file in a folder. Use these for anything that isn't tied to one ayah or hadith: lecture notes, study plans, reflections, checklists.

To create one:

• Tap New at the top of the Collections screen and choose Note, or
• Use Write a note in an empty collection.

Give it a title, and the editor opens immediately, ready to write. Note items can be renamed, moved, copied, and organized into folders exactly like everything else in your collections, and they are included in your collections' backup and sync with Premium.

Saving is automatic

There is no save button. Qalam persists your note quietly while you type and once more the moment you leave the editor. Close the app mid-sentence; the sentence will be there when you come back.

The editor at a glance

The editor has two faces, and you can flip between them at any time with the eye / pencil button in the top bar:

• Writing mode — a focused text surface where formatting appears live as you type. Bold text turns bold, headings grow, highlights glow, references become colored chips — while the underlying notation stays visible in a deliberately faded tone, so you always know exactly what your note contains. If you prefer, the symbols can be shown in the accent colour instead: see Personalizing the editor.
• Reading mode — the finished page. Notation disappears entirely; tables become real grids, checkboxes become tappable, drawings render, references become buttons that open the actual Quran and hadith readers.

Along the bottom of writing mode sits the toolbar — a single strip of tools grouped into sections:

Buttons light up when the cursor sits inside the matching formatting — place the cursor in a bold word and the bold button glows — and tapping a lit button removes that formatting. Every style is a true toggle.

The top bar's menu holds the document-level tools: Outline & statistics, Find & replace, Format document, Copy all, Share, and Editor settings.

The writing surface

Everything below is about the act of writing itself — how the page moves under your cursor, how much room the lines get, and what happens to the space you leave between thoughts.

The page follows your cursor

However long a note grows, the line you are typing on stays in view. Reach the bottom of the visible area and the page moves up to meet you; move the cursor with the arrow keys, tap somewhere far up the note, or paste a long block, and the view goes where the cursor went.

The insert palette

Type / at the start of a line and a palette opens listing everything the Insert and Structure sections of the toolbar can add — headings, lists, tables, callouts, code blocks, dividers, Quran and hadith references, du'a and honorifics. Keep typing to narrow it: /tab finds Table, /qur finds the Quran reference.

The palette floats over the bottom of the page rather than pushing your writing around, and never takes more than half the screen, so the sentence you just wrote stays visible while you choose.

A slash is a character before it is a command. If you are typing a date, a path, or a fraction, dismiss the palette and carry on — the / stays as ordinary text. Three ways out:

• Tap Dismiss on the palette
• Press Escape, with a keyboard attached
• Press back

Dismissing applies to that slash only. The next one you type opens the palette again, so turning it away is never a setting you have to go and undo.

Line spacing

Lines are set with generous leading, and the space is distributed above and below each line rather than piled underneath it — which is what stops descenders and diacritics from crowding the line below.

Three things follow from that, and each is deliberate:

• Headings get room to be headings. A heading is taller than body text, and it is given the height it needs rather than being clipped by the line above.
• Arabic gets Arabic leading. A paragraph containing Arabic is given the extra height its harakat need, so the marks of one line never touch the next.
• The spacing between blocks follows the line height. Set your leading in Editor settings and the gaps between paragraphs, lists and quotes scale with it instead of staying fixed.

Formatting works on an empty line

Choose a heading, a list, a task list or a quote from the toolbar before you type, and the empty line is made ready for it — the marker is placed, and what you type next takes that form. You do not need to write a word first and format it afterwards.

Blank lines are part of what you wrote

In a notebook, the gap you leave before a new thought is part of the note. Qalam keeps it. Leave three blank lines before a new section and three blank lines is what you get — on screen, when the note is saved, when it is reopened, and when it is shared as text. Format document tidies notation without closing up the space you left.

Writing and formatting

There are three ways to format text in Qalam, and they all produce identical results. Use whichever fits how you think.

1. Select, then tap

Select any stretch of text and tap a style button. The selection is wrapped in that style. Tap again to unwrap it. With nothing selected, the style applies to the word under the cursor — handy for bolding a word you just typed without fiddling with selection handles.

2. The insert menu

On any empty line, type / and a menu of every block type appears — headings, lists, tables, callouts, Quran references, drawings, all of it. Keep typing to filter (/ta narrows to Table and Task list), then tap to insert. The / trigger is removed automatically.

3. Type the notation directly

Because notes are plain text underneath, you can simply type the notation and watch it become formatting as you write. Type ** before and after a word and it turns bold in front of you. Type - at the start of a line and it becomes a list. Writers who know Markdown will feel at home immediately; the full notation is documented in this guide, section by section.

Lists that think

Lists behave the way you would hope:

• Press return at the end of a list item and the next line starts with the next bullet, number, or empty checkbox automatically.
• Press return on an empty item and the list ends — the marker is removed and you are back to normal text.
• Insert an item in the middle of a numbered list and the numbers below renumber themselves.
• Indent / outdent buttons move items between nesting levels; lists nest as deep as you need.

The same continuation logic applies to quotes: press return inside a quote and the next line stays quoted; press return on an empty quote line to step out.

Undo and redo, generously

Every change can be stepped backward and forward. Bursts of typing are grouped into sensible steps (undo removes the phrase you just typed, not one letter), while toolbar actions are always their own step. History runs two hundred steps deep.

Text styles reference

All inline styles, their buttons, and their plain-text notation:

Styles combine freely — bold italic highlighted text is fine — and can span any part of a line.

Color

Two tools go beyond the standard set, both with a full color wheel rather than a fixed palette:

• Text color — paints the selected words in any color you pick.
• Custom highlight — the default highlight uses the app's marker color; a custom color can be applied through the color tool for color-coded study systems (for example, green for rulings, amber for warnings, blue for language notes).

In the stored text these appear as smart tags, e.g. :color[important](c=#E57373) — see Smart tags.

Structure: headings, lists, quotes, and more

Headings

Six levels of heading organize a note, written as # through ###### followed by a space:

# Chapter
## Section
### Subsection

Headings do double duty: they feed the Outline view (see Working faster), which turns any long note into a tappable table of contents.

Bullet, numbered, and task lists

- A bullet point
- Another one
  - Nested underneath

1. First step
2. Second step

- [ ] Something still to do
- [x] Something done

Task lists deserve a special mention: in reading mode the checkboxes are live. Tick them off as you complete memorization targets or daily adhkar without ever entering editing mode — the note updates itself. Completed items are struck through and dimmed so remaining work stands out.

Quotes

Lines beginning with > render as an elegant quotation block with an accent rule — right for translations, sayings, and passages you want visually set apart. Quotes can contain anything: multiple paragraphs, lists, even headings.

Code blocks

Fenced blocks preserve text exactly as written — no formatting is applied inside — which makes them right for anything where spacing and symbols matter:

```
text kept exactly as typed
```

Name a language after the opening fence — such as ```python or ```sql — and the block gains light colouring for that language. Every code block carries a one-tap Copy button in reading mode.

Dividers

A line containing --- renders as a horizontal rule — a quiet visual break between topics.

Tables

Real tables, not simulated ones. Write them in the standard pipe notation, or insert an empty grid from the toolbar's table tool by choosing the number of rows and columns:

| Prayer  | Rakat | Time    |
| :------ | :---: | ------: |
| Fajr    |   2   | dawn    |
| Maghrib |   3   | sunset  |

The second line controls column alignment: :--- left, :--: center, ---: right.

In reading mode, every column sizes itself to its widest content, the header row is emphasized, and wide tables scroll sideways rather than crushing the layout. Cells accept inline formatting — bold, highlights, even Quran reference chips inside a table cell.

Islamic writing tools

These tools are made for Islamic study notes: references that open the exact verse or narration, supplications set apart, honorifics written correctly, and Arabic that flows properly within any language.

Quran references

Tap the Quran tool and a reference builder opens:

• A searchable directory of all 114 surahs — search by number, transliterated name, English meaning, or Arabic name, each entry showing its Arabic title and ayah count.
• Ayah and range fields with live validation. The builder knows every surah's length; it will tell you, before you insert anything, that Al-Fatihah has no ayah 8, or that a range must run forward.
• An optional label. Leave it empty and the reference names itself (for example Al-Baqarah 2:255); fill it to display anything you like (Ayat al-Kursi).

The inserted reference appears in your note as a coloured chip. In reading mode, tapping the chip takes you straight to that ayah in the app's Quran reader, so your notes and the mushaf stay connected.

In the stored text, a reference is written as a readable tag:

:quran[Ayat al-Kursi](surah=2 ayah=255)
:quran[](surah=112 ayah=1 to=4)

Hadith references

The hadith tool works the same way: choose from the classical collections — Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Sunan an-Nasa'i, Sunan Abi Dawud, Jami' at-Tirmidhi, Sunan Ibn Majah, Muwatta Malik, Musnad Ahmad, Sunan ad-Darimi, Riyad as-Salihin, the Forty Hadith of an-Nawawi, and the Forty Hadith Qudsi — enter the narration number, optionally add a label, and insert.

Tapping a hadith chip in reading mode opens that narration in the app's hadith reader, from the collection in your Hadith Library.

:hadith[](book=bukhari no=1)
:hadith[The hadith of intentions](book=bukhari no=1)

Du'a

A dedicated tag marks supplications, giving them their own distinct chip so du'a stand out from surrounding commentary in long notes:

:dua[Du'a for entering the home](source="Hisn al-Muslim")

Honorifics and phrases

The honorifics tool opens a one-tap library of correctly written Arabic honorifics and common phrases, including:

• ﷽ and the full basmala
• ﷺ (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam)
• ﷻ (jalla jalaluhu)
• عليه السلام, رضي الله عنه / عنها / عنهم, رحمه الله
• Everyday phrases with full diacritics: alhamdulillah, subhanAllah, Allahu akbar, astaghfirullah, inshaAllah, mashaAllah, jazakAllahu khayran, and more

These insert as proper Unicode text — they are part of your note's text, searchable and copyable, not pictures.

Arabic script, properly

Arabic inside a note is set properly: the Arabic run tool wraps text so it renders in the app's Quranic typeface, slightly enlarged, with correct right-to-left flow — even in the middle of an English sentence.

The ayah begins :ar[بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ] and continues...

Arabic works everywhere else, too: you can write entire notes in Arabic, mix directions freely, and even use Arabic hashtags like #رمضان.

Drawings

Some things are drawn, not typed — a qibla diagram, a family tree of narrators, tajweed markings, a quick map of a lecture's structure.

Insert a Drawing from the toolbar or the / menu, tap the empty canvas, and a full-screen sketch pad opens:

• Ink colors — a row of ready colors plus a full color-wheel picker for any shade.
• Stroke width — a smooth slider from fine liner to broad marker, with a live preview dot.
• Undo removes the last stroke; Clear starts the canvas over.

Save, and the drawing sits inside your note like any other block. Tap it any time to continue drawing.

True to the Qalam rule, drawings are stored as text as well — each stroke is recorded as a compact list of coordinates inside the note itself. Your sketches travel with your note through every copy, export, and backup, and they redraw crisply at any screen size.

Callouts and collapsible sections

Callouts

Callouts are colored panels that make a paragraph impossible to miss. Five moods are built in — info, note, tip, warning, and danger — each with its own accent color and icon, plus an optional title:

:::callout type=tip title="Memorization technique"
Read the ayah aloud **five times** before attempting recall.
:::

Callouts are full containers: lists, references, tables — anything can live inside them.

Collapsible sections

For long notes, fold away the detail:

:::details title="Full narrator chain"
The complete isnad, kept out of the way until needed...
:::

In reading mode this renders as a titled row with a chevron; tap to expand or collapse. Add the word open after the title to have a section start expanded.

Links, images, and tags

Links

Three kinds, all first-class:

• Labeled links — [Tafsir of this ayah](https://example.com/page) shows the label, hides the address.
• Bare links — paste any web address into a note and it becomes tappable on its own.
• In-app links — links that point inside Al-Islam itself (the kind produced when sharing content from the app) open the target screen directly instead of a browser.

Images

Embed an image by address, with an optional caption:

![Diagram of the Hajj routes](https://example.com/hajj-map.png)

An image standing alone on its line renders full width with its caption beneath it.

Tags

Type # followed by a word to create a tag: #tajweed, #ramadan2026, #رمضان. Tags render in the accent color, and tapping one in reading mode searches the note for every other occurrence — a lightweight way to thread themes through long documents.

Reading mode

Reading mode is the note as a finished page, and it is fully interactive:

• Checkboxes tick and untick with a tap, saving as they go.
• Quran and hadith chips open the actual reader screens.
• Links open; tags search; drawings open their canvas for further editing.
• Code blocks offer one-tap copy.
• Collapsible sections fold and unfold.
• Text selection works across the whole note for copying passages out.

Reference chips also respond in writing mode with an information sheet showing the full details of the reference — surah, ayah, collection, number — with a copy action, so you can verify a citation without leaving the text.

Working faster

Outline and statistics

Open Outline & statistics from the menu and every heading in the note becomes a tappable table of contents — tap any entry to jump the cursor straight there. Below the outline live the note's statistics: word count, characters (with and without spaces), estimated reading time, heading count, and — if the note has task lists — a done/total progress count.

Find and replace

Full search within a note: match counting (3/14), previous/next navigation that moves the selection through the document, and replace — one match at a time or all at once. Searches are case-insensitive.

Format document

One command rewrites the entire note into tidy notation — consistent list markers, aligned tables, normalized spacing — without changing a single word of meaning. Useful before sharing a note's raw text.

It leaves your blank lines alone. Tidying notation and closing up the space you deliberately left are different things, and only the first is what you asked for.

Hardware keyboard shortcuts

With a keyboard attached, the essentials are covered:

Voice dictation

The editor has a microphone. Tap it and a recorder opens inside the editor — nothing opens over your note, nothing navigates away from it, and the note you were writing stays exactly where it was.

Dictation requires Premium and runs on your own AI provider account. See Intelligence.

Recording is entirely on your command

Recording begins only when you press record, pauses only when you pause it, and stops only when you stop it.

There is no wake-word. There is no background listening. There is no silence detection that decides you have finished speaking and cuts you off. The microphone is open only while you have the recorder open, and nothing else in the app ever opens it.

While you record

• A live waveform driven by your actual microphone level, so you can see you are being heard rather than trusting that you are.
• A running timer.
• An unmistakable state at every stage — recording, paused, ready, transcribing — so you are never guessing what the recorder is doing.
• Pause and resume as often as you like. A pause is a pause, not a stop; the take continues where you left off.

Import instead of recording

Hand the recorder an audio or video file you already have and transcribe that instead. Useful for a lecture you recorded elsewhere, a voice message, or a talk you saved.

This also means a device with no microphone at all can still use dictation — record elsewhere, import here.

Transcribing is a deliberate step

Nothing is sent anywhere when you finish recording. Transcription happens only when you take that step explicitly.

When you do:

• The words land exactly at your cursor, inside the note you were already writing — not appended to the end, not in a separate pane you then have to copy from.
• Language can be stated or left open for the model to work out on its own.
• You can review, re-record, or delete a take without ever transcribing it.

As many takes as you like

Record repeatedly into the same note, each take landing wherever you put the cursor. Write a paragraph, dictate the next, type a correction, dictate again — the two input methods interleave freely.

What this is good for

• Dictating a lecture as you listen to it, capturing the substance without typing through it.
• Capturing a thought on the move, when typing is impractical.
• Writing a long note without typing a word of it.
• Transcribing a recorded talk into a note you can then format, tag, and reference.

Privacy

The recording is written to temporary storage on your device and sent for transcription only when you ask — and it goes directly to the AI provider you configured, never to us. Temporary audio is overwritten by your next recording. The complete account is in the Privacy Policy.

Intelligence in your notes

Beyond dictation, the Intelligence layer reaches into notes in three more ways. All require Premium and run on your own provider account under your own key.

Ask about what you have written

Ask Intelligence works on a selection or on the whole note.

Select a paragraph and ask what it means, whether it holds together, or how to say it more plainly. Or ask about the entire note — summarise it, pull the key points out of it, find what is missing from it.

• The answer appears inside the editor, not in a separate app or screen.
• It can be inserted straight back into the page at your cursor, so a summary you asked for becomes part of the note without copying anything.
• It can also be copied, or read aloud.

This is the same Ask that appears beneath every ayah and narration — here it is pointed at your own writing instead.

Listen to your notes

A note can be read aloud, and Qalam is read properly: as continuous prose.

Headings, formatting marks, table borders, list markers, callout syntax and drawings never reach the voice. You hear the note, not its notation — which is the difference between a document being read to you and a screen reader describing a file.

Playback continues when you leave the screen, with the player following you through the app.

Insert translations and answers

Anywhere in the app that Intelligence produces text — a translation of an ayah, an answer about a narration, a transcript, the output of one of your own commands — that text can be inserted straight into a note.

This closes the loop the notes system was built for. Read a hadith, ask about it, translate it into a third language, and drop all three into a study note without leaving the reading or copying anything by hand.

Your own commands work here too

The commands you write in the Actions studio — Explain this simply, Give me three lessons, Rewrite this in plainer English — run over note content as well as over readings.

A word of caution

AI output can be fluent, confident and entirely fabricated, including invented rulings, invented attributions, and citations that look authentic but are not.

If you are writing study notes on Islamic material, verify anything consequential against the authentic sources in the app — which is exactly why Qalam's validated Quran and hadith references exist, and why they open the real reader when tapped. AI output is a study aid and never a religious authority. See Intelligence.

Personalizing the editor

Editor settings (in the top-bar menu) shape the writing surface to your taste, live as you drag:

Your preferences apply everywhere Qalam appears.

Sharing and exporting

• Share sends the note's full text to any app on your device — messaging, email, another editor. Because the format is plain text, what arrives is complete and readable anywhere.
• Copy all places the entire note on the clipboard in one tap.
• Notes attached to collections travel with them — through organizing, moving, copying between folders, and the collection library's backup and sync.

There is no lock-in by design: the share output is the note, whole.

Smart tags

Every special ability in Qalam — Quran references, hadith citations, colors, Arabic runs, callouts, drawings — is expressed through one consistent, open notation called smart tags. Once you have seen the pattern, you have seen all of it:

• Inline tags decorate text within a line:

  :name[visible label](setting=value another="value with spaces")
  

• Block tags contain whole sections:

  :::name setting=value
  ...content...
  :::
  

You never need to write these by hand — every tool in the editor produces them for you — but the notation is documented so your notes are never a mystery, and power users can go further: the custom tag tool in the Insert section lets you create tags of your own invention, with any name and any settings, as either inline chips or block panels.

Unknown tags are kept. If a note contains a tag the app does not recognise — one of your own, or one written in another version of the app — it is displayed as a labelled chip or panel and preserved exactly in the text.

Appendix: the plain-text format, in full

For reference — and for anyone who wants to write notes by hand, process them with other tools, or simply understand what is stored — this is the complete notation Qalam reads and writes. It is a superset of standard Markdown: any ordinary Markdown document is a valid Qalam note.

Inline

Blocks

On blank lines. Standard Markdown collapses any run of blank lines to a single paragraph separator. Qalam does not: one blank line separates blocks as usual, and every blank line beyond that is preserved — written back out exactly as you left it and drawn at that height on the page. This is the one place the format deliberately parts company with Markdown, and it is why a note reopened, reformatted or shared as text still has the breathing room you gave it.

An ordinary Markdown document remains a valid Qalam note; the difference only shows when you leave more space than Markdown would keep.

Built-in smart tags

Settings follow one grammar everywhere: key=value, quoting values that contain spaces (title="Watch out"), with bare words acting as on-flags (open).

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to learn the notation to use notes? No. Every ability has a button, a menu entry, or a picker. The notation exists underneath for your benefit — portability, longevity, and trust — not as a requirement.

What happens to my formatting if I paste a note into another app? You get the plain-text form: readable immediately, and — since the format is Markdown-compatible — most writing tools will render the standard parts (headings, bold, lists, tables) correctly as well.

Can I paste Markdown from elsewhere into Qalam? Yes. Standard Markdown renders directly. Anything Qalam doesn't recognize stays safely as text.

How does a hadith reference open? Reference chips open narrations from your Hadith Library. If the collection is not on your device yet, download it and the chip opens the narration.

How long can a note be? As long as you need. The outline turns a long note into a table of contents you can jump through.

Are my notes private? Notes are stored on your device as part of your collection library. They are included in the library's backup and sync only when you choose to enable those features.

Can a note contain only Arabic? Absolutely. Right-to-left writing, Arabic headings, Arabic tags, and mixed-direction paragraphs are all fully supported.

I ticked a checkbox in reading mode — did that change my note? Yes, deliberately: the corresponding [ ] in the text becomes [x]. It's the same note, kept in sync with your progress, and an undo away if you tapped by mistake.