By Arif Kabir

[Editor's Note: This is the beginning of an Islamic Technology series (iTech in short) that will be dealing with different technologies and how we can use them for Islam. This particular one is rather technical, but it should prove to be useful for all online writers and bloggers Insha'Allah]

UPDATE: If you would like an alternate (and perhaps easier) way of referencing your Qur’anic Ayahs, you can use Quran.com, click on a verse, and you’d get your personalized page. However, we recommend you use the following for Ahadith or any other type of resource.)

While compiling Shaykh Muhammad AlShareef’s Heart Wheel Journals into a list for easier viewing for MYM, I wanted to have all the videos on the same page. However, since there were more than 20 videos, I wanted to have a hyperlinked table of contents so that one could just click on one of the contents and go to that specific video on the page instead of having to continuously scroll to find the desired video.

Page Jumping

Alhamdulillah, I found the perfect tool for the job once I learned about Page Jumps. They basically allow one to instantly go to another page section with just one click. The interesting part about it is that it will not only take you to that section, but it will also have an added value in the address bar. For example, to watch the tenth episode of the Heart Wheel Journal, it’d be

(Original post url) + #day-10 = http://muslimyouthmusings.com/2009/08/26/the-heart-wheel-journal-videos/#day-10

(Coincidentally, the video’s title is “To go up, you must go down”, which is what page jumps are all about:) If you want the twentieth episode, just delete #day-10, add #day-20, and you’re set!

Now, you may be wondering, “why is this tech tidbit being shared with me?” Well, it’s to bore you to death as we tech junkies love to do! (lol)

Seriously though, it was so that we can take our referencing to a new level. Basically, I was checking out University of Southern California’s database of the Qur’an and Sunnah and with my newfound knowledge on page jumps, I noticed that this website was also using page jumps for every single Ayah and Hadith, which I found to be amazing, given how much code needs to be written to have so many page jumps (they probably have some top-notch coding/programmers/software). I then realized that we can really utilize this for Islamic reference purpose, in a method that I like to call, “Sahih Page Jumping” :)

Sahih Page Jumping

Let’s say you’re on the chapter of knowledge in Sahih Bukhari at the USC database. You see the Hadith,

Volume 1, Book 3, Number 106:

Narrated ‘Ali:

The Prophet said, “Do not tell a lie against me for whoever tells a lie against me (intentionally) then he will surely enter the Hell-fire.”

This Hadith inspires you so much that you want to share it with others (as a sidenote, this Hadith tells us the importance of why we should be referencing all our works so we that this won’t lead us to the Hell-Fire – may Allah protect us). You could 1) share the Hadith by just mentioning it’s in Sahih Bukhari. You could take it a step further and 2) mention which volume and book it is. However, it has been seen in the past that many of these references have been faulty because some people would actually make up numbers. The best way is 3) to take them back to the original text and to do it in a manner that would be easiest for them.

Each title on the USC database is a page jump. You can tell because if you scroll over it, it becomes underlined (a characteristic of a hyperlink) but if you try clicking it, you won’t be able to: it seems like a dead link. If you need more proof, then look at the source code for that Hadith and you will see that it says:

a name="001.003.106"
Volume 1, Book 3, Number 106:

You will see that it says <a name=”001.003.106″> above the title and this confirms that it is is a page jump (the numbers also confirm the hadith chapter, book, and number). Now, as an example, if you are typing in example.com + # + 001.003.106 (number), it would equal example.com/page.html#001.003.106. Let’s add it to the real url and we get: http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/crcc/engagement/resources/texts/muslim/hadith/bukhari/003.sbt.html#001.003.106, which takes you to the Hadith that we are currently looking at.

So for your next blog post, if you want to post a Hadith, I strongly recommend you use the ‘Sahih page jumping’ method and add the hyperlink for the Hadith with the necessary page-jump hashtag (#) so that both you and your reader can be rest assured it’s an authentic statement. Furthermore, for those WordPress bloggers, if you want to use Page Jumps to organize some of your own writings, please visit this WordPress support page and follow the instructions to set up your Page Jumps.

May Allah (subhanahu wa ta’ala) keep us away from relaying inauthentic statements and keep us on the Straight Path. Ameen…

By the way, need a ride back to the top? :)