The Compact Quran

Each page of the Qur'ān in this format holds up to five short lines. I will admit that this format came about by accident while trying to make the sentences in the Qur'ān as comfortable to read as possible on the small screen of the Mudita Kompakt®. For me, this format did not just become an aesthetic choice for continued reading, it also enabled efficient memorization. Long-term memorization is built less by how long you study a passage and more by how often you successfully bring it back to mind, spaced out over hours and days rather than repeated all at once (Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Rohrer & Wixted, 2006, Psychological Bulletin). A page this small is easy to revisit in passing, while praying, or while waiting or switching between tasks. The five daily prayers (mainly the two silent ones) and the 12+ sunnah rak'ahs offer some of the most natural of these moments, since each one already sets aside a few minutes for personal recitation. Any short, recurring gap in the day, such as minutes before a nap for example works the same way. Actively producing a memorized passage from memory builds a measurably stronger memory trace, a finding known as the generation effect (Slamecka & Graf, 1978, Journal of Experimental Psychology). Combining the two, i.e. small-sized recall with repeated recall attempts across naturally spaced moments in the day, and you get what researchers call successive relearning (Rawson, Dunlosky & Sciartelli, 2013, Educational Psychology Review): retrieval and review carried across multiple sessions rather than crowded into one. A later review of the technique found that retention holds up best when a learner hits a correct recall in each of several separate, spaced sessions, rather than getting it right multiple times in a single sitting (Rawson & Dunlosky, 2022, Current Directions in Psychological Science); this is exactly the difference between memorizing a little daily, and a lot at once. In the latter, you may have memorized a page, but a comprehensive revision of a long passage becomes more cumbersome to plan and sustain. The same approach has improved exam performance in a genuinely difficult college course (Janes, Dunlosky, Rawson & Jasnow, 2020, Applied Cognitive Psychology), and a 2025 study with primary school children found that combining retrieval with spacing strengthened retention of factual classroom material (Franzoi, Cembrani, Mulatti & Treccani, 2025, Frontiers in Psychology). You may have memorized a page of the regular muṣḥaf, but a comprehensive and lasting recall of it is another matter. This is the principle this format rests on. I hope and pray that some users benefit from this format. Fun estimation: with some light diligence, memorizing two to three of these short pages every work day, with weekends and one month per year to revise, it would take about four to seven years to memorize the full Qur'ān.