About International Quran News Agency

International Quran News Agency

The International Quran News Agency, known by its acronym IQNA, is a specialist Iranian news agency based in Tehran that reports on the Quran and on Quranic activities around the world. Publishing at iqna.ir in Persian and in a wide range of foreign languages, it covers Quran memorisation and recitation competitions, Quran translation and scholarship, historic manuscripts, Quranic education, and the religious and cultural life of Muslim communities internationally. Media directories describe IQNA as the first and only specialised Quran news agency in the Islamic world, and the agency itself notes that it was the first news agency in Iran to publish in 22 languages. Its founding idea, stated by the agency, is that news stories related to the Holy Quran can play a unifying role among Islamic nations and Muslims worldwide, just as the Quran itself does.

A specialist agency with a single subject

Most news agencies are generalists, organised around geography or around the institutions that own them. IQNA is organised around a text. Its subject is the Quran: its recitation, memorisation, translation, interpretation, calligraphy and preservation, and the institutions and people devoted to it, from Quran schools in Kosovo and Algeria to manuscript museums in Mecca and memorisation competitions in the United Arab Emirates and Bangladesh. That focus gives its output a distinctive character. A typical IQNA news file moves between Tehran-datelined reports on Iranian Quranic policy and world-datelined briefs on a Quran teacher training course in Jordan, a memorisation contest in Istanbul, or a new translation of the Quran into an African or European language. The agency's English-language archive reaches back at least to 2010, when it reported on the presentation of world Quran translation centres at the 18th International Holy Quran Exhibition in Tehran, and it has published continuously since.

Publishing in 22 languages

The most distinctive feature of IQNA is its language operation. When the agency opened its Tajiki service, it announced that Tajiki had become its 22nd language, making it the first news agency in Iran to publish in that many languages. The opening ceremony was attended by Hojat-ol-Islam Mohsen Qomi, the deputy for international affairs of the office of the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, an indication of the institutional importance attached to the agency's international reach. IQNA said at the time that its foreign-language pages received more visitors than its Persian page, and that the choice of new languages was based on studies by the outlet together with feedback from users and Islamic institutions in other countries. Tajik, a variety of Persian spoken by more than seven million people in Tajikistan and parts of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan, was a natural extension for a Tehran-based agency, but the wider list of languages reflects a deliberate global strategy: IQNA aims to be read wherever there are Muslim communities with an interest in Quranic news.

Provincial and international reach

Within Iran, IQNA operates provincial editions alongside its central Tehran service. Its Isfahan edition and Qom edition publish local Quranic news under the iqna.ir domain, and its provincial desks include a Hamedan edition; a Sistan and Baluchestan service also appears under its domain. These editions cover the Quranic life of Iran's provinces: local competitions, Quran schools, ceremonies honouring teachers and memorizers, and events at shrines and seminaries. Internationally, the agency's reports are filed from across the Muslim world and beyond, covering Quranic activity in Iraq's holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, in Saudi Arabia's Mecca and Medina, in Turkey, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia, and in Muslim communities in Europe and North America. Its Tehran headquarters receives visiting delegations; in January 2021, for example, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement's representative in Iran, Nasser Abu Sharif, visited the agency's central office in the capital, and in September 2026 a ceremony at the IQNA headquarters in Tehran honoured the veteran Quran activist and scholar Hamid Reza Mostafid.

Quran competitions and recitation

Competition coverage is a staple of IQNA's file. The agency reports national and international contests in memorisation, recitation and tajwid, the rules of Quranic pronunciation, following Iranian competitors abroad and foreign competitors in Iran. It reported the honouring of Quran competition winners in Istanbul in 2015, the second-place finish of Iran's Amir Hossein Sharifizadeh in an international memorisation competition in Bangladesh the same year, and women's memorisation finals in the United Arab Emirates. It follows events such as the "Fatiha al-Kitab" international competition, in which women memorizers from Basra won top ranks, and Quranic plans for seminary students in Najaf. For the global community of qaris, reciters, and hafiz, memorizers of the entire text, IQNA functions as a trade press, recording results, careers and honours that general news agencies rarely note.

Translation and scholarship

Quran translation is another core beat. IQNA reports new translations and the institutions behind them, from the Tarjoman-e-Vahey Institute in Iran to the King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Quran in Saudi Arabia. In July 2026 it reported that digital translations of the Quran into 44 languages had been made available online free of charge. It covered the praise of Nigeria's former president Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida for a translation of the Quran into the Nupe language, the launch of an audio translation of the Quran's meanings into Tajik, a new Swedish translation unveiled in Stockholm in collaboration with Malaysia's Restu Foundation, and scholarly discussion of translations into Ukrainian and Betawi, the language of Jakarta. Its scholarship coverage extends to exegesis, including series on historic Persian interpretations such as the Tafsir of Surabadi, and to academic argument about the relationship between Quran translation and the development of the Persian language.

Manuscripts, calligraphy and heritage

IQNA gives substantial attention to the Quran as a physical and artistic heritage. It reported the display of what was described as the world's largest handwritten Quran at the Holy Quran Museum in Mecca's Hira Cultural District, the exhibition of rare Quranic manuscripts at Jeddah's Islamic Arts House, and the unveiling of a 120-year-old handwritten Quran, created by a local calligrapher, in the village of Shurcheh in Quchan County in north-eastern Iran. It covered the first international "Quran of Negel" congress in Sanandaj, attended by Kurdish-speaking qaris and memorizers from Iran, Turkey and Iraq, the presentation of an early printed Quran, more than two centuries old, to Uzbekistan at a forum in Tashkent, and the digitisation of an estimated 180-year-old Quran manuscript from Aceh in Indonesia. This heritage reporting connects the agency's religious brief to the wider cultural coverage of museums, exhibitions and conservation.

Quranic education and community life

Education reporting runs through IQNA's output: Quran schools and memorisation teachers, training courses for teachers in Qatar, Jordan and Pakistan, and community classes for children in countries from Ukraine to Kosovo. It reported a long-running Quranic school in Algeria's Hama Bouziane region that had taught memorisation for 24 years, a gathering of women teachers working to strengthen Islamic education in Kosovo's mosques, and a meeting in Vienna on improving the quality of Islamic education in Austria. Alongside its Quranic Activities, Religious Activities, World and Culture and Knowledge sections, the agency also carries political news, particularly where it touches Muslim communities and Iran's religious diplomacy, and news of the Islamic Culture and Relations Organization, Iran's cultural diplomacy body, whose programmes it has followed for years. The breadth illustrates how a nominally single-subject agency becomes, in practice, a general wire for the institutional life of the Quran worldwide.

Place in Iranian and Islamic media

Iran supports several specialist agencies attached to particular fields, including agencies for agriculture, energy, books and cultural heritage, but IQNA is unusual in the scale of its international operation and the global nature of its subject. Its claim to be the Islamic world's only specialised Quran news agency is repeated in media directories, and its 22-language service is unmatched among Iranian agencies. Headquartered in Tehran with provincial editions across Iran, it serves two audiences at once: the Iranian Quranic community of teachers, memorizers, reciters and officials, and an international readership that, by the agency's own account, is larger on its foreign-language pages than on its Persian one. In doing so it performs a soft-power function for Iran as a centre of Quranic culture, while providing a genuinely specialised news record of competitions, translations, manuscripts and scholarship that no other agency assembles in one place.