Answering Islam
🏠

A Christian-Muslim Dialog and Apologetic

Download this archive

This site is an archive of Answering Islam as it stood in May 2010, kept as it was written. It was distributed on CD-ROM from about 1998, and later as a DVD image and a BitTorrent download. This page explains what is still available and what is not, and replaces the seven order and download pages that described the old arrangements.

The copy you are reading

The most dependable offline copy of this material is this archive itself. It is an ordinary directory of about 22,000 files and 643 MB — no database, no installer — so copying the folder copies the whole site, all 12,000-odd articles and twenty language sections included.

One caveat worth knowing before you rely on it: the pages are PHP, not plain HTML. Each one includes a shared template, so the folder needs something that can run PHP to be readable as a website. Opening a page straight off the disk in a browser will show you its source, not the article. Any PHP 7.3 or later will serve it, and php -S 127.0.0.1:8080 router.php from the top of the folder is enough — there is nothing to build and nothing to install. This is the one respect in which the 2010 CD-ROM was easier than this archive: it held static HTML and simply opened.

The publisher's own offline edition

answering-islam.org is still online, and still offers a free offline edition: the DVD version released on 20 May 2010, in three formats. Checked on 3 September 2026, all three torrent files are being served:

That edition is the closest thing there is to a companion to this archive: it was published the same month, from the same site. This mirror was in fact taken slightly earlier — the archived BitTorrent page here still announces the DVD as something that would be available by 20 May 2010, which dates this snapshot to the days before it.

Whether the download will complete is another matter, and the honest answer is that it may not. These are BitTorrent files, so they need someone still sharing the data. Both of the trackers named inside them shut down years ago and no longer exist as internet addresses, which leaves a client to find peers on its own through the distributed hash table. Asked directly, a public tracker reported a single computer sharing the ZIP and none sharing the RAR or the ISO. The ZIP is therefore the one worth trying, and it may be slow; if your client cannot find the data from the torrent file alone, these identifiers describe the same three downloads and let it search the network directly:

What is no longer available

The CD-ROM is not for sale, and has not been for many years. The publisher said so itself in the May 2010 edition of its own conditions-of-use page, which is preserved here: the CD was by then given away rather than sold. The order pages kept in this archive still quote 2002 and 2008 prices, postal addresses in Virginia and Milton Keynes, and a bulk-order email address on a domain that has since lapsed. None of them will reach anyone. Do not send money or card details to any address on those pages.

The update files that once let a CD owner refresh their copy are gone as well. They were hosted on answering-islam.de, a mirror that no longer answers, and all 98 download links on the update page are dead. The February 2008 torrents on the BitTorrent page are dead for the same reason, which is why the May 2010 files above are given instead.

The pages this one replaces

All seven are kept, each with a note at the top saying what is no longer true, so that older links still land on the page they named and nothing written at the time is lost: