Abstract
With the advancements in technology and the increase use of the Internet, information dissemination of digital text documents have seen an exponential growth with Arabic language being one of the top ten languages in the Internet. The Islamic content has also seen an increase in the last two decades. Thus, portions of Qur'anic text, i.e. verse/s, have appeared in many online articles and many of these verses appear with very minimal diacritics or without diacritics since in general online Arabic text do not contain diacritics. Therefore, such text needs to be verified in case of any distortions. In this paper, a zero-watermarking approach is proposed which exploits the characteristics of the Arabic characters without modifying the text; i.e, zero watermarking. The watermark key is based on the characteristics of the host verse/s. A key is generated for each verse of the Qur'an where in the initial stage the surah name/number and verse number/s are verified. The results demonstrate the competence of this approach against random tampering attacks providing 100% detection of any distortion made intentionally or unintentionally to Qur'an text.