| --- |
| license: cc-by-nc-sa-4.0 |
| pretty_name: "islamlab — The Islamic Sciences Corpus" |
| language: |
| - ar |
| - en |
| task_categories: |
| - text-generation |
| - text-retrieval |
| - question-answering |
| size_categories: |
| - 1M<n<10M |
| tags: |
| - islam |
| - arabic |
| - classical-arabic |
| - fiqh |
| - sirah |
| - hadith-sciences |
| - tasawwuf |
| - islamic-history |
| - arabic-linguistics |
| - retrieval |
| configs: |
| - config_name: works |
| default: true |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: works/train-*.parquet |
| - config_name: sira |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: sira/train-*.parquet |
| - config_name: fiqh |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: fiqh/train-*.parquet |
| - config_name: aqidah |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: aqidah/train-*.parquet |
| - config_name: rijal |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: rijal/train-*.parquet |
| - config_name: tasawwuf |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: tasawwuf/train-*.parquet |
| - config_name: tarikh |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: tarikh/train-*.parquet |
| - config_name: lugha |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: lugha/train-*.parquet |
| - config_name: adab |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: adab/train-*.parquet |
| - config_name: mutafarriqat |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: mutafarriqat/train-*.parquet |
| - config_name: passages |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: passages/train-*.parquet |
| - config_name: parallel_en |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: parallel_en/train-*.parquet |
| --- |
| |
| # islamlab — The Islamic Sciences Corpus |
|
|
| The Islamic sciences **other than Qur'an and hadith**, as their authors wrote |
| them: **4,022 works** by scholars who died between the |
| 0st and the 14th Hijri century, cut along their own chapter |
| and biographical-entry boundaries into **1,864,389 units** |
| (3.41 billion characters of Arabic), each carrying the volume and |
| page it sits on so a quotation can be cited rather than merely produced. |
|
|
| > Scope is **Ahl al-Sunnah wa'l-Jamāʿah**, and the gate is the author, not the |
| > title. A work enters only if its author died by 1350 AH, so every text here |
| > is in the public domain and is carried verbatim. |
|
|
| islamlab is a volunteer effort. Our aim is to present these works carefully and |
| at high quality, and to help them travel faithfully — in the spirit in which |
| they were written — not to claim them as ours. Who to thank, and what we |
| consulted without ever quoting, is set out in [`SOURCES.md`](SOURCES.md). |
|
|
| ## Subsets |
|
|
| | config | science | works | units | chars | |
| |---|---|---:|---:|---:| |
| | `sira` | Sīrah | 110 | 37,634 | 107M | |
| | `fiqh` | Fiqh | 974 | 386,382 | 1457M | |
| | `aqidah` | ʿAqīdah | 414 | 23,745 | 116M | |
| | `rijal` | Rijāl | 844 | 824,734 | 741M | |
| | `tasawwuf` | Taṣawwuf | 298 | 25,662 | 105M | |
| | `tarikh` | Tārīkh | 299 | 239,785 | 360M | |
| | `lugha` | Lughah | 378 | 235,028 | 292M | |
| | `adab` | Adab | 512 | 73,342 | 196M | |
| | `mutafarriqat` | Mutafarriqāt | 193 | 18,077 | 33M | |
| | `works` | bibliographic spine | 4,022 | — | — | |
| | `passages` | retrieval chunks | — | 3,575,392 | — | |
| | `parallel_en` | Arabic–English alignments | 17 | 45,972 | — | |
|
|
| ## The shelves |
|
|
| **`sira` — Sīrah.** The life of the Prophet, his described character, and the Companions around him. Among the largest: *سبل الهدى والرشاد في سيرة خير العباد* — الصالحي الشامي (d. 942); *إمتاع الأسماع بما للنبي من الأحوال والأموال والحفدة والمتاع* — المقريزي (d. 845); *دلائل النبوة - البيهقي* — أبو بكر البيهقي (d. 458); *السيرة النبوية من البداية والنهاية - ت عبد الواحد* — ابن كثير (d. 774). |
|
|
| **`fiqh` — Fiqh.** The law and its theory — the four schools, legal maxims, fatwa collections, judgeship and governance. Among the largest: *المبسوط للسرخسي* — شمس الأئمة السرخسي (d. 483); *حاشية ابن عابدين = رد المحتار - ط الحلبي* — ابن عابدين (d. 1252); *البحر الرائق شرح كنز الدقائق ومنحة الخالق وتكملة الطوري* — زين الدين ابن نجيم (d. 970); *حاشية الجمل على شرح المنهج = فتوحات الوهاب بتوضيح شرح منهج الطلاب* — الجمل (d. 1204). |
|
|
| **`aqidah` — ʿAqīdah.** Creed, the schools and sects, and the refutations written between them. Among the largest: *منهاج السنة النبوية* — ابن تيمية (d. 728); *درء تعارض العقل والنقل* — ابن تيمية (d. 728); *العواصم والقواصم في الذب عن سنة أبي القاسم* — ابن الوزير (d. 840); *درء التعارض* — ابن تيمية (d. 728). |
|
|
| **`rijal` — Rijāl.** The sciences *about* hadith — narrator criticism, hidden defects, terminology, takhrīj, and the biographical dictionaries they rest on. Among the largest: *تاريخ دمشق لابن عساكر* — أبو القاسم ابن عساكر (d. 571); *سير أعلام النبلاء - ط الرسالة* — شمس الدين الذهبي (d. 748); *تهذيب الكمال في أسماء الرجال* — المزي، جمال الدين (d. 742); *الوافي بالوفيات* — الصفدي (d. 764). |
|
|
| **`tasawwuf` — Taṣawwuf.** Sober spiritual discipline, ethics, heart-softening literature and litanies. Among the largest: *اتحاف السادة المتقين بشرح إحياء علوم الدين* — الزبيدي، مرتضى (d. 1205); *إحياء علوم الدين* — الغزالي (d. 505); *حسن التنبه لما ورد في التشبه* — نجم الدين محمد الغزي (d. 1061); *الفتوحات الربانية على الأذكار النواوية* — ابن علان (d. 1057). |
|
|
| **`tarikh` — Tārīkh.** Chronicles, city histories, geography and travel. Among the largest: *تاريخ الإسلام - ت تدمري* — شمس الدين الذهبي (d. 748); *البداية والنهاية - ت التركي* — ابن كثير (d. 774); *تاريخ الإسلام - ت بشار* — شمس الدين الذهبي (d. 748); *تاريخ الإسلام - ط التوفيقية* — شمس الدين الذهبي (d. 748). |
|
|
| **`lugha` — Lughah.** The Arabic language sciences — grammar, morphology, rhetoric, and the great lexicons. Among the largest: *تاج العروس من جواهر القاموس* — مرتضى الزبيدي (d. 1205); *لسان العرب* — ابن منظور (d. 711); *تهذيب اللغة* — أبو منصور الأزهري (d. 370); *تمهيد القواعد بشرح تسهيل الفوائد* — المعروف بناظر الجيش (d. 778). |
|
|
| **`adab` — Adab.** Letters and poetry, from the pre-Islamic dīwāns to the chancery anthologies. Among the largest: *نهاية الأرب في فنون الأدب* — النويري، شهاب الدين (d. 733); *صبح الأعشى في صناعة الانشاء* — القلقشندي، الفزاريو الشافعي (d. 821); *خزانة الأدب ولب لباب لسان العرب للبغدادي* — عبد القادر البغدادي (d. 1093); *نفح الطيب من غصن الاندلس الرطيب ت إحسان عباس* — المقري التلمساني (d. 1041). |
|
|
| **`mutafarriqat` — Mutafarriqāt.** Works whose author came through the gate but whose science the sources do not settle — shelved as miscellanea rather than guessed at or dropped. Among the largest: *kitāb al-Khabar ʿan al-Bashar Fī ’ansāb al-‘Arab wa Nasab Sayyed al-Bashar* — المقريزي (d. 845); *مجموع رسائل الحافظ ابن رجب الحنبلي* — زين الدين أبو الفرج عبد الرحمان بن أحمد بن رجب عبد الرحمان بن الحسن بن محمد بن أبي البركات مسعود البغدادي السلامي الدمشقي (d. 795); *تعطير الأنام في تعبير المنام* — عبد الغني النابلسي (d. 1143); *مجموعة رسائل الإمام الغزالي* — الغزالي (d. 505). |
|
|
| ## How the rows are shaped |
|
|
| - **`works`** is the spine: one row per work, carrying `work_id`, our |
| `category` and `subcategory`, `madhhab` where the work declares one, the |
| Arabic and transliterated title and author, the author's death year in both |
| calendars, and the size of the text. `source` says which library our copy |
| came through and `text_quality` warns where the digitisation was never |
| proof-read. Everything else joins to it on `work_id`. |
| - **The science configs** hold the text. A row is one heading-delimited |
| unit: `heading` and `heading_path` place it in the book, `kind` says whether |
| it is a `section` or a biographical `entry`, and `page_start` / `page_end` |
| anchor it in the printed edition. `markers` carries the structural flags the |
| source records about that heading — `auto` and `check` say how the heading |
| was found, `bio_man` / `bio_wom` / `dic_top` / `dic_lex` / `dic_nis` / |
| `dic_bib` say what kind of entry it opens, and `paratext` / `editor` warn |
| that the block is the modern edition's apparatus rather than the author's |
| text. Filter on it or ignore it; it is never mixed into the Arabic. |
| - **`passages`** is the same text re-cut to ~1,200 characters on sentence |
| boundaries for retrieval, each chunk carrying a ready Arabic `citation` and |
| the `unit_id` it came from. |
| - **`parallel_en`** is the corpus's one multilingual seam: sentence-aligned |
| Arabic–English for seventeen works that have a published translation — among |
| them al-Shāfiʿī's *Risāla*, Ibn Khaldūn's *Muqaddima*, Ibn Khallikān's |
| *Wafayāt*, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's *Riḥla* and Ibn Ḥazm's *Ṭawq al-Ḥamāma*. It is a |
| separate table because it is a different kind of thing: a translation is |
| someone's reading, not the author's words. |
| |
| The Arabic itself is untouched: continuation lines are rejoined, page stamps |
| and editorial flags are lifted into their own columns, whitespace is collapsed, |
| and no letter or vowel is altered. The one substitution is notational — where |
| the source brackets a Qur'anic quotation with its own ASCII markers, the text |
| carries **﴿ ﴾** instead, which is how Arabic prints it. There is no |
| search-normalised copy; strip the diacritics yourself if your retriever wants |
| them gone. |
| |
| ```python |
| from datasets import load_dataset |
| |
| fiqh = load_dataset("islamlab/islamic-sciences", "fiqh", split="train") |
| works = load_dataset("islamlab/islamic-sciences", "works", split="train") |
| ``` |
| |
| ## Where this sits |
| |
| Three organisations, three gates; a work belongs to exactly one of them. |
| |
| | Dataset family | What it holds | |
| |---|---| |
| | [`quranlab/*`](https://huggingface.co/quranlab) | Qur'an, translations, tafsīr, qirā'āt, hadith text and its commentary, recitation | |
| | [`risaleinur/*`](https://huggingface.co/risaleinur) | The Risale-i Nur corpus and its derivatives | |
| | **`islamlab/*`** | **Every other Islamic science** — this dataset | |
|
|
| Four datasets are derived from this one, each re-cutting it for a job the |
| corpus itself does not do well: |
|
|
| | Dataset | What it re-cuts it for | |
| |---|---| |
| | [`islamlab/arabic-lexicons`](https://huggingface.co/datasets/islamlab/arabic-lexicons) | The dictionaries, entry by entry, with the headword and root split out — for looking a word up | |
| | [`islamlab/islamic-biographies`](https://huggingface.co/datasets/islamlab/islamic-biographies) | Every biographical notice in the ṭabaqāt literature, one row per notice — for prosopography | |
| | [`islamlab/islamic-scholars`](https://huggingface.co/datasets/islamlab/islamic-scholars) | One row per author instead of per book — the authority file the rest joins to | |
| | [`islamlab/islamic-sciences-training`](https://huggingface.co/datasets/islamlab/islamic-sciences-training) | Domain-adaptation text, retrieval pairs with hard negatives, and citation questions with a work-level held-out split | |
|
|
| Alongside it, [`islamlab/persian-islamicate`](https://huggingface.co/datasets/islamlab/persian-islamicate) |
| carries the Persian side of the same tradition — chiefly historiography — as a |
| separate dataset, because OpenITI's Persian metadata does not support filing a |
| work under a science the way the Arabic side does. |
|
|
| The line that matters most in practice: hadith *text* belongs to |
| [`quranlab/hadith`](https://huggingface.co/datasets/quranlab/hadith); the |
| sciences built *about* that text — narrator criticism, ʿilal, muṣṭalaḥ, |
| takhrīj — are the `rijal` config here. |
|
|
| ## Notes |
|
|
| - Keys are stable: `work_id`, `unit_id` (`{work_id}:{seq}`), `passage_id`. |
| - `subcategory` and `madhhab` are empty where the work does not declare one. |
| An empty cell means we do not know, never that the answer is "none". |
| - Corrections, additions and removal requests are welcome on the **Community** |
| tab, and are acted on promptly. |
|
|
| ## License |
|
|
| The works are public domain; the machine-readable transcriptions they reached |
| us through are licensed **CC BY-NC-SA 4.0**, so this dataset carries the same |
| terms — attribute, keep it non-commercial, share alike. The details are in |
| [`LICENSES.md`](LICENSES.md) and the credits in [`SOURCES.md`](SOURCES.md). |
|
|
| ## Citation |
|
|
| ```bibtex |
| @misc{islamlab_islamic_sciences, |
| title = {islamlab — The Islamic Sciences Corpus}, |
| author = {islamlab contributors}, |
| year = {2026}, |
| howpublished = {Hugging Face Datasets} |
| } |
| ``` |
|
|
