| # Sources — islamlab, The Islamic Sciences Corpus |
|
|
| islamlab is a volunteer effort. Our aim is to present these sources 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. |
|
|
| None of this is ours. Every work here belongs to the scholar who wrote it and |
| to the people who took the trouble to make it readable by a machine — often |
| quietly, for years, without being asked. What we did was select, sort, segment |
| and check. What follows is who to thank. |
|
|
| ## The projects this corpus rests on |
|
|
| - **[Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI)](https://openiti.org)** — The |
| machine-readable corpus of premodern Islamicate texts, pinned here to release |
| **2025.1.9**, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. OpenITI is led from the Aga Khan |
| University (ISMC), the University of Vienna, Leipzig University and the |
| Roshan Institute at the University of Maryland, with support from the KITAB |
| project and the Qatar National Library. |
| - **[al-Maktaba al-Shāmila](https://shamela.ws)**, reached through the |
| [AuthenticIlm](https://huggingface.co/datasets/AuthenticIlm/Shamela4_Full_DB) |
| packaging of its library (MIT). Shamela is where a great many of these works |
| were first typed and proof-read, over decades, by people who did not sign |
| their work. |
| - **[Rasaif](https://rasaif.com/)** — The sentence-aligned Arabic–English |
| translations behind the `parallel_en` config (CC BY-4.0). |
|
|
| Which of the two libraries a given text reached us through is recorded per row |
| in the `source` column of `works`, and nowhere else: it is a fact about our |
| copy, not about the book. |
|
|
| The works themselves are older than any of us and belong to their authors — |
| al-Ghazālī, al-Māwardī, Ibn ʿAsākir, Ibn Manẓūr, al-Sarakhsī, al-Dhahabī and |
| the rest. Where a printed edition stands behind a text, it is named per work in |
| the `edition` column of the `works` config. |
|
|
| ## Consulted, but never quoted |
|
|
| Some things we read carefully and published nothing from. They told us what a |
| work is and which shelf it belongs on, and then we set them down. We name them |
| because using something and reproducing it are different acts, and both should |
| be said out loud. |
|
|
| - **Library catalogue headings** carried in the OpenITI metadata (al-Maktaba |
| al-Shāmila, al-Jāmiʿ al-Kabīr, Brockelmann's *GAL*) — these decided which of |
| the eight sciences a work was filed under when its genre tags were silent. |
| Not one of those headings is in the data; they never became a column, a row |
| or a source line. |
| - **[TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi](https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr)** — Our first |
| stop when we needed to be sure who an author was, when he died, and where he |
| stood. Read, never reproduced. It is what let us separate Qāḍī Abū Bakr Ibn |
| al-ʿArabī (d. 543, Mālikī) from Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638), and keep the first. |
|
|
| ## What we left out, on purpose |
|
|
| The gate is described in the card; the machine-readable form of it lives in |
| `data/banned.json` in our build repository, with a written reason beside every |
| exclusion. In summary: material outside Ahl al-Sunnah wa'l-Jamāʿah, the |
| Hellenistic philosophers, non-Muslim and orientalist authors, anything whose |
| author died after 1350 AH, and anything that belongs to |
| [`quranlab/*`](https://huggingface.co/quranlab) or |
| [`risaleinur/*`](https://huggingface.co/risaleinur) instead. |
|
|
| ## If we got something wrong |
|
|
| If you hold rights to a work here, or we have credited someone poorly, or we |
| have put a scholar on the wrong side of the gate, write to us on the |
| **Community** tab of |
| [`islamlab/islamic-sciences`](https://huggingface.co/datasets/islamlab/islamic-sciences). |
| A removal request is honoured promptly and without argument; a correction is |
| welcomed with thanks. |
|
|
