---
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}
}
```