| --- |
| license: cc-by-nc-sa-4.0 |
| pretty_name: "islamlab — Persian Islamicate Prose" |
| language: |
| - fa |
| task_categories: |
| - text-generation |
| - text-retrieval |
| size_categories: |
| - 10K<n<100K |
| tags: |
| - persian |
| - islamicate |
| - historiography |
| - classical-persian |
| - islam |
| configs: |
| - config_name: works |
| default: true |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: works/train-*.parquet |
| - config_name: units |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: units/train-*.parquet |
| - config_name: passages |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: passages/train-*.parquet |
| --- |
| |
| # islamlab — Persian Islamicate Prose |
|
|
| **237 Persian works** by authors who died between the 4th and the |
| 13th Hijri century, segmented into **73,734 units** and **127,089 retrieval |
| passages** — 125 million characters. |
|
|
| Persian is the second language of Islamicate learning, and this is the part of |
| it that survives the same gates the Arabic corpus is held to. What survives is |
| chiefly **historiography** — Bayhaqī's *Tārīkh*, Mīrkhwānd's *Rawḍat al-ṣafā*, |
| Sharaf al-Dīn Yazdī's *Ẓafar-nāma*, Abū al-Faḍl's *Akbar-nāma*, Firishta's |
| *Tārīkh* — together with the *tadhkira* literature of biographical notices. |
|
|
| | work | author | d. (AH) | size | |
| |---|---|---:|---:| |
| | Habib Siyar | Khwandamir | 942 | 5.8M | |
| | ʿArafāt al-ʿāšiqīn | Awhadi Balyani | 1050 | 5.0M | |
| | Tafsir | Abu Bakr Surabadi | 484 | 3.9M | |
| | Tārīḫ | Muhammad Qasim Firishta | 1053 | 3.4M | |
| | Tārīḫ Bayhaqī | Abu Fadl Bayhaqi | 470 | 2.7M | |
| | Shāh Ǧahān Nāmah | Kanbuh Lahawri | 1082 | 2.4M | |
| | Rawdat Safa | Mir Khwand | 903 | 2.1M | |
| | Zafar Nama | Sharaf Din Yazdi | 858 | 1.9M | |
| | Akbar Nama | Abu Fadl Callami | 1011 | 1.9M | |
| | Khulasat Tawarikh | Ahmad Ibrahimi Husayni | 1026 | 1.8M | |
| | Matlac Sacdayn | Cabd Razzaq Samarqandi | 887 | 1.8M | |
| | Haft Iqlim | Amin Ahmad Razi | 1022 | 1.6M | |
|
|
| ## What is not here, and why |
|
|
| This is a **separate dataset rather than a ninth shelf** of |
| [`islamlab/islamic-sciences`](https://huggingface.co/datasets/islamlab/islamic-sciences), |
| for two honest reasons. |
|
|
| The first is metadata. OpenITI's Persian subcorpus is thinly catalogued: two |
| thirds of it carries no genre tag at all, and a third has no death year in the |
| identifier. The Arabic corpus files every work under a science because the |
| sources say which one; here they do not, so no science is claimed. There are |
| no shelves in this dataset — only works, units and passages. |
|
|
| The second is the gate. The same rule that keeps Ibn ʿArabī and Ibn al-Fāriḍ |
| out of the Arabic corpus keeps out the Persian Sufi poets — ʿAṭṭār, Rūmī, |
| Sanāʾī, Jāmī — along with the Ismaili dāʿī Nāṣir-i Khusraw, the Twelver |
| scholars, and the secular dīwāns, which are not an Islamic science in any |
| language. That refusal is by **author name**, which is a blunter instrument |
| than the Arabic side's tag-and-collection gate. Read this dataset knowing |
| that: it is Persian Islamicate prose that passed a name-based filter, not a |
| corpus each of whose authors has been vetted one by one. |
|
|
| ## Columns |
|
|
| `works` carries `work_id`, the transliterated title and author, |
| `death_year_ah` / `death_year_ce`, `century_ah`, size, and `text_quality`. |
| `units` is one heading-delimited block per row with `page_start` / `page_end` |
| anchors; `passages` re-cuts the same text to ~1,200 characters with a ready |
| citation. Keys join across all three on `work_id` and `unit_id`. |
|
|
| ## Sources and licence |
|
|
| The texts come from the **Open Islamicate Texts Initiative**, release |
| 2025.1.9 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), and this dataset carries the same terms. The works |
| themselves are public domain; the gate admits nothing whose author died after |
| 1350 AH. |
|
|
| Corrections and removal requests are welcome on the **Community** tab. |
|
|
