A weekly list introducing two online resources of Islamic law, ranging from e-archives to e-libraries, from digitized personal collections to online depositories of first and secondary sources on Islamic law
“Whisper-Small-Quran is a fine-tuned version of OpenAI’s Whisper-Small model specialized for Quranic recitations in Arabic. It’s part of the QV Finder project — a research system for AI-powered Quran verse transcription and retrieval. Unlike general ASR systems, this model captures Tajweed-influenced pronunciations, regional recitation styles, and noisy real-world recordings, achieving high accuracy across both professional… CONTINUE READING
The Saiful Bahri Collection contains “digital images of 23 manuscripts owned by Saiful Bahri of Lambunot, Besar Regency. The manuscripts contain texts on a range of topics, including Islamic law, Sufism, theology, history and fiction, in prose and poetic form; the manuscripts date from the 17th to the 20th century” in Achinese, Arabic, and Malay.
“M-Classi is a new digital tool in the field of knowledge organization. It is conceived primarily as a means of cataloging and interrogating the classifications of the sciences in Islam and those of the cultures with which the Islamicate world came into contact from antiquity to the pre-modern era. Practically, M-Classi is focused by priority… CONTINUE READING
Digital Ottoman Corpora is “a pioneering project aimed at transforming the way we access, analyze, and engage with Ottoman Turkish texts.” Their projects include an “artificial intelligence-based text recognition project [that] incorporates Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) tools for Ottoman Turkish” and “the first Ottoman Turkish crowdsourcing project designed on Zooniverse.” Read more about DOC here.
“The Rezwan Corpus is the most comprehensive intelligent database of Shia and Sunni hadith, containing over 1.39 million narrations from 1,289 historical books. Developed by the Najm Institute, this dataset is enriched with AI-driven annotations to transform raw text into usable knowledge for researchers, academics, and developers in Natural Language Processing and Islamic Studies. This… CONTINUE READING
“Quantifying Islamic Law in the Modern State” uses quantitative methods to “reconstruct” Islamic legal tradition through almost 800 shari’a court cases in Morocco from 1921–1957—the colonial period and the last decades prior to state codification of shari’a. The project focused on quantifying the frequency of over 200 jurists that judges of this era mentioned in… CONTINUE READING
“From Pen to Printing Press: Ten Centuries of Islamic Book Arts” is a permanent online collection adapted from the 2009 Indiana University Art Museum special exhibition of the same name, featuring manuscripts, miniatures, paintings, and early printed books.
The Haji Nurdin Ismail digitized manuscript collection contains nine eighteenth–twentieth century manuscripts in Arabic and Malay, including works of fiqh and tafsīr, currently housed in Sumatra, Indonesia.
“Farasa is the state-of-the-art full-stack package to deal with Arabic Language Processing. It has been developed by Arabic Language Technologies Group at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), and has a RESTful Web API that you can use through your favorite programming language.”
The Surau Sheikh Abdurrahman Collection of Sufic Texts “were digitised as part of the EAP205 Endangered Manuscript Collections of Sufi Brotherhoods in Western Sumatra project. The original manuscripts are held at the Surau Sheikh Abdurrahman in Kabupaten Lima Puluh Kota, Western Sumatra. One manuscript is a compendium of works concerned with Islamic law, mysticism, history,… CONTINUE READING
