Field Guide Roundup

The Afsaneh Esfandiari (Gidfar) collection contains “family photographs and legal and financial documents, including depositions and settlements” from 19th–21st-century Iran.

“The Michaelides fragments comprise the largest private collection of Arabic papyri to be found in any institution worldwide.Cambridge University Library bought the collection in 1977 from the heirs of the antiques dealer Georges Anastase Michaelides (1900-1973). Born in Cairo and educated in Egypt and France, G.A. Michaelides developed a profound interest in the history and… CONTINUE READING

“SaudiLegalAI-8B is a specialized legal artificial intelligence model developed by Abdul Wasey specifically for the Saudi Arabian legal system. Built upon the advanced Qwen3-8B architecture and optimized with Apple MLX framework, this model provides expert-level assistance in Saudi legal matters, combining modern commercial law with traditional Islamic jurisprudence.” The model integrates Saudi commercial law, Islamic… CONTINUE READING

Kān Zamān is a date converter designed for academics working on the Islamicate world. It features a toggle for dyslexic-friendly reading and an uncluttered UI, the ability to choose between conversions for an entire year range or a specific day, support for Arabic-Indic and Western Arabic numerals inputs, and outputs in English, IJMES transliteration, and… CONTINUE READING

OpenITI MAKHZAN is a “large aggregation of Arabic-script ground truth and evaluation data drawn from a wide variety of Persian, Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Urdu print and handwritten (manuscript) documents.” “Comprising nearly 1,500 page images across 208 documents sourced from 30 repositories worldwide, the dataset spans seven languages, around 20 unique and mixed script types,… CONTINUE READING

The “LATOC (Latin-transliterated Ottoman Turkish Corpus) includes 143 Ottoman Turkish books, 13,252,350 words, written between the 15th and 20th centuries. The books were transliterated by domain experts and publicly shared on the Internet. The books in the corpus were automatically structured via a rule‑based approach and manually checked.”

“Al-Muwatta AI is an Islamic knowledge platform specialized in Maliki jurisprudence, combining retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with multiple LLM providers. Named after Imam Malik’s foundational hadith compilation, the platform provides authenticated responses from classical Maliki texts.”

Hipajattul Islam [Feb 1930 -Dec 1936] is a digitized periodical collection “mainly focusing on the doctrines of Islam and spread of Islam in Tamilnadu [India]. Original material is held by Anjuman Nusrathul Islam, Islamic Public Library, Kottakuppam.” The collection features 1,815 images.

“Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus (PAL) is dedicated to the edition and study of the Arabic and Latin versions of Ptolemyʼs astronomical and astrological texts, and related material. These include works by Ptolemy or attributed to him, commentaries thereupon, and other works that are of immediate relevance to understanding Ptolemy’s reception and legacy in the Middle… CONTINUE READING

The Manuscripts of Arabic Handwriting (Muharaf) dataset is a “machine learning dataset consisting of more than 1,600 historic handwritten page images transcribed by experts in archival Arabic. Each document image is accompanied by spatial polygonal coordinates of its text lines as well as basic page elements. This dataset was compiled to advance the state of… CONTINUE READING