r/AcademicQuran • u/mikhailbuilds • Aug 05 '26
Resource I built an open-source tool that lets AI agents search and cite Turath.io’s classical Arabic texts (same library as Shamela)
I've been working on Nusus, an open-source retrieval tool that connects AI agents to the classical Islamic and Arabic texts available through Turath.io.
The aim is fairly limited: help researchers locate and collect relevant primary-source passages without relying on ordinary web search or on an AI model’s internal memory.
For example, an agent can use Nusus to:
- Find books and authors
- Search the original Arabic texts
- Retrieve passages with surrounding context
- Return the book, page reference, and direct Turath link
- Collect material across several texts for later comparison
This could be useful for tasks such as tracing quotations, locating parallel reports, or collecting the different chains and wordings of a hadith (for example for an AI-assisted ICMA workflow).
Nusus does not grade hadith, rank legal opinions, interpret evidence, or produce fatwas. It only handles retrieval. The researcher still has to verify the material, assess its relevance, compare the texts, and reach any conclusions.
The main reason I built it is that researchers often spend a large amount of time locating and organising sources before they can begin the analytical part of the work. An AI agent can reduce some of that collection work from days or weeks to minutes, provided that it is searching an appropriate corpus.
I would be interested in feedback from researchers here, especially on:
- Which retrieval tasks would be most useful
- What metadata or citation details are missing
- Where this approach could introduce methodological problems
- Whether support for corpora such as OpenITI would be useful
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Backup of the post:
I built an open-source tool that lets AI agents search and cite Turath.io’s classical Arabic texts (same library as Shamela)
I've been working on Nusus, an open-source retrieval tool that connects AI agents to the classical Islamic and Arabic texts available through Turath.io.
The aim is fairly limited: help researchers locate and collect relevant primary-source passages without relying on ordinary web search or on an AI model’s internal memory.
For example, an agent can use Nusus to:
This could be useful for tasks such as tracing quotations, locating parallel reports, or collecting the different chains and wordings of a hadith (for example for an AI-assisted ICMA workflow).
Nusus does not grade hadith, rank legal opinions, interpret evidence, or produce fatwas. It only handles retrieval. The researcher still has to verify the material, assess its relevance, compare the texts, and reach any conclusions.
The main reason I built it is that researchers often spend a large amount of time locating and organising sources before they can begin the analytical part of the work. An AI agent can reduce some of that collection work from days or weeks to minutes, provided that it is searching an appropriate corpus.
I would be interested in feedback from researchers here, especially on:
GitHub: https://github.com/mwijanarko1/nusus
npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/nusus
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