Al-Isharat: A 14th-Century Manuscript on Islamic Jurisprudence Names and Places

Qatar National Library provides a 2.9 GB high-resolution digital copy of manuscript HC.MS.00783 from its Heritage Collection. The manuscript, titled 'Al-Isharat ila ma fi Kutub al-Fiqh min al-Asma' wa al-Amkinah', was authored by Muhammad ibn Ya'qub al-Firuzabadi (1329–1414). The dataset was last updated on June 3, 2026, and is available under a CC0 1.0 license.

Use Cases

• Training Optical Character Recognition (OCR) models for classical Arabic script based on high-resolution manuscript images.
• Analyzing the evolution of geographic and personal name references within Islamic legal texts.
• Conducting named entity recognition on historical Arabic texts to identify places and individuals mentioned in jurisprudence.

Strengths

• High-resolution digital master copy, suggesting detailed visual fidelity for analysis.
• Direct provenance from the Qatar National Library Heritage Collection, indicating institutional authority.
• Released under a permissive CC0 1.0 public domain license, allowing for broad reuse.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality and legibility require manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; the structure and organization of the digitized content must be inferred.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale text mining.

Provenance

Source

Qatar National Library Heritage Collection, manuscript HC.MS.00783.

Collection Method

High-resolution digitization of a physical manuscript.

Time Range

Manuscript authored in the 14th-15th centuries (author lifespan: 1329–1414).

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-03 06:01:25; freshness should be verified.