Shamela4: Full Islamic Library Corpus with 8,589 Books

8,589 books across 40 categories of classical Islamic sciences form this Arabic text corpus. The dataset was extracted from the al-Maktaba al-Shamela v4 database by AuthenticIlm on 2026-04-26, containing approximately 7.6 million pages of text.

Use Cases

• Train large language models for classical Arabic based on the extensive corpus of Islamic texts.
• Conduct topic modeling or genre analysis across the 40 categories of Islamic sciences.
• Build search or retrieval systems for classical Arabic literature and religious scholarship.
• Perform linguistic analysis on historical Arabic prose and religious terminology.

Strengths

• Corpus contains 8,589 books, providing substantial volume for analysis.
• Text spans 40 distinct categories of Islamic sciences, offering thematic breadth.
• Extracted from a known source, al-Maktaba al-Shamela v4, suggesting a structured origin.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Freshness should be verified as the last metadata update was 2026-05-19.

Provenance

Source

al-Maktaba al-Shamela (الشاملة) v4

Collection Method

Extracted from the original Lucene + Sqlite Shamela DB

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-19 21:04:21