Usul is an AI-powered platform designed to evolve how Islamic research is done in the twenty-first century, at a time when online research and AI technology are fueling tomorrow’s world. But the public lacks easy access to a single site of online sources for Islamic knowledge, much less sites that combine windows for Islamic research with the latest AI technology. Moreover, advances in AI that make ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and other sites so useful for general knowledge do not yet give reliable or credible answers for the universe of Islamic knowledge—where credibility and reliability are at a premium. In large part, the divergence between existing AI models and Islamic research has to do with the lack of sources: the general models were trained on the sources available on the internet—good, bad, and ugly. Unfortunately, most Islamic sources are not available online, and those that are available mix the classical/primary sources that a Muslim scholar would recognize as authoritative (such as Qur’an, hadith, fiqh works, historical chronicles, and court cases from recognized figures) with millions of opinions, analysis, and even false narratives about Islam. This is a problem.
Usul solves the problems of credibility, reliability, and AI-powered access to online sources that—prior to now—have impeded researchers’ ability to explore complex questions related to Islamic law, history, and more. Researchers and data engineers joined forces to create an online platform that enables advanced searches on a curated, closed, and credible collection of Islamic sources, powered by AI.
-
Credibility of Research: Our work is guided by our founding Director and a team of Senior Researchers—who have all trained and hold advanced degrees, from institutions in both the Muslim world and the U.S., in the fields of Islamic law, history, and theology, among other subjects. They guide our venture of collecting and curating thousands of authoritative sources in almost a dozen fields of Islamic knowledge.
-
Reliability of Results: Our engineers know how much researchers—as well as the average user—value reliability of results, particularly in the fields of Islamic knowledge where accuracy is critical, where legal questions might have many correct answers depending on the school or the context, and where common AI hallucinations can alter the ability of a researcher to rely on search results that have no citations. We built our engine to provide citations to every query, fine-tuned in a way that has meaning to researchers. Moreover, we are building tools that will better aid researchers in asking questions of the sources in order to yield more insights, faster, and with maximum reliability.
-
Access to Sources: Usul combines advanced AI and search technology with a growing collection of historical texts to make the study of Islamic sources accessible, searchable, and analyzable at scale. At over 15,000 texts and counting, we absorbed the largest existing open-source libraries for online Islamic sources (including 8000 books in Al-Maktaba Al-Shamela and OpenITI), doubled them by converting scanned classical Arabic books curated by our researchers into machine-readable form (‘Arabic OCR’), and are creating a means to absorb new machine-readable sources as they gradually come online.
The project focuses on three key initiatives:
-
AI-Powered Search for Islamic Sources: Incorporate state-of-the-art search tools and the latest AI models to enable researchers to quickly locate precise information and navigate large volumes of text with ease.
-
Curated Islamic Collections: Working with leading scholars, create a “core corpus”—a representative sample of sources from all Islamic fields (including law, history, theology, literature, biographical dictionaries, and every other major field)—as well as representative collections in each genre.
-
Universal Corpus: Build the infrastructure and partnerships with libraries and other online repositories to house a universal, comprehensive corpus of texts in structured digital formats to ensure that, as the world of online knowledge grows, all works are accessible, searchable, and analyzable for researchers via usul.
Usul is a non-profit organization that operates with the nimbleness and speed of a startup. It relies on large and individual monetary donations, paid service contracts for researchers or organizations wanting customized sites or collections (which contribute to the whole), and investments of researchers’ time and expertise. Here’s how we have progressed since our founding:
Usul is a project of Seemore Foundation, a 501(c)3 pending non-profit. Please reach out if you’d like to donate or support our work.