Guide

Everything needed to connect, and what to know before quoting anything this server returns.

Connecting

Server address

Claude

Anthropic's assistant, on the web, desktop, and mobile.

ChatGPT

OpenAI's assistant. Needs “Developer mode” turned on first.

Hermes Agent

Nous Research's agent, run from the terminal (command line).

More apps will be added over time.

What it can do

Search

Full-text search across the books: by phrase, by Arabic root, by boolean (and/or/not), and by title.

Browsing

Tables of contents, volumes, pages, and moving between a book's sections.

Quran and tafsir

Fetch a verse, and gather what the commentators say about it from the installed tafsirs.

Hadith

Find a hadith, and see which collections record it.

Citation

Build a citation to book, author, volume, and page — and verify a quotation you already have.

Usage limits

An account gets an allowance of its own: enough at once for the searches a single question needs, a steadier rate under that, and a daily total. Go past any of them and the server answers immediately asking you to wait, and tells you when to come back — a request is never left hanging.

Before you trust a result

Page numbers

Some books carry Shamela's automatic pagination rather than the printed edition's, and the citation tool says so. Do not pass it off as the edition's numbering.

Body and footnote

A footnote is the editor's or commentator's words, not the author's. Results keep them apart — do not attribute a footnote to the author of the book.

What is searched

Search reaches only the books installed on this server. An empty result does not mean the Shamela library is silent, let alone the scholarly tradition.

Judgements

This server issues no ruling on a hadith and no fatwa. Any judgement you see is quoted from the text, attributed to whoever said it.