The world’s Islamic texts.
One question away.
3arif.ai searches and cites 60+ classical Islamic sources in real time — the Quran, 15 tafsīrs, 9 ḥadīth collections, Islamic law across every major school, Sufi literature, theology, philosophy, and history. 370,000+ passages. Every answer cited. Free for everyone.
The library we’re building is unlike anything that exists. We want to ingest 20,000 classical Islamic texts — making every surviving work of Islamic scholarship searchable, cited, and free, for any student, anywhere on earth, in any language. Nothing like this has ever been built.Your support builds it.
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Why 20,000 books?
The Islamic scholarly tradition is the largest continuous intellectual output in human history. From the first generation of ḥadīth collectors in the 7th century to the great legal encyclopaedists of the 19th, scholars wrote in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu — on law, theology, philosophy, history, grammar, medicine, mysticism, and the sciences. The library they built spans 1,400 years and tens of thousands of volumes.
Today, that library is scattered. Some of it is in PDF scans nobody can search. Some is in physical collections that scholars travel to access. Some is being digitised slowly by institutions that gate it behind paywalls or require institutional affiliation. The student in Jakarta, the researcher in Lagos, the seeker in Detroit — they cannot easily reach it.
We are changing that. Using AI embeddings, we convert each text into a searchable form: every sentence, argument, ḥadīth, and ruling becomes findable by meaning, not just keyword. When you ask 3arif.ai a question, it doesn’t search the internet. It searches the actual library — and cites exactly where it found the answer.
No tool like this exists. No university library, no Islamic digital archive, no AI assistant offers this: a cross-referenced, cited, multilingual search across the classical Islamic canon — free, in real time, to everyone.
Where we are. Where we’re going.
We publish every stage openly. Here is the honest state of the library today, what each phase costs to run, and what unlocks when we reach the next one.
The Quran, 15 tafsīrs, 9 ḥadīth collections including Al-Kāfī and Man Lā Yaḥḍuruhu, Nahjul Balagha, Al-Ṣaḥīfa al-Sajjādiyya. The core textual foundation of Islamic scholarship.
Ḥadīth sciences (Tahdhīb al-Kamāl, Mīzān, Lisān, Nukhba), Quranic sciences (Al-Itqān, Al-Burhān), fiqh across all madhabs and Jaʿfarī marājiʿ, history (Al-Ṭabarī, Ibn Isḥāq), theology, philosophy, and Sufi literature. The full scholarly apparatus is searchable.
The remaining major tafsīrs, the six Sunnī ḥadīth encyclopaedias in full Arabic, expanded fiqh coverage, Sufi classics (Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, Mishkāt al-Anwār, Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam), and sīra literature.
Every major work in fiqh, kalām, philosophy, sīra, and Sufi literature. Law across all four madhabs in full. The complete intellectual legacy of 14 centuries of Islamic civilisation.
Every surviving classical Islamic text. 14 centuries of thought, argument, commentary, and discovery — free, cited, and searchable. Nothing like it exists anywhere on earth.
What 20,000 books actually means — in numbers
The one-off embedding cost — converting 20,000 books into searchable AI vectors — is approximately £500. That’s it. The ingestion is a one-time investment that permanently expands what every user can find. The ongoing cost to keep the full library live and free is £300–500/month, entirely covered by community support.
Full transparency — what it costs right now
At current traffic, 3arif.ai runs on £12–22 a month. The 60+ source library, 370,000+ passage index, and all six response modes are covered by free tiers and a small AI cost. We publish this because you deserve to know exactly where your money goes.
| Service | Monthly | |
|---|---|---|
Railway — backend server | £5 | |
Claude AI — response engine | £5–15 | |
Qdrant Cloud — vector store | £0 | |
Neon — PostgreSQL database | £0 | |
Voyage AI — text embeddings | £0 | |
Domain — 3arif.ai | £1.50 | |
| Total | £12–22 / mo |
At full scale — 20,000 books, 1,000+ research queries/day — the monthly cost rises to £300–500/month. That is the target this community is building toward, one phase at a time.
Claude AI at 1,000 queries/day | £30–60 | |
Qdrant — 40M+ vectors | £80–120 | |
Railway — upgraded compute | £15 | |
Voyage AI — ongoing ingestion | £10–30 | |
Neon — larger DB | £17 | |
| Total at scale | £300–500 / mo |
Why will it always be free?
The scholars who wrote these texts — Al-Ghazālī, Ibn Kathīr, Al-Ṭabarī, Al-Kulaynī — wrote for God. Their books were copied by hand and given away. They were transmitted across oceans and centuries without ever being sold. That tradition is not incidental to Islamic scholarship. It is the point.
Knowledge in Islam is a trust. It belongs to the community. A student in Kano should have the same access as a professor at Oxford. A mother seeking an answer at midnight deserves the same response as a funded researcher.
3arif.ai will never charge for access to Islamic knowledge. What we ask of those who can give is simple: cover the infrastructure that makes it free for those who cannot.
100 people giving £5/month covers everything we run today — 60+ sources, free for everyone.
1,000 people giving £20/month builds the full 20,000-book library and keeps it free forever.
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