When the program, containing 969 free books, first appeared on internet fora for Islamic scholars in early 2005, it met with a lot of enthusiasm – so much so that the pioneering publishing house of digital texts, Markaz al-Turath li-l-Baramijat (the publisher of al-Jamiʿ al-Kabir, the other main source of texts in our corpus), launched an acrimonious attack against the program on the Ahl al-Hadith forum, accusing Nafiʿ of stealing its software and content. The program was created by an Egyptian member of the Ahl al-hadith forum known only as Nafiʿ (often referred to affectionately on specialised internet fora as al-akh Nafiʿ, ‘Brother Nafiʿ’, or duktur/al-ustadh Nafiʿ, ‘Dr/Prof. In its first iteration, it was called al-Mawsuʿa al-Shamila (‘The comprehensive encyclopaedia’). It is currently the largest source of texts in the OpenITI corpus: about 45% of the texts in the corpus come from Shamela. It has millions of users in the Islamic world and is also widely used in Western academia. (This is the first blog post in a longer series of posts about the sources of OpenITI.)Īl-Maktaba al-Shamila (‘The comprehensive library’, often referred to simply as Shamela) is a free software that aims at providing a digital research environment for Islamic scholars and comes with a large collection of Arabic primary sources and secondary texts.
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