AI for Arabic and Islamic cultural heritage that shows its sources and stays silent when it has none

What the Initiative does

Arabic and Islamic cultural heritage is kept in libraries, archives, museums and historic cities, and in living traditions. AI can help people find and understand it, but it also brings a new risk: that texts, objects and traditions are credited with things that are not in them. Research groups working on Arabic language models themselves describe the misattribution of religious sources as a core problem.

The Initiative is not building another language model. It works in four fields: cultural heritage as its main focus, the Arabic language in AI, sovereign and secure AI, and education. In all four, its work rests on three principles:

• Every Arabic quotation is matched against its original before it is shown; what does not match is rejected, not guessed.
• Every link between names of persons states its method and its level of confidence; records are never merged without saying so.
• Every image of a heritage object leads back to the institution that holds it and is never copied.

Its first building block is an open standard that lets any operator check its own model on its own infrastructure, without producing a ranking or comparison of countries.

The Initiative addresses libraries, archives, museums and manuscript centres, researchers and teachers, public bodies responsible for heritage, language and AI policy, and funders of research and education.

Guardrails

Our work is philological and documentary. The Initiative is bound by published guardrails that apply to all its tools and publications. The most important are:

• We issue no fatwas, give no religious rulings, express no view on questions of creed and do not rank schools of thought.
• We make no judgements on the authenticity of hadith. The tools show where a text appears in its sources, not whether it is authentic. If a text is not found, that means only that it was not found in the stated edition at the stated place, never that it is spurious or fabricated.
• Images of manuscripts and other heritage objects are never copied or republished. They remain with the holding institution, and we link back to it.
• AI does not replace scholarship. No scholarly work is published before a specialist in philology and textual criticism has reviewed it.

The draft Ethics Charter for AI and Arabic and Islamic Heritage sets out these guardrails and the Initiative's other commitments.

Programmes

The work is organised in four programmes. Cultural heritage is the main focus, and the other three serve it. Overview of the programmes

Arabic and Islamic Cultural Heritage

The main focus: manuscripts and the written word, built heritage, arts and crafts, music and oral tradition, and the history of science, with every object linked back to those who keep it.

Arabic Language and AI

The quality of Arabic in AI systems, beginning with the Citation Fidelity Standard, an open test of whether AI quotes its sources faithfully.

Sovereign and Secure AI

Information security for the systems that keep heritage and knowledge: protection against tampering, disclosure of where models run, and decisions left with each institution.

Education and the Next Generation

The Charter, methods and open materials for universities, schools and young researchers in heritage, Arabic and computer science.

What you can check today

The Initiative has not yet released tools of its own. Some of its principles, however, are already applied on an existing platform that any researcher can examine: arabianscript.com. It brings manuscript records from Fihrist, Qalamos, HMML and IIIF sources together in one search and, where the source allows, links to the catalogues and images of the holding institutions instead of copying them. It is a first example from the field of the written heritage, not the whole of the Initiative's work.

Figures such as the number of records or the accuracy of name matching will not appear here until a methods report sets out the measurement run, its date, the sample and the limits. The Tools page gives the details.

Where the Initiative stands

What exists, what is planned and what has not yet been decided:

Open Legal form: the Initiative does not yet have legal personality of its own. Its legal form and seat have not been decided.

In progress Charter: the draft is open for public comment from 15 September 2026 to 10 November 2026.

In progress Methods report: it covers the manuscript record search and name matching. No figures are published before it appears.

Planned Boards: an Academic Advisory Board and a Supervisory Board are planned. No members have been appointed.

Open Partnerships: there is no cooperation agreement with any institution yet.