Founder of the Initiative
Mustapha Bazra
Mustapha Bazra works on verifiable AI for Arabic and Islamic heritage: every quotation matched to its original, every link with its method disclosed, every source credited to those who preserve it.
At a glance
- Role in the Initiative
- Founder of the Initiative
- Profession
- Managing Director of Infosec Technologie GmbH, an IT security company in Frankfurt am Main
- Areas of work in the Initiative
- Citation fidelity, the link back to the source, sovereign and secure AI, and the governance of AI when it deals with heritage texts
Guiding idea
From information security to textual integrity
In Arabic the phrase reads من أمن المعلومات إلى أمانة النصوص and rests on two words from the same root. أمن (amn) means security: in technology, that information remains protected from alteration and tampering. أمانة (amāna) means faithful custody: in scholarship, that a text is passed on exactly as it stands and credited to its author and to the place where it appears.
The founder's work starts from this link between the two words. When AI deals with heritage texts, it should meet the same demands that information security makes of any information that matters.
From method to stance
The method
Information security asks three questions of any piece of information. Has it remained unaltered? Can it be attributed to its source? Can it be verified? Scholars have asked the same questions for centuries when establishing texts and collating their manuscript copies.
The occasion
Large language models for Arabic are appearing in quick succession, and they can attribute to religious and classical sources words that do not appear in them. Researchers in Arabic language technology treat this as a core problem, and a shared evaluation task, IslamicEval 2025, was devoted to detecting it in verses of the Qur'an and in hadith quoted by such models.
The response
The response has two parts: tools that would rather decline than guess when they find no source, and an open standard, the Citation Fidelity Standard, against which anyone who builds or operates a system can measure that system. This work belongs to the Initiative's Programme B, Arabic Language and AI.
The stance
The Initiative serves the holding institutions that preserve this heritage. It claims no authority to interpret it, and it does not compete with those institutions or with existing scholarly projects; it seeks to complement their work.
Why the Initiative bears the Al-Bazra name
In the Arabic tradition it is common for scholarly and cultural institutions to bear the name of the person who founded them. The name does not give the founder the last word on scholarly matters. Scholarly oversight of the Charter and the methodology is to rest with the Academic Advisory Board, an independent body with a right of veto, and the Supervisory Board is to be chaired by an independent member rather than by the founder.
Planned Neither the Academic Advisory Board nor the Supervisory Board has been formed yet. No members will be named without their written consent.
Details to be published once documented
This page states only what can be verified. The following details will be added once the documents that support them are available:
- Professional career
- Managing Director of Infosec Technologie GmbH (IT security, Frankfurt am Main) and director of M.B. Great Cyprus Holding Ltd; further details will be added once documented
- Professional certificates
- will be added once documented
- Academic background
- will be added once documented
- Languages
- will be added once documented
- Publications and talks
- will be added once documented
Interests
The founder of the Initiative has business activities outside it, among them the company that operates arabianscript.com. These activities are listed in the register of interests on the disclosure page, and the founder abstains from any decision that concerns the companies listed there.