Methodology

1. What this archive is

al-Maṣādir is a documentary research archive. It reproduces primary Islamic texts — the Qur'an, the authenticated hadith collections, classical tafsir, sīra, and early chronicles — together with exact citations, and presents them in four languages. The archive does not express opinions about the material it documents, in either direction. It exists so that every claim about what the classical sources say can be checked against the sources themselves, from the original Arabic.

2. Source selection rules

• Qur'an: text fixed to the Cairo 1924 edition (riwāyat Ḥafṣ, ʿUthmānī orthography); verse numbering per the Egyptian standard enumeration.
• Hadith: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim first; then the Sunan (Abū Dāwūd, al-Tirmidhī, al-Nasāʾī, Ibn Mājah) and other graded collections. Every narration is given with collection, book, number, and grading. The archive prefers Ṣaḥīḥ-graded narrations; when a narration is graded only Ḥasan, or is disputed, the grading note says so explicitly.
• Tafsīr: al-Ṭabarī (Jāmiʿ al-Bayān), Ibn Kathīr, al-Qurṭubī, and other classical commentaries — always quoted with the scholar's name, the work, and the verse being commented on.
• Sīra and history: Ibn Hishām (recension of Ibn Isḥāq), al-Ṭabarī's Tārīkh, al-Balādhurī's Futūḥ al-Buldān, with edition references.
• Fiqh and classical doctrine: al-Māwardī, Ibn Qudāma, al-Nawawī, Ibn Taymiyya, and similar authorities, with chapter-level locators.

3. Verification pipeline (every entry)

1. Extraction: Arabic text is taken from the printed editions listed in the Sources registry and cross-checked against at least two digital repositories (sunnah.com; the Shamela library; Wikisource for tafsir texts).
2. Citation check: hadith numbers are verified against the standard editions (Fath al-Bārī numbering for Bukhārī; al-Minhāj numbering for Muslim) before publication. Every hadith block carries a link for independent online verification.
3. Grading: recorded per the classical verdicts (agreed upon; or Ṣaḥīḥ/Ḥasan per al-Albānī's editions), or marked 'grading disputed' when the narrators differ.
4. Translation: all editorial renderings are faithful-literal. English translations are checked against two published translations; Spanish against the standard published rendering; Bengali against the Bengali tafsir corpus. Where a word is ambiguous, the ambiguity is flagged in the editorial context, never silently resolved.
5. Context: every entry carries a context section compiled strictly from classical sources — asbāb al-nuzūl, the classical exegesis, the narrations' internal qualifications, and recorded classical dissents. Editorial context is descriptive and is labelled as such.
6. Independent review: each entry requires at least two reviewers, one Arabic-literate, before it receives the 'verified' status and a review date.

4. What the archive deliberately does not do

• It does not issue religious rulings (fatwās) or state what a Muslim 'must' do today.
• It does not soften, omit, or modernize the classical texts.
• It does not polemicize: no advocacy in either direction, no sensational framing.
• It does not present modern polemical literature as if it were a primary source.

5. Corrections and additions

The archive is version-controlled and open to correction. An entry found to contain an error in text, translation, citation, or grading is corrected and re-reviewed, and the review date is updated. Additions follow the template in src/content/entries/_template.json and the guidelines in the repository's CONTENT-GUIDE.md.