A Catalogue, and One Key
Fihrist is the Arabic and Persian word for a catalogue — the index at the front of a book, or the ledger a library keeps of what it holds. It is also the name of the research toolkit we have been building for the people who prepare our teaching material.
What Fihrist does, and the one thing it refuses to do
We have a library of Arabic and Persian books — the sources behind The Lantern of the Path, the Shahada series, and the teaching material being written in daftar. Finding a passage used to mean opening books and reading pages one at a time. Fihrist searches all of them at once and tells you which book and which page to open. It takes a fraction of a second.
Then it stops. Fihrist never gives you text you can quote. It gives you a page number, and it will show you the page itself so you can read it with your own eyes and copy the words yourself. The short snippet it prints beside a result is a signpost to help you recognise the right page — a machine read it, and machines misread letters — and every result is marked to say so. Nothing a machine read goes on a minbar, into a script, or into a write-up. A person reads the page. That is not a limitation we are working around; it is the product.
That rule is the same one we wrote about when we sent a student to the hawza: point people back to the texts, and never put words in a source's mouth.
Three ways in
Fihrist is one tool with three doors, for three kinds of work.
- A website, for a person at a desk: search, grouped by book; a library you can browse by collection; a notebook for the loci you find during a session, searchable later by words and by meaning; and a help page for adding books.
- An interface for programs, so the tools we are building can ask it questions directly.
- A connector for AI assistants, so that during a working session an assistant can search the library and show a page — and then, exactly as a person would, file where something was found rather than what it said. The assistant gets the same rule everyone else gets: a page, never a quote.
One key
Until now, each tool we built was a separate door with its own lock. Fihrist is the first to open with the same key as daftar.
daftar already knows who everybody is: every account there exists because somebody vouched for the person behind it, and it is where passkeys and sign-in links live. So when you open Fihrist, it simply asks daftar. daftar confirms who you are and sends you back, and that is the whole of it. If you were not signed in to daftar, you sign in there as usual, and a card on your welcome page takes you to Fihrist.
Two things about how that works are worth saying plainly.
daftar says who you are, and nothing else. Whether you may use Fihrist — and what you may do there — is decided by Fihrist, from its own list of members. Being in daftar does not put you in Fihrist, and being an administrator in one makes you nothing in the other. We wrote that rule down before we wrote any code, because it is the kind of shortcut that is convenient for a year and then impossible to undo.
There is still no sign-up form, anywhere. The sign-in became wider; the door did not. Fihrist is for the people who prepare our material, and an account exists only because somebody invited the person behind it.
For anyone who builds systems and wants the mechanism — what one tool tells another, how long that statement lives, and the checks that stop it being forged or sent astray — we have written it up as a technical note. It describes the design, not our machines.
What we got wrong on the way
The check that keeps our tools speaking the reader's language flagged the name of a cryptographic algorithm as an English word we had forgotten to translate. It was not on any page; it is a fixed name in a protocol, and translating it would have broken every signature. But the check was right to ask, and it is now told, in one line, why that word is allowed. We mention it because it is the kind of thing we said we would tell you: the checks that guard the reader's language are strict enough to catch things that are not words at all.
What is next
Fihrist is at work already, on the desks of the people who use it. The sign-in it now shares with daftar is the piece that lets it open beyond a single desk — carefully, to the people who prepare our material, and not as a public website. When it is ready for that, we will say so here.
Find the page. Read it yourself. One key for every door we build.