In Your Language, From the Start
In our first dispatch we made a promise: IlmFlow will speak to you in the language you speak to it in. English, Farsi, Arabic, and more.
We should be straight about something. The place where that promise is being built — daftar, the workshop where scholars, students and reviewers write and check the teaching material — was entirely in English.
So we were asking people who study and teach in Farsi and Arabic to do careful, precise work in a language that was not theirs, on a site that did not speak to them, while telling everybody else that the thing they were building would speak to them.
That was the wrong way round. As of today, it is not.
What Changed
Every page a contributor sees. Every button, every form, every message the system sends back when something needs attention. The names of the subjects — uṣūl, fiqh, kalām — written as you would write them, not in Latin letters. Both of the emails we send.
You choose the language from the top of any page, and it stays chosen.
None of it is machine-translated. Every line was written, and then read back word by word, by someone who speaks the language — including the awkward ones. The difference between a record sent back for changes and one not accepted is a difference that matters, because somebody who reads the first as the second stops contributing. Where a language draws that line with different words, we used those words.
The Emails, and a Small Decision
When somebody is invited to daftar, the invitation reaches a person who has never visited. The system cannot know what language they read. We thought about asking whoever sends the invitation to choose — and decided against it.
They would be guessing. And a guess about which language a person is most comfortable in is the kind of thing that is wrong quietly, in a way nobody reports.
So every email goes out in all three languages, every time. You decide. Nobody decides for you.
What We Got Wrong on the Way
We had a check that was supposed to catch any English left behind. It passed every day. When the site was walked through by hand, there was still English on the pages where records are written — words that had been translated weeks earlier and were sitting, ready, unused. The check had been asking whether a translation existed. It had never asked whether the page was using it.
We mention this not because it is interesting, but because it is the kind of thing we said we would tell you. The check now asks the right question, and there is a second one that simply loads each page in Farsi and in Arabic and looks at what is on the screen.
The Door, in Three Languages
daftar is invite-only, and that is deliberate — every account exists because somebody vouched for the person behind it. If you teach or study in a hawza and would like to take part, there is a form, and it is in your language too.
The door is open. The workshop speaks. The student is at the hawza.