Written, Found, and Kept

Diwan is the Persian and Arabic word for a register, and for a collected book — the gathered work of a writer, kept together in one place. It is also the name of the third tool we have built for the people who prepare our material, and it opened this week.

Three tools, one purpose

IlmFlow is our effort to make sourced answers about the Shia tradition — faithful to their sources — available to people who currently get neither.

We have written before about sending a student to the hawza: not a person, but a large language model, trained to learn how scholars think. Like any student there, it needs three things: material to learn from, a library to research in, and a place to keep its notes — carefully curated, and accurate to the letter. Each now has a tool of its own:

daftar is where its teaching material is written — by scholars, in their own language, and reviewed before it is used.
fihrist is where the sources are found. It searches our library of Arabic and Persian books and tells you which book and which page to open — never a quote to copy.
diwan is where the written work is kept — the notes, outlines and write-ups behind our research and our sessions, exactly as they were written.

Together they are how we build the heart of IlmFlow: a model that anyone can talk with — a Muslim, Shia or Sunni, a Christian, a Jew, anyone of any faith tradition who wants to learn and to understand. We are training it never to invent: everything it tells you will carry its source, and its method will be that of the hawza ʿilmiyya, the seminaries of Najaf and Qom.

An answer is only as trustworthy as the chain behind it: the page it came from, the person who wrote it, and the record of every change since. The three tools are that chain, one link each.

A writing tool, not a CMS

Most websites run on a content management system — a CMS — the software that stores a page and publishes it to the world. Our own site has one. diwan is not that. Nothing in diwan is published: it is where the work is written and kept while it is being made — closer to a scholar's notebook, a filing cabinet and a record of every draft, in one place. What you eventually read on this site - our sister sites such as Reflections313 and Sacred Reason began there.

What diwan does, and what it will not do

It keeps every character exactly. Not a tidied copy: the text as it was written, Arabic included, every vowel mark in its order, down to whether a file ends with a new line. What goes in is what comes out, and diwan proves it by taking a fingerprint of each document and checking it.
An edit says what it expects to find. You do not just tell diwan to change a sentence; you tell it which sentence you expect to be there, and what should replace it. If that sentence is not there — someone else changed it, or you remembered it wrong — diwan changes nothing and says why. Two people, or a person and an assistant, cannot overwrite each other without knowing.
Every change is kept, with who made it. Any version can be read again, and any two compared.
Nothing is kept in one place alone. As each change is saved, it is also copied into a separate history that is only ever added to, and every day that copy is checked against the store, word for word.
It is not a public website. The writing is for the people who prepare it. It reaches you the way it always has: through our sessions, our series, and this site.

Built for working with an AI

diwan was built from the first day for a person and an AI research assistant working on the same documents. You can write in it yourself, but it is designed for the way our writing team now works: you connect the assistant of your choice, and it can read, search, compare versions and edit — under exactly the rules a person follows. Members will find the steps on diwan's Connect your AI page.

How you and your assistant work together

You give your assistant its own key. On diwan's Tokens page you make a key for it: you name it, and choose whether it may only read or also write. It is shown to you once, it lasts ninety days, and you can withdraw it at any moment.
It works in its own name, for you. Every change it makes is recorded as the assistant's, made on your behalf — so the history always shows whose assistant wrote a line. And it can never do more than you can: a reader's assistant can only read.
Neither of you can overwrite the other by accident. Your assistant must read a document before changing it, and every edit says what it expects to find. If you changed the document in the meantime, its edit is refused; it reads again and tries afresh. Nothing is lost, and nothing is merged behind your back.
You stay the author. Every change your assistant makes is yours to read, compare with what came before, and put back if you disagree.

Which AI

Any AI model can work with diwan, provided it runs in a harness: the program around a model that lets it use tools — a chat app with connectors, a coding assistant, or software you run yourself. The harness must speak MCP, the Model Context Protocol, an open standard for connecting AI assistants to tools, or be able to call a web API. diwan offers both.

Self-hosted or cloud-hosted. A self-hosted model runs on your own computer or server, and nothing leaves it except what it sends to diwan. A cloud-hosted model runs on its provider's servers and is reached over the internet — the easiest way to start, and usually the most capable.
Small, large or frontier. Models are often described by size. A small model can run on an ordinary laptop, and is quick but limited. A large model needs serious hardware or a provider's servers. A frontier model is one of the most capable models available at the time, and today these run almost entirely in the cloud.

Careful research in Arabic and Persian sources rewards a capable model, but diwan's rules hold for every one of them: read before you write, and never retype a source.

Our writing team works with Claude, made by Anthropic. We are not paid to say so; it is simply what we use. Like daftar and fihrist, diwan is by invitation. If you would like to work with us, and to try this way of working with Claude, contact us and tell us about the work you have in mind.

Why diwan never checks Arabic by eye

This week an Arabic passage was set into one of our write-ups by typing it from the source instead of copying it. It looked perfect. It was wrong in seven places: pairs of vowel marks written in the opposite order, which look identical on screen, and one invisible direction mark. A search of our own library then could not find the passage in the very book it came from, and nothing on the screen showed why. It was put right by copying the exact characters from the source and checking the fingerprint.

diwan is built around that lesson. Arabic in diwan is never checked by looking at it. The assistants that work in it are given the same rule in writing: find the passage in the source, compare fingerprints, and never retype it.

One key, still

diwan opens with the same sign-in as daftar and fihrist. daftar says who you are; diwan decides, from its own list of members, what you may do there. There is still no sign-up form anywhere.

What we got wrong on the way

On the first night, the tool that moves our existing writing into a new store stopped at its first step, having written nothing: a command that worked on our practice copy was read differently on the real one. We fixed it, added a test built from exactly that failure, and ran it again. It filled the store, then checked every document against the original, and every one was identical. We mention it because it is the kind of thing we said we would tell you — and because the checks stopped it before a single word was written.

What is next

Our next session will be the first written in diwan from the start. Later, we want a document to be able to take a passage straight from fihrist — its book, its page and its status attached — so that nobody ever has to retype one again. We have written down how; it waits until diwan has been used in earnest.

And further ahead, the same door will open for our own model. Once the student we are sending to the hawza has finished its training, it will be able to work in diwan like any other assistant — reading, researching and keeping its notes under the same rules: read before you write, say what you expect to find, and never retype a source. When that day comes, we will publish full instructions for connecting it, here.

Find the source. Write it down. Keep every word.