--- title: "Technical Writings" description: "Occasional write-ups from Truth Promoters on building and running the systems behind this site. Not a technology site: an Islamic community that works with technology, publishing what it learns." canonical_url: "https://www.truthpromoters.com/help/technical-writings" type: "help" section: "Help Center" keywords: "Islam and technology, hawza technology, infrastructure notes, sysadmin write-up" --- # Technical Writings This part of the Help Centre is where we write up things we have learned while building and running the systems behind this site. It is written for people who work with the same tools, and it is published in the hope that it saves someone else a difficult evening. **You do not need to share our beliefs to find these useful, and we would rather you took what is useful and left the rest.** They are notes about machines, written by people whose work happens to be something else. > [!IMPORTANT] > **We are not a technology organisation.** We are an Islamic community, and our work is religious > content and education. The technology exists to serve that and nothing else. These pages are a > by-product of doing that work carefully — not a change of direction, and not a second identity. ## Why a community like ours writes about this at all Religious life has always run on technology, and the tradition has always known it. The printing press is the obvious example. Within a few generations of its arrival, scripture stopped being something most believers encountered only through an intermediary and became something they could hold. That was not a theological change. It was a change in *machinery* — and it reshaped religious life more thoroughly than most theological arguments ever have. People died over who was allowed to operate it and in what language. Every tradition has its version of this, and ours is no exception. Islamic scholarship adopted paper early and enthusiastically, built libraries and cataloguing systems around it, and developed in the *isnad* — the chain of transmission — something a modern engineer would recognise immediately as a verification protocol: a claim is worth what its chain of custody is worth, and the chain is recorded so that anyone can check it. Scholars have argued about the reliability of an individual transmitter for centuries, with a rigour that would not embarrass a security review. That is not a claim to have got there first. It is the observation that **the problem is a shared one** — how do you carry something faithfully across distance, across languages, and across generations, using whatever machinery you have? — and that people who take it seriously tend to arrive at recognisably similar answers, whatever they believe. ## This is not reluctant engagement It is worth being direct about this, because religious communities are often assumed to be uneasy about technology, and ours is not. > "We do not oppose technology; not only are we not opposed, rather it is *wajib* — religiously > obligatory — that we use it." … "Let no one imagine that we are opposed to these technologies. Only > a person devoid of reason opposes progress and technology." > > — **Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi** > ([official office](https://makarem.ir/news/en/News/Details/326349)) And it is not theoretical. The hawza's own institutions have spent decades digitising, indexing and making searchable a body of work that previously existed only in print — treated as scholarship rather than as administration, because it is. That work continues into territory many organisations are still hesitant about: > "I am pleased to see that the seminary has not lagged behind the caravan of science and technology. > It has become a leader in applying artificial intelligence in the service of Islamic knowledge." … > Quranic interpretation, he noted, is "among the most scientific fields of Islamic study, requiring > linguistic, conceptual and historical precision — areas where AI can significantly enhance research > accuracy and speed." > > — **Grand Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi**, at the unveiling of a system built by the Computer Research > Center for Islamic Sciences (Noor), Qom, November 2025 > ([report](https://en.hawzahnews.com/news/373655/Ayatollah-Makarem-Shirazi-Seminary-a-Pioneer-in-Artificial-Intelligence)) ## Why we write it down rather than only reading There is a distinction we take seriously between learning from others and remaining permanently dependent on them: > "We must transform the approach of being consumers of science into an approach of producing > science. How long must we sit as consumers of others' knowledge? I am not at all opposed to > learning science from others … but being a student is one thing, and blind imitation is another." > > — **Imam Sayyed Ali Khamenei**, to university professors and researchers, June 2018 > ([source](https://farsi.khamenei.ir/newspart-index?tid=1245)) Almost everything we know about running these systems, we learned from someone else's write-up — usually written by a stranger, usually for free, usually at the end of a long day. **Reading those and never writing one is the consuming half without the producing half.** It is a small thing to give back, but it is the thing we are actually able to give back. So we work with technology in that spirit: with respect, with care about what it does to the thing it carries, and with the understanding that **a tool used badly damages what it was meant to serve.** Writing down what we learn is part of using it well. ## What you will find here, and what you will not **You will find:** accounts of specific problems we hit, what we tried, what actually worked, and — usually at greater length — the things that misled us on the way. They are written so that someone searching for the same error message finds the part they need without reading the rest. **You will not find:** any description of our own infrastructure. No addresses, no machine names, no capacities, no diagrams of what sits behind what. Every example is written generically, and that is a deliberate rule rather than an oversight. The interesting part of what we learn is almost never specific to us anyway — it is usually a fact about a tool that anyone using it will meet. **And you will not find advice we have not tested.** Where we have proved something on exactly one machine, the page says so and names the cases we did not try. A procedure that worked once is not the same as a procedure that works, and the difference is usually a condition nobody wrote down. ## There is no schedule, on purpose These pages appear when we have learned something worth another person's time. That might be twice in a month or not at all in a year. We would rather this section were occasionally quiet than regularly padded. The test we apply is simple: **did this come out of work we were doing anyway?** If the answer is ever *"we went looking for something to write about"*, the section has stopped being a by-product and started being the point — and the technology would have quietly become the centre, which is precisely what it is not. ## The writings - **[Proving a backup restores, and six tools that told us the wrong thing](/help/proving-a-backup-restores)** — August 2026. We had backups of every machine and had never restored one. So we erased a server and put it back. It worked; almost every instrument we checked along the way did not. ## Related topics - [Working With AI](https://www.truthpromoters.com/help/working-with-ai) — Why we work with AI rather than use it, what a person still decides, and where we refuse - [The AI Behind This Site, Explained](https://www.truthpromoters.com/help/ai-explained) — Transcription, translation, voice, search and drafting — what each one actually is