dalil data

The books and search databases of dalil (دليل, "evidence"), a search system over classical Islamic texts in Arabic: the Quran, hadith collections, tafsir, fiqh, aqeedah and seerah. The code that reads this data is on GitHub: abdallah-alkanani/dalil.

What it holds

• 542 books by 37 authors, plus the Quran and al-Ahadith al-Qudsiyya
• 349,633 parents (the passages that are shown and cited)
• 927,744 retrieval views (the chunks that are embedded and searched)
• Vectors from Qwen3-Embedding-8B, 4,096 dimensions, in an exact FAISS IndexFlatIP

category	books	views
hadith	100	461,950
fiqh	168	256,556
aqeedah	183	108,019
tafsir	58	70,487
seerah	12	22,213
quran	1	6,236
fiqh_usul	20	2,283

How it was built

• Cut where the book divides. DeepSeek read each book and chose how it is cut: by heading, by fatwa or mas'ala, by question and answer, and others. Nothing is cut at a fixed word count. Parents that were still too long were cut where DeepSeek named, in the text's own words, a change of subject; an anchor not found exactly once in the text was dropped. In this database, 146 parents in 51 books (the longest 555,464 words) were cut at 6,502 such places, all recorded in recipe/decisions/semantic_boundaries.jsonl.
• Search small, return whole. Each chunk is embedded with a header naming its book, category, place in the book and kind of text, and a search returns the whole parent, with the parents before and after it on request.
• Hadith three ways. The full text, the isnad and the matn are separate chunks. In the four Sunan, 19,291 hadith carry al-Albani's grade.
• Cleaned text. Symbol-font characters are restored, text lost by the sources is recovered, and 49,710 Shamela footnotes are placed with their passages.

The details, with a worked example, are in the README.

The books

• ابن تيمية (119 books): مجموع الفتاوى، جامع المسائل - المجموعة الرابعة، منهاج السنة النبوية، مجموعة الرسائل والمسائل - ط وهبة، and 115 more
• ابن عثيمين (108 books): فتاوى نور على الدرب للعثيمين، مجموع فتاوى ورسائل العثيمين، لقاء الباب المفتوح، اللقاء الشهري، and 104 more
• الألباني (107 books): صحيح وضعيف الجامع الصغير، تفريغ «سلسلة الهدى والنور» للشيخ الألباني - الإصدار 4، صحيح الجامع الصغير وزيادته، التعليقات الحسان على صحيح ابن حبان، and 103 more
• ابن القيم (61 books): إعلام الموقعين عن رب العالمين ت مشهور، التبيان في أيمان القرآن ط عالم الفوائد، الطرق الحكمية في السياسة الشرعية ط عالم الفوائد، التفسير القيم لابن القيم، and 57 more
• ابن باز (60 books): فتاوى نور على الدرب لابن باز، فتاوى الدروس لابن باز، مجموع فتاوى ومقالات متنوعة - ابن باز، فتاوى نور على الدرب لابن باز - بعناية الشويعر، and 56 more
• وليد السعيدان (50 books): تلخيص مسائل الحج على القول الراجح، تمام المنة ببعض ما اتفق عليه أهل السنة، إتحاف أهل الألباب بمعرفة التوحيد والعقيدة في سؤال وجواب، الشرح المبدي جمال منظومة الشيخ ابن سعدي، and 46 more
• The Quran and the hadith collections: القرآن الكريم، صحيح البخاري، صحيح مسلم، سنن أبي داود، جامع الترمذي، سنن النسائي، سنن ابن ماجه، موطأ مالك، مسند أحمد، الأربعون النووية، الأحاديث القدسية
• Tafsir: تفسير ابن كثير، جامع البيان (الطبري)، الجامع لأحكام القرآن (القرطبي)، التحرير والتنوير (ابن عاشور)
• and 22 more books by other scholars

The full list, scholar by scholar, is in docs/books.md.

Layout

path	size	what it is
db/dense_faiss_ar.index	15.2 GB	FAISS index; row n is the view in row n of child_metadata
db/faiss_metadata.sqlite	5.9 GB	table child_metadata: one row per view (view id, parent id, book, section, text, embedding text)
db/parents.sqlite	5.5 GB	table parents: one row per parent (citation, section path, references, original text, page number where the source has one)
db/bm25.sqlite	3.2 GB	FTS5 keyword index over the views (child_fts)
db/BUILD_REPORT.json		counts and checks from the build
passages/	472 MB	every parent as Parquet, for the viewer and for datasets: citation, book, scholar, category, place in the book, page, text
books/original/	1.0 GB	every book in its original form, one folder per author and per book (Arabic names)
books/cleaned/	886 MB	every book's full cleaned text, one .txt per book, in the same folders as books/original/
catalog/	66 MB	library/<scholar>/<book>/<book>.json: one card per book (title, scholar, category, source, its folder in books/original/, its file in books/cleaned/, passage and chunk counts), and library/books.parquet with all the cards in one table; hadith/: the al-Albani grade tables of the four Sunan
recipe/	9 MB	what a rebuild needs besides the books: which books to use, how each is cut, the al-Albani grades of the four Sunan

Reading the passages

The viewer above shows every passage (passages) and every book (books). To load them in Python without the search databases:

from datasets import load_dataset

passages = load_dataset("Alkanani/dalil", "passages", split="train")
books = load_dataset("Alkanani/dalil", "books", split="train")

text_original is the passage as it is in the book; text_for_synthesis adds its footnotes and, for the four Sunan, al-Albani's grade.

Using it with the dalil code

Clone the code, then download everything except recipe/ into the code's data/ folder, and recipe/ into the code's root folder:

hf download Alkanani/dalil --repo-type dataset --exclude "recipe/*" --local-dir data
hf download Alkanani/dalil --repo-type dataset --include "recipe/*" --local-dir .

Then search with python -m dalil.s8_search "<question>".