About ShamelaTranslate
Last updated: 2026-07-14
ShamelaTranslate is a scholarly, largely open-access library that makes the classical Arabic Islamic tradition readable in German and English. The purpose is simple: a vast body of scholarship — hadith, jurisprudence, Qur'anic commentary, biography, history, and the Arabic sciences — has for centuries been accessible only to readers of Arabic. We work to lower that barrier, carefully and honestly, without ever hiding the original.
What we do
We gather classical works — primarily from the public Shamela library, supplemented by manual scholarly entry — and aim to preserve each text's original Arabic as it comes to us. Alongside it we publish a translation, so that a reader of German or English can study the same page a reader of Arabic sees.
The library spans the core genres of the Islamic scholarly heritage: hadith collections and their commentaries, works of fiqh across the schools, tafsīr, ʿaqīda, sīra and history, and the linguistic sciences that underpin them all.
Every page keeps the Arabic beside its translation. You can read in Arabic only, in translation only, or with both side by side — whichever serves your study.
Why this matters
Most of these works have never been translated, and those that have are scattered, uneven, or out of print. For a student, a researcher, or simply a curious reader who does not command classical Arabic, the door to this material has been effectively closed. Opening it — even imperfectly, and always transparently — is the whole point of this project.
How the translations are made
Translations are produced by a carefully constrained AI pipeline built specifically for this material. It is given the surrounding context of each page so that meaning carries across page boundaries, and a shared glossary so that key terms are rendered consistently throughout a work rather than differently in each passage.
We have editorial tools to review and correct translations afterwards — and we will not present the work as finished when it is not. Every book carries an honest status, so you always know where its translation stands:
- Draft Translation — the book has been added to our queue but isn't being worked on yet.
- In Progress — the book and its translation are actively being worked on.
- Complete — the Arabic text and the AI German and English translations are all finished, but not yet checked by a person.
- Verified Translation — the translation has been reviewed and confirmed by a human.
A book's pages are published as soon as they're ready — always clearly marked with this status, so no one mistakes an unverified translation for a human-checked one. The Arabic original is stored as it comes from the source; at most we correct an obvious, unmistakable typographical error, and never the substance of the text.
How to use the library
You can browse by book or by author, search the whole collection in Arabic or in translation, and jump directly to any volume and page. Signed-in readers can save favourites and keep their place, so a long work can be studied over many sittings.
Reviewing, corrections & open access
Most of the library is free to read; a small number of titles require a Premium subscription, which also helps fund the translation work. If you find a mistake — a mistranslation, a garbled passage, anything — please use the feedback control on the page itself or the contact page. Reader corrections feed straight back into the texts and are among the most valuable things you can contribute.
Our commitments
We commit to three things: never to hide or alter the Arabic original; never to present a machine draft as though it were reviewed scholarship; and to keep improving the translations over time, with the help of the readers who use them.