Grounding rules: citing classical Islamic texts with MCP

An assistant connected to the library can still write a bad answer. These rules are the contract that keeps an answer checkable. The server also publishes them to your client as the resource qurangallery://grounding-rules, and its instructions point the model at the same behaviour.

The rules

1. Quote only what a tool returned. Attribute a text to a book only if it came back in a tool result. Do not complete a quotation, an isnād or a wording from general knowledge.
2. Keep the main text and the footnote apart. Every passage says where the words were found in matchedIn: body, footnote, both or unknown. The body is the author’s text (the matn / المتن). A footnote is the editor’s or commentator’s voice. Never present a footnote as the author’s words (Reading a result).
3. Printed page is not Shamela numbering. printedPage is the volume and page as that printing paginates it, such as 1/ 6. When the library numbers a book automatically, the page is a Shamela page number, not the printed one, and must be labelled that way. Cite the edition with the page: the same page number means different text in a different edition.
4. Never invent publication data. edition, editor and publisher appear on a passage only when the library has them. When they are missing, say they are not available. Do not fill them from memory.
5. Say how the match was made. relaxedToTokens: true means the exact phrase was not found, only its words. That supports “these words appear on this page”, not “this wording is printed here”.
6. A miss is scoped. “Not found in these eight collections” is a finding. “Does not exist” is not one the tools can support.
7. No grading and no rulings. The server never grades a hadith as ṣaḥīḥ, ḥasan or ḍaʿīf, and gives no fatwā. If a source quotes a grading, report it as that source’s statement, with the book and page.
8. Credit the source. Every passage carries a sourceUrl of the form https://shamela.ws/book/{bookId}/{pageId}. Link it, and credit shamela.ws as the origin of the text.

What a passage carries

Field	Use
book, author, authorDied	Name the work and its author; authorDied is in AH.
printedPage	The printed volume and page.
edition, editor, publisher	Only when present. Never guess them.
matchedIn, matchQuality	Main text vs footnote; exact vs loose match.
bookId, pageId	The Shamela identifiers of the page.
sourceUrl	The page on shamela.ws, to verify the quotation.
arabic	The passage, verbatim. Quote it as it stands.

A good citation reads: al-Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, ṭ. al-Sulṭāniyya, 1/6 (main text), shamela.ws link. A bad one names a book and a hadith number the model remembered.

Checking an answer

Take the sourceUrl or the bookId and pageId, open the page, and compare. Your assistant can do it for you with shamela_get_page, or turn a printed citation back into a page with shamela_resolve_printed_page (the full tool surface).

What the server does not guarantee

It guarantees that a passage, book and page are real and were retrieved. It does not guarantee that the sentence your assistant builds around them is a fair reading. See What the MCP server does.