Choosing a scope

search_library requires a scope. The raw shamela_* searches do not — but the reason the curated one insists is worth understanding before you decide to skip it.

Why a scope is required

Full-text search over this library ranks results by term statistics — roughly, how unusual your words are and how often they appear on a page. That is a reasonable default for a search engine and a bad one for a library of religious texts, because term frequency knows nothing about scholarly authority.

Two real examples, both from searching the whole library:

• التيمم (dry ablution) returns 26,098 hits, topped by a poetry anthology from 710 AH. Every fiqh manual that actually rules on the subject sits below it.
• إنما الأعمال بالنيات returns 6,815 hits in which Sahih al-Bukhari never appears at all — buried under minor collections that merely repeat the hadith more often per page.

An assistant handed those results would cite them confidently.

search_library therefore will not run without a scope. shamela_search_pages will, and there are real uses for it — but if you are asking “where is this text printed,” scope the search.

The twelve scopes

Scope	Contains	Books
hadith-primary	The eight primary collections, each pinned to a specific printing	8
tafsir-canonical	Ibn Kathir, al-Tabari, Ibn al-Jawzi and three more, read in that order	6
fiqh-hanafi	Hanafi fiqh, plus usul and general fiqh	1,034
fiqh-maliki	Maliki fiqh, plus usul and general fiqh	1,036
fiqh-shafii	Shafi’i fiqh, plus usul and general fiqh	1,037
fiqh-hanbali	Hanbali fiqh, plus usul and general fiqh	1,100
fiqh-comparative	All four schools, plus inheritance, governance and fatwa collections	1,559
aqeedah	Creed and sects	958
hadith-sciences	Hadith commentary, takhrij, and the sciences of hadith	1,957
tafsir	The whole tafsir shelf and Quranic sciences	586
seerah	Prophetic biography, history, and biographical dictionaries	972
lugha	Arabic language, lexicons, grammar and adab	1,052

The two small scopes are small on purpose

hadith-primary (8 books) and tafsir-canonical (6 books) are curated lists, not categories.

hadith-primary pins each collection to a named printing: al-Bukhari is the Sultaniyya, Muslim is the ʿAbd al-Baqi numbering, and so on. This does two jobs at once. It keeps the search focused — the full sunnah category is 1,243 books, and searching all of them surfaces minor works that merely repeat a hadith. And it makes the page number mean something: printings paginate differently, so a volume and page without a named edition is not a citation a reader can check.

tafsir-canonical exists because the underlying verse index reads books in catalogue order, which is an accident of numbering rather than a judgement. For one verse that meant a grammar-parsing work and an esoteric commentary were surfaced while Ibn Kathir and al-Tabari — both indexed for that same verse — went unread. The curated list fixes the order.

Use the broad tafsir scope (586 books) when you want breadth; use tafsir-canonical when you want the works most readers would expect to be consulted first.

Picking one

If you are asking about…	Start with
Whether a hadith exists, and where it is printed	hadith-primary
What a well-known commentator said about a verse	tafsir-canonical
A ruling within one school	fiqh-hanafi, fiqh-maliki, fiqh-shafii, fiqh-hanbali
How the schools differ on a question	fiqh-comparative
A grading, a chain, or how a hadith was received	hadith-sciences
A point of creed	aqeedah
An event, a life, or a narrator’s biography	seerah
What an Arabic word means or how it is parsed	lugha

Scope narrows which books are searched, never how the words are matched. A scope with 8 books and one with 1,957 run the same search — you get fewer, better-placed results from the small one.

What the scopes do not cover

The twelve scopes span 26 of the catalogue’s 41 categories — 7,084 of 8,594 books. The remaining 1,510 have no scope of their own and are reachable only through the raw shamela_* tools:

Not in any scope	Books
الأدب — literature and belles-lettres	406
كتب عامة — general works	357
التجويد والقراءات — tajwīd and qirāʾāt	152
الجوامع — comprehensive collections	137
فهارس الكتب والأدلة — indexes and guides	102
البلدان والرحلات — geography and travel	97
العلل والسؤلات الحديثية — hadith defects and questions	78
الأنساب — genealogy	52
البلاغة — rhetoric	44
Six smaller categories (poetry, medicine, logic, prosody, other)	85

If your question lands on one of those shelves — a qirāʾāt ruling, a narrator’s genealogy, a point of ʿilal — search_library will come back empty even though the books are there. Use shamela_search_pages with an explicit category_ids scope instead, which you can look up with shamela_list_categories.

If a scope returns nothing, that is information rather than a dead end. Try the broader neighbour — tafsir-canonical → tafsir, or one school → fiqh-comparative — and note that the narrower shelf was silent.