The full tool surface

Thirty-seven tools. One is ours; thirty-six come from the library server itself and are exposed under their own names, with their own schemas.

Your client will list all of them. This page is a map, so you know what exists and which one to reach for — every tool carries its own parameter documentation in the schema your client already received.

Start with search_library. It requires a scope and reports how it matched, which is the right default for “find me this text.” Reach for the raw shamela_* tools when you need something it cannot do. All queries must be in Arabic.

Searching

Tool	Use it when
search_library	The default. Scoped search with citations and match reporting. See its reference.
shamela_search_pages	You want the raw page search, including unscoped. Ranks by term frequency — read the warning below.
shamela_search_phrase	You need an exact consecutive phrase, or proximity matching.
shamela_search_exact	Diacritics (التشكيل) and hamza/alef forms must match exactly.
shamela_search_boolean	You need OR and NOT, not just AND.
shamela_search_titles	You are looking for a chapter or section heading, not body text.
shamela_search_hadith	You have a hadith’s wording and want the collections carrying it.
shamela_search_batch	Up to 12 scoped searches in one call, merged and deduplicated.
shamela_recon	Before searching: how much does the library hold on this topic, and on which shelves?
shamela_root_stats	How an Arabic root spreads across the library, by category and century.

shamela_search_pages will run unscoped, and usually should not. Ranking is by term frequency, which knows nothing about scholarly authority. Unscoped, التيمم returns 26,098 hits topped by a 710 AH poetry anthology, and إنما الأعمال بالنيات returns 6,815 hits in which Sahih al-Bukhari never appears. Pass a scope, or use search_library.

Reading

Tool	Use it when
shamela_get_page	You have a book_id + page_id and want the full page — body, footnotes, and all.
shamela_get_pages_range	You need up to 20 consecutive pages.
shamela_get_book_section	You want every page under one chapter heading.
shamela_get_toc	The table of contents of a book.
shamela_get_book_parts	The volumes of a multi-volume work.
shamela_get_page_services	Which verses, hadith keys and isnād markers a page carries.

Citations

Tool	Use it when
shamela_resolve_printed_page	Verifying a citation. Turn «vol. 4, p. 405» into the page ids that carry it.
shamela_resolve_work	Resolve a cited title (and author, and edition) to a catalogue entry — or refuse.
shamela_get_citation	Format a citation in one of three styles.
shamela_resolve	Disambiguate an Arabic name fragment to book or author ids.

Those first two are the reason this surface is worth having. A claim like “al-Mughni, 4/405” can be checked rather than believed: resolve the work, resolve the page, read it.

Isnād and narrators

Tool	Use it when
shamela_search_narrators	Find a narrator by name — 18,989 of them, death years 2–774 AH.
shamela_get_narrator	The full dossier: lineage, death year, ṭabaqa, gradings.
shamela_search_isnad	Search 45,220 indexed chains across ten hadith books.
shamela_get_isnad	The chain(s) printed on one page, with narrator names resolved.
shamela_get_books_for_hadith	Every collection recording the same hadith, by its shared key.

Qur’an and tafsir

Tool	Use it when
shamela_search_quran	Search the 6,236 verses (Hafs from Asim).
shamela_get_aya	Fetch verses by number, or by surah + ayah.
shamela_get_tafseer_of_aya	Which tafsir books comment on this verse.
shamela_list_tafsirs_for_aya	Per-verse tafsir coverage report.
shamela_get_tafseer_texts	The actual commentary texts for one verse, across sources, in one call.

Catalogue

Tool	Use it when
shamela_search_books	Find books by name, author, or bibliographic description.
shamela_search_authors	Find authors by name or biography.
shamela_get_book	Full metadata for one book.
shamela_get_author	Full metadata for one author, optionally with their books.
shamela_list_categories	All 41 categories with book counts.
shamela_books_by_period	Filter the catalogue by period, AND-combining constraints.
shamela_brief	The library server’s own operating brief for programmatic callers.

What is not exposed

Three of the library server’s tools are withheld, and not because they are powerful. They report on the machine the server runs on, so a remote caller would be reading facts about our infrastructure while believing they were reading facts about a library:

• shamela_list_downloaded_books — what is downloaded on the host. Use shamela_search_books, which reads the catalogue.
• shamela_health — server version and internal diagnostics.
• shamela_guide — the user guide for the Shamela desktop extension, describing an interface you do not have.

Nothing about the corpus is withheld.