What is Maktabah?
Maktabah is the Quran Gallery reading room for 8,594 classical Arabic works, shown page by page as printed, with the footnotes kept apart.
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Maktabah (المكتبة, “the library”) is where Quran Gallery publishes the classical Arabic books behind its other apps. It holds tafsir, hadith, fiqh, history and language, 8,594 works in all, and you read them page by page as they were printed. Open it at qurangallery.com/maktabah. You don’t need an account to read.
Where the books come from
Every book comes from al-Maktabah al-Shāmilah, the open digital library of Islamic texts. Each book and each page links back to the same book or page on shamela.ws. Maktabah gives the text a stable address, shows the printed page numbers, and lets you search it. It never changes the text.
Chat’s grounded answers, the MCP for developers and Maktabah all read the same library. So when a chat answer cites a page, you can open that page here and read the whole of it.
Finding a book
- Core shelves: the home page opens with the standard references of each field, oldest author first. Examples are the six books of hadith, the major commentaries and the founding works of each school of law.
- Categories: every book belongs to one of Shamela’s categories (Quranic sciences, hadith, fiqh, creed, history, language and more). A category page lists all of its books.
- Authors: every author has a page listing their works in the library, along with the year they died (AH) where it is known.
Reading a page
A book’s page shows its edition, editor and publisher, its volumes, and its table of contents. Choose Start reading or any chapter to open the text.
Each reading page shows one printed page:
- The printed volume and page appear at the top, so you can match what you read here against a physical copy.
- The author’s text and the footnotes are kept apart. Footnotes appear under their own heading, because they come from the book’s editor and are not the author’s words.
- Long pages are split into parts. Choose Continue this page to read the next part.
- Previous and next move one printed page at a time.
- Text size has small, medium and large settings, and your choice is remembered on that device.
| Term | Plain meaning |
|---|---|
| Juzʾ / volume | One volume of a multi-volume printed edition. |
| Taḥqīq | A critical edition. The editor (muḥaqqiq) compares manuscripts and adds the footnotes. |
| Ṭabʿah | A printing or edition, e.g. “ط الرسالة” (the al-Risālah edition). |
Going to a printed page
If a reference reads “vol. 3, p. 120”, open the book and use Go to a printed page. Choose the volume, type the page number and choose Go. If that page isn’t in that volume, Maktabah says so, and the reference may be to a different edition of the book.
Citing a page
Every reading page has a Cite this page box with three styles: Shamela, Short and Full. Each one has a copy button. Some books have no printed page numbers; for those, the box notes that the numbers are Shamela’s own, so you don’t cite them as the printed edition’s.
Searching
Search the text of every book from the home page, or search one book from that book’s page. Results show the book, its author and the printed page, with your words highlighted. Matches inside footnotes are labelled as footnotes. The search reads Arabic text, so type your query in Arabic.
Asking for a book to be removed
If you hold the rights to a book and want it removed, use the Request removal link at the bottom of any page. It opens the Quran Gallery feedback form. A removed book’s pages say that it was removed at the rights holder’s request.