The narrator entry

A narrator’s entry is their biography as it appears in one of the library’s works. It is the heart of Rijāl: the full text of what a classical scholar wrote about that person, shown exactly as it stands in the book, with the original printed pages right beside it.

You reach an entry by searching a work or by browsing one of its volumes and selecting a name.

The entry heading

At the top of every entry you see:

• The narrator’s name in Arabic.
• A link back to the work the entry belongs to.
• The volume the entry sits in.
• The page range the biography spans in the printed book (for example, p. 142–145). Selecting it opens the page reader at that spot.

These let you place the narrator in context at a glance — which book records them, and where.

The biography text

Below the heading is the biography itself — the entry’s full Arabic text, presented in a comfortable right-to-left reading layout. The text is shown verbatim, exactly as recorded, without editing or paraphrase, so what you read is the scholar’s own words.

If a particular entry’s text has not been prepared yet, the page says so plainly with a short note. You can still read that narrator from the original page scans (below).

Original page scans

Each entry can show the original printed pages the biography appears on. Look for the Original page scans panel beneath the text — it lists how many pages there are. Select it to expand a thumbnail grid of those pages.

From there you can:

• Open any page full-screen. Select a thumbnail to open it in a large viewer.
• Move between pages with the on-screen arrows, or with your keyboard’s left and right arrow keys.
• See where you are — the viewer shows the page number and your position, such as p. 143 · 2/4.
• Close the viewer to return to the entry.

This lets you check the biography against the source itself — useful when you want to read the exact printed wording or see the page as it was typeset.

Open the full scan reader

Beneath the scans panel is a link to open the scanned-page reader at this entry. It takes you into the work’s page-by-page reader, opened to the entry’s first page, where you can read the original scan and its text side by side and keep paging through the book. See Reading a work for what that reader offers.

Moving between narrators

At the foot of the entry are Next entry and Previous entry links, each showing the neighbouring narrator’s name. They let you read straight through a book one biography after another, without returning to the list each time.

Want to keep a list of narrators to return to? Saving is coming soon — see Saving & accounts for what an account adds and what’s still being built.