Hawzah News Agency- In an exclusive interview, Hojatoleslam Akbar Rashedinia, Deputy for Research at the Noor Center, detailed the upcoming launch of the "Comprehensive Database of Manuscripts." The platform represents the initial phase of an ambitious project to leverage artificial intelligence and modern technology to rescue a millennium of written heritage currently scattered and largely inaccessible.
5 Million Manuscripts, 90% Unpublished
Officials estimate there are roughly five million Islamic manuscripts held in collections worldwide. The staggering reality, Rashedinia noted, is that barely ten percent of these works have ever been published. "We have over a thousand years of scientific and scholarly production, yet 90% of this written heritage remains out of reach," he said. The center’s mission is to facilitate access by first identifying, then digitizing, and finally enriching these sources.
The center has spent nearly four decades cataloging modern works, having digitized 150,000 printed books and 2 million academic articles. However, the ancient manuscript tradition is the final frontier. With only 50,000 classical titles currently available in digital form, the center is now racing to bridge the gap between the scattered physical copies and the global research community.
The "Al-Fehrest" Metadata Hub
As a complement to the manuscript images, the Noor Center is set to launch "Al-Fehrest" within the next two months. Named in the tradition of the great bibliographical indexes of early Islamic scholars, this database will be the most comprehensive metadata bank for Islamic sciences. Even if the full text of a work cannot be digitized due to access or copyright issues, its existence will be logged. The system will allow researchers to discover books held in libraries from Egypt to Turkey and Yemen to Europe, forming a unified map of all surviving scientific data from the Islamic world.
AI-Powered Revival Tools
The project goes beyond simple archiving. The center is actively developing a suite of AI tools designed to accelerate the academic "correction and revival" of ancient texts. A process that traditionally takes a scholar over a year could soon be shortened to a few months. The intelligent system will assist in:
- Textual Comparison: Automating the collation of different manuscript copies.
- Word Recognition: Suggesting readings for illegible words using a vast historical lexicon, solving a problem that has baffled editors for centuries.
In the coming phases, the center aims to make these manuscripts fully searchable, linking handwritten pages directly to their printed counterparts.
Cooperation with Major Libraries
Initial agreements have been secured with several major Iranian libraries, including the University of Tehran Library, the Library of the Iranian Parliament, and negotiations are underway with the National Library. The center is also working to identify and include smaller, private collections across the country.
The first version of the database is expected to go live by the end of the first half of the current Iranian year, setting the stage for what the center calls the "intelligent revival" of Islamic heritage, turning a scattered past into a unified, searchable future for researchers worldwide.
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