Method

What the museum holds

The museum is one knowledge graph of the Islamic world, from the world of 610 to today — including the modern era, 1976 to the present, which has its own browser. Its records fall into twenty-four classes: people, places, events, buildings, objects, works, passages, concepts, practices, groups, polities, periods, journeys, inventions, awards and the sources every claim is tied to, among others. They are shelved in nine wings: Time, Place, People, Ideas, Objects, Words, Living, Today and Made. The same museum serves a child in the children's wing and a scholar checking a citation, and entries are written rich-first, with as much sourced detail as the sources allow. The live counts — and the gaps — are on the Coverage page; this page is about the rules, not the numbers.

The publication standard

An entry is published when three things are true: it cites its sources, so that every fact-stating sentence carries a citation; its sources are defined, so that every citation resolves to a source record a reader can open, never a bare name; and its provenance is recorded — what the record was built from, by whom or what, and in which run. That is the whole bar, and one defined, cited source is enough for any fact. No review, by a human or by another agent, stands between a record that meets the bar and its publication: the museum shows every reader the citations and the provenance, and leaves the judgement to them. The structured data is published CC0, the prose CC BY-SA 4.0 and the code MIT, so the museum can be checked, reused and forked.

How we choose

Coverage is gap-driven. A standing coverage programme measures what the museum lacks — whole regions, centuries, classes of people — publishes the gap map in the open, and works through it phase by phase. Gaps are shown, not hidden. The work itself runs in lanes: a written lane document fixes one subject area's scope, source rules and queue, and the builders work the queue in waves, row by row.

Nobody in a queue is skipped. Every channel on a harvest list yields a record for its author, and every entry in a reference work the museum mines is read, and becomes a record, enriches one, or is logged with the reason it was not used. Where evidence is thin the record is minimal and honest — shorter, never padded, never invented. In plain terms, what earns a place: a person with sourced historical attestation — and, for a modern public figure whose influence runs through media, a sustained public reach of roughly 100,000 Muslims for men or 50,000 for women on their own platforms, active within the last two years, with aggregator channels never counting; a place, event, object, work, idea or practice the sources tie to the story; a group or award documented in sources a reader can check; an invention documented in its primary text, a patent or specialist scholarship, with popular lists treated as leads, not evidence. Reference corpora are worked systematically: the Encyclopaedia of Islam entry by entry, the great biographical dictionaries person by person, a canon of prominent books one by one.

How we classify

Every key statement carries a claim status: scriptural, where the Qur'an states it; tradition, where it is reported in hadith, sira or the biographical literature; historical, where it is the consensus of historians, with sources; debated, where a disagreement is live and the positions are shown; or legend — popular and culturally significant, but not supported by sources. A source's own doubt markers are kept as data, so a record says when its source says "it is said" or grades a chain weak, and a conflicting account is kept as a second, debated claim — never deleted to make the record agree.

One classification is guarded above all: a person's faith. It is recorded only from attestation about the person himself, and it settles only when two independent sources name the same school or order — never from an infobox or a database value alone, and never from his office, his headship of an order, his family, his descent or his party. Where sources compete or doubt remains, the record says unknown, and the rival readings are preserved in its note. The same discipline governs the museum's frame: Sunni Islam is the museum's stated standpoint, and its research starts from Sunni sources; every other view — Shia, Ibadi, academic or any other — is welcome, is always named before it is stated, and is never stated in the museum's own voice. Contested topics carry a perspectives block: the Sunni position first, then the academic view, then any other view the topic needs, each cited and labelled, with no verdict. And the shelving rule: every entry belongs to at least one wing; an entry whose wing cannot be recognised is shelved in Ideas rather than left unshelved, and an entry that belongs to several wings shows all of them as tags.

What we do not choose

The museum refuses: any claim without a source; a sensitive classification carried by a single source, or by structured data alone; a figurative depiction of a prophet, and an AI-generated portrait of anyone; a book or copy that fails the authenticity gate — an edition that cannot be identified, a copy that cannot be validated, a source on a blocked spam or phishing list; a modern figure whose reach cannot be verified, who has long been inactive, or who merely aggregates other people's work; and, for living people, anything beyond well-sourced public facts. It also refuses three habits: it does not hide its gaps, it does not silently drop a queue entry — a skip is logged with its reason — and it does not present AI-written summaries as checked text; they are labelled as summaries, with the sources standing beside them for the reader to judge.

Ages and sensitivity

Entries carry sensitivity labels, and the labels do work. Relics and sacred objects are presented reverently and descriptively. Violence, war and persecution are included as sober history, with casualty figures sourced and given as ranges, and no graphic imagery by default. Polemical material is described and cited, never reproduced or displayed. Children get two protections: a kid mode that hides material labelled violence, mature, contested or polemical, and a children's wing written for ages four to twelve under its own stricter rulebook — reading levels by age band, no fear-based language, no graphic detail, no shaming, nothing prescriptive. Contested topics do not enter children's routes at all, and children's content is built only from material explicitly marked for it — never by watering adult pages down.

Corrections and openness

Corrections are made in the open. Every record, policy and change lives in the museum's public repository with its full history, and a reported error and its outcome are recorded there. This page is a digest: the documents themselves govern, and the main ones are linked below — the editorial policy, the scope note that states the museum's frame, the sources policy, the publication standard, and the authenticity page describing the gate for books and copies. If this page and a document ever disagree, the document wins, and the page is corrected.

Where the rules live

ہم یہ کیسے طے کرتے ہیں کہ کیا دکھانا ہے · احاطہ

Editorial policy · Scope note · Sources policy · Publication standard