islamlab/persian-islamicate

islamlab — Persian Islamicate Prose

237 Persian works by authors who died between the 4th and the 13th Hijri century, segmented into 73,734 units and 127,089 retrieval passages — 125 million characters.

Persian is the second language of Islamicate learning, and this is the part of it that survives the same gates the Arabic corpus is held to. What survives is chiefly historiography — Bayhaqī's Tārīkh, Mīrkhwānd's Rawḍat al-ṣafā, Sharaf al-Dīn Yazdī's Ẓafar-nāma, Abū al-Faḍl's Akbar-nāma, Firishta's Tārīkh — together with the tadhkira literature of biographical notices.

work	author	d. (AH)	size
Habib Siyar	Khwandamir	942	5.8M
ʿArafāt al-ʿāšiqīn	Awhadi Balyani	1050	5.0M
Tafsir	Abu Bakr Surabadi	484	3.9M
Tārīḫ	Muhammad Qasim Firishta	1053	3.4M
Tārīḫ Bayhaqī	Abu Fadl Bayhaqi	470	2.7M
Shāh Ǧahān Nāmah	Kanbuh Lahawri	1082	2.4M
Rawdat Safa	Mir Khwand	903	2.1M
Zafar Nama	Sharaf Din Yazdi	858	1.9M
Akbar Nama	Abu Fadl Callami	1011	1.9M
Khulasat Tawarikh	Ahmad Ibrahimi Husayni	1026	1.8M
Matlac Sacdayn	Cabd Razzaq Samarqandi	887	1.8M
Haft Iqlim	Amin Ahmad Razi	1022	1.6M

What is not here, and why

This is a separate dataset rather than a ninth shelf of islamlab/islamic-sciences, for two honest reasons.

The first is metadata. OpenITI's Persian subcorpus is thinly catalogued: two thirds of it carries no genre tag at all, and a third has no death year in the identifier. The Arabic corpus files every work under a science because the sources say which one; here they do not, so no science is claimed. There are no shelves in this dataset — only works, units and passages.

The second is the gate. The same rule that keeps Ibn ʿArabī and Ibn al-Fāriḍ out of the Arabic corpus keeps out the Persian Sufi poets — ʿAṭṭār, Rūmī, Sanāʾī, Jāmī — along with the Ismaili dāʿī Nāṣir-i Khusraw, the Twelver scholars, and the secular dīwāns, which are not an Islamic science in any language. That refusal is by author name, which is a blunter instrument than the Arabic side's tag-and-collection gate. Read this dataset knowing that: it is Persian Islamicate prose that passed a name-based filter, not a corpus each of whose authors has been vetted one by one.

Columns

works carries work_id, the transliterated title and author, death_year_ah / death_year_ce, century_ah, size, and text_quality. units is one heading-delimited block per row with page_start / page_end anchors; passages re-cuts the same text to ~1,200 characters with a ready citation. Keys join across all three on work_id and unit_id.

Sources and licence

The texts come from the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative, release 2025.1.9 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), and this dataset carries the same terms. The works themselves are public domain; the gate admits nothing whose author died after 1350 AH.

Corrections and removal requests are welcome on the Community tab.