📜 isnady  _إسناد

Hadith search built around the isnad, the chain of transmission
_{Search the collections, read every chain narrator by narrator, and see how the scholars read it}

Why • Install • Quick Start • Search • Narrators • Scholars • Books • Shia Rijal • Meaning (AI) • Chains • Educational • Appearance • Data • CLI • Screenshots • Roadmap

Pre-alpha (0.1.2). Search and chains of transmission work today, on data you import in one command. Narrators, scholars, gradings and the rest are being built, in the open.

🎯 Why isnady

A hadith is two things: the text (matn) and the chain of people who passed it on (isnad). Most hadith sites let you search the text and show a grade. isnady is built the other way round: the chain comes first, because that is where the scholars of hadith did their work.

• The chain is read, not typed in. isnady reads the chain from the Arabic text itself: who narrated to whom, with which words, and whether it reaches the Prophet.
• Nothing is guessed. Where the wording cannot be read with confidence, the chain is kept whole and marked, never split wrongly. A missing link is shown as missing.
• Every fact has a source. Every hadith, text and grade records where it came from, under which licence.
• Grades are shown as the scholars gave them. Each grade keeps its scholar's name and wording; isnady does not merge them or invent its own.
• Window and command line, same engine. Everything the window does, the command line does too, with the same results.

📦 Install

Desktop application

Download isnady for your system from the latest release — everything included, the AI features too:

Put isnady on the desktop and in the applications menu with Tools → Create Desktop Shortcut (or iy shortcut): the shortcut starts isnady the way it is installed — the AppImage, the application, or the isnady-gui command of a Python install.

With Python

One line, on any system. Install isnady wherever you like — for all users, for yourself, in a virtual environment, with pipx: the same line installs it, and later updates every copy where it is, asking for administrator rights only when a copy needs them. Nothing is ever removed.

# Linux and macOS
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bayramkotan/isnady/main/install.sh | bash

# Windows (PowerShell)
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bayramkotan/isnady/main/install.ps1 | iex

Or with pip:

pip install isnady
isnady            # or the short name:  iy

Run inside a clone of this repository, the installer makes an editable (developer) install of that clone instead.

The same program answers to several names: iy to type, isnady to read, and isnady-cli kept from the first releases. Without arguments it opens the window; with arguments it is the command line. On Windows, isnady-gui opens the window without a console.

# Isolated — recommended, no system packages touched
pipx install isnady

# Into your user site — needs the override flag
pip install isnady --break-system-packages --no-cache-dir -U

Something not right?

iy update updates every copy of isnady where it is installed. iy doctor lists every copy and which one each command really starts — an older copy in the user folder can start before a newer one elsewhere, so every copy is kept at the same version. The same report is under Help → Check Installation. If an old copy starts even for iy update, run python3 -s -m isnady update (Windows: py -s -m isnady update).

Upgrading

iy update

Your data stays where it is; a newer isnady upgrades the database in place the first time it opens it.

🚀 Quick Start

isnady ships without hadith data: you choose the sources. One command brings in Sahih al-Bukhari and Sunan Abi Dawud in Arabic and Turkish from the open fawazahmed0/hadith-api collection (public domain):

iy import fawazahmed0 https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/fawazahmed0/hadith-api@1/editions.json \
   --book bukhari --book abudawud --language ara --language tur --license Unlicense

Or open the window with iy and choose File → Data Sources: every built-in collection (al-Bukhari, Muslim, Abu Dawud, al-Tirmidhi, al-Nasa'i, Ibn Maja, the Muwatta and three forty-hadith books) and the Taqrib import with one click — or Import all — in the languages you tick. You can add your own files or links there too, and move the data folder anywhere you like.

On the command line:

iy search النيات            # Arabic, with or without diacritics
iy search "niyetlere göre"   # Turkish, English, any imported language
iy chain bukhari 1           # one chain, narrator by narrator

Importing takes a minute or two; the search index and the chains are built as part of it.

To identify the narrators in those chains, add Ibn Hajar's Taqrib al-Tahdhib — 8,824 narrators with his verdict on each — from the OpenITI corpus:

iy import taqrib https://raw.githubusercontent.com/OpenITI/0875AH/master/data/0852IbnHajarCasqalani/0852IbnHajarCasqalani.TaqribTahdhib/0852IbnHajarCasqalani.TaqribTahdhib.JK000121-ara1.completed
iy narrator الزهري

🔎 Search

Results appear at once and fill in as you read; the window never waits for them.

👥 Narrators

The Narrators page lists every narrator of the imported rijal work — 8,824 from Ibn Hajar's Taqrib — searchable in Arabic or in Latin letters (Abu Hurayra, Zuhri, Ibn Umar), and filtered by tabaqa, rank and book. For each narrator: Ibn Hajar's verdict and its rank, the tabaqa and death year, the books his hadith appear in, whom he narrates from and who narrates from him in the imported chains, the compilers who narrate from him directly, and every hadith whose chain includes him. On the Isnad Chains page a click on a narrator's name opens him here.

Each narrator — and each scholar — is shown by the name he is known by (al-A'mash, Ibn 'Umar, Abu Hurayra), with his full name and every part of it laid out: name, lineage, kunya, by-name, nisbas, client of; the part he is known by is marked ★.

🎓 Hadith Scholars

The scholars whose work is in the imported data, and what the data measures of it: compilers (their collection, the teachers their chains begin with, the Companions they end with), graders (how they grade, and how far they agree with each other on the same hadith — agreement, Cohen's kappa, and a strictness index: the classical mutashaddid / mutasahil, measured), and critics of narrators (Ibn Hajar's twelve ranks). On Sunan Abi Dawud, for example, Zubair 'Ali Za'i grades most strictly (−0.21) and agrees with al-Albani on 70% of the hadith; the page also flags a pair of graders whose 98% agreement suggests the source did not keep them independent.

📚 Books

isnady is not only for searching: the Books section opens every imported work and reads it in its own order. A hadith collection reads chapter by chapter, each hadith with its card (chain, narrators, other narrations, grades) and the languages you choose; Ibn Hajar's Taqrib reads letter by letter and name by name, each entry with its narrator a click away. Find within a chapter, go to the previous or next one, and isnady remembers where you were. From any search result, In its book opens the hadith where it stands, among the hadith of its chapter.

Books are not tied to hadith collections: a work is a tree of any depth (volume, book, chapter, section) whose leaves are hadith, narrators' entries or paragraphs — so the commentaries, manuals of fiqh and other works of the scholars can be read the same way as they are added.

iy book                      # the books
iy book bukhari              # its chapters
iy book bukhari 2 --language Turkish
iy book taqrib 1

🕌 Shia Rijal

The Imami tradition's judgments on narrators, on its own terms: al-Najashi's Rijal — 1,266 authors and narrators — read along the two axes of the Imami critics, reliability (thiqa; praised — jalil, wajh, 'ayn; weak) and creed (Imami, or Waqifi, Fathi, Zaydi, 'ammi …), which together give the classical four: an Imami thiqa, a praised narrator (mamduh), a thiqa of another school (muwaththaq), a weak one. The critic's own words are always shown; a creed he does not state stays unknown; nothing is mapped onto Ibn Hajar's twelve ranks. Checked on four blind samples of entries, each round's misses corrected. The book itself reads in Books, and the Shia narrators are kept apart from the (Sunni) chains: no chain link is matched to them.

Next: al-Tusi's Rijal and Fihrist, al-'Allama al-Hilli's Khulasat al-aqwal, Ibn Dawud's Rijal, al-Kashshi's reports, and the Four Books with their chains.

🧠 Search by meaning (AI)

Choose Match → By meaning (AI) to find hadith that say the same thing in other words or in another language: komşu hakları finds the hadith on the neighbour's rights, a Turkish sentence finds its Arabic original, and إنما الأعمال بالنيات gathers the narrations of the hadith on intentions from every imported book. Each result shows how close it is in meaning (0–1), which says nothing about authenticity.

The model is learnt on your computer from the texts you imported — Arabic beside its translations is a parallel corpus, and cross-lingual latent semantic analysis learns the concepts the languages share. Nothing is downloaded and no outside model is used. Measured on al-Bukhari and Abu Dawud: for hadith the model never saw while learning, a Turkish translation finds its Arabic original first 68% of the time and among the first ten 93% of the time (chance: 0.8%). For an exact quotation the ordinary word search stays the better tool.

The same step finds the other narrations of each hadith across the imported books (takhrij): every result card says where else it is narrated — Also narrated in: Sahih al-Bukhari 5070 · 6689 · 6953 | Sunan Abi Dawud 2201 — and each number opens that hadith. Only the texts are compared, never the chains; upright numbers share the text, italic ones probably report the same event from the same Companion. In blind, hand-checked samples 34 of 35 pairs of the first kind and 18 of 20 of the second were right.

pip install "isnady[ai]"        # numpy and scipy
iy ai build                     # a few seconds; or Tools → Build AI Indexes
iy search --mode meaning "komşu hakları"
iy tahric bukhari 1             # the other narrations of a hadith

🔗 Chains of transmission

Every Arabic text is read for its chain:

Sahih al Bukhari 1
   1. حدثنا (narrated to us)  الْحُمَيْدِيُّ عَبْدُ اللَّهِ بْنُ الزُّبَيْرِ
   2. حدثنا (narrated to us)  سُفْيَانُ
   3. حدثنا (narrated to us)  يَحْيَى بْنُ سَعِيدٍ الْأَنْصَارِيُّ
   4. أخبرني (informed me)    مُحَمَّدُ بْنُ إِبْرَاهِيمَ التَّيْمِيُّ
   5. سمع (heard)            عَلْقَمَةَ بْنَ وَقَّاصٍ اللَّيْثِيَّ
   6. سمعت (I heard)          عُمَرَ بْنَ الْخَطَّابِ
      -> the Prophet

In the window, each result shows its chain as a row of names ending at the Prophet, and View chain opens it as a timeline from the book to the Prophet, with the Arabic text below: the chain in lighter ink, the text of the hadith in full ink.

👤 Who each narrator is

With Ibn Hajar's Taqrib al-Tahdhib imported, every name in a chain is matched to a narrator, and the chain shows what Ibn Hajar says of him: his verdict in his own words, its rank on Ibn Hajar's twelve-step scale, the narrator's tabaqa (generation) and his death year.

A name is linked only when the evidence leaves one person: the words of the name, the book marks (a narrator in al-Bukhari must be one Ibn Hajar marks خ), the order of generations along the chain, and the last link before the Prophet being a Companion. When several narrators remain — "Sufyan" can be al-Thawri or Ibn 'Uyayna — the chain says so and names how many, rather than choosing one. Today about half of all names are identified; in blind, hand-checked samples of the identified ones, the last fifty were all correct.

Names are kept exactly as written, with the clarifications the compilers added ("— yaʿnī Ibn Muḥammad —", "mawlā Ibn ʿAbbās"), because identifying each narrator is a separate step that comes next.

🎓 Educational by Design

isnady teaches the science it uses. Every transmission term in a chain explains itself:

The Learn section — hadith terminology, grading, jarḥ wa taʿdīl and the classical works, each shown on real hadith and real chains — is on the roadmap.

🎨 Appearance

Every script has its own reading font, size, colour and line spacing — Arabic, Latin, Cyrillic, Bengali and Tamil today, more as sources in other scripts arrive. The light and the dark theme each keep their own colours, and the interface font can be changed too. Edit → Preferences (Ctrl + ,) applies every change at once; each row has its own Default button.

The same settings from the command line:

iy config list --prefix text.arabic       # what is set, and what is changed
iy config set text.arabic.size 22
iy config set text.latin.family "Noto Serif"
iy config set colors.dark.gilt "#5A4A1E"  # matched words in the dark theme
iy config reset text.arabic               # back to the defaults

Settings live in settings.json in the isnady data folder, shared by the window and the command line.

📚 Data and licences

isnady reads open formats and keeps the source of everything:

• Supported now: the fawazahmed0/hadith-api JSON format, from a file or a URL, with or without authentication (username and password, bearer token, or API key; credentials are never stored).
• Rijal: Ibn Hajar's Taqrib al-Tahdhib in OpenITI mARkdown — each narrator's name, kunya, verdict, rank, tabaqa, death year and book marks, read by the rules Ibn Hajar sets out in his own introduction. The OpenITI release does not state its licence in the repository, so it is kept as tier C (used on your computer, never redistributed) until it is confirmed.
• Coming: CSV, SQL/SQLite, OpenITI mARkdown, REST APIs and Shamela, so any collection you have can be brought in.

Every source records a licence tier: A may be redistributed, B may be redistributed under its conditions, C may not. Sources you add yourself stay on your computer. Help → Licences lists every source in your database with its licence.

⌨️ CLI

Everything the window does also works without it — on a server, over SSH, or in a script. The command line never loads Qt.

$ iy search niyet --book abudawud --limit 1
43 hadith found in 8 ms

Sunan Abu Dawud #472
  grades: Al-Albani: Hasan; Muhammad Muhyi Al-Din Abdul Hamid: Hasan; Shuaib Al Arnaut: Daif; Zubair Ali Zai: Daif
  [Turkish] Ebu Hureyre (r.a.); Resulullah (Sallallahu aleyhi ve Sellem)'in şöyle buyurduğunu rivayet etmiştir: "Bir kimse mescid'e hangi [niyet]le gelirse nasibi ondan ibarettir"

📸 Screenshots

🗺️ Roadmap

• Narrators — the other half of the names identified through teachers and students (al-Mizzi's Tahdhib al-Kamal), the verdicts of other critics beside Ibn Hajar's, and whether each link could have met the next.
• Hadith scholars — their lives in full, and more scholars as more collections and grades are imported.
• Shia rijal — narrator verdicts from the Shia rijal works, beside the Sunni view.
• Learn — the sciences of hadith, shown on real hadith and real chains.
• More sources and formats — and adding your own from inside the window.
• Glossary — every Arabic term of hadith and the Islamic sciences explained where it appears: hover or click a term, read its meaning in the interface language.
• isnady.net — the same engine on the web.

🔁 Versions and releases

One version number on GitHub, PyPI and npm, always. A release builds the Python package and the Windows, Linux and macOS applications first; only when every build succeeds is anything published — PyPI, then the GitHub Release with every file and its checksum. What each version brought is in the CHANGELOG. The README on npm is made from this one.

🏗️ Build from Source

git clone https://github.com/bayramkotan/isnady.git
cd isnady
pip install -e .
iy

Python 3.10 or newer and PySide6. The command line alone needs no PySide6.

The desktop application of your own system: pip install ".[ai]" pyinstaller, then python packaging/build_app.py linux|windows|macos VERSION (Windows also needs Inno Setup).

📝 License

MIT for the application code. Hadith data comes from separate sources, each under its own licence, recorded with the data and listed under Help → Licences.

The Arabic and reading typeface is Amiri by Khaled Hosny, bundled under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (src/isnady/assets/fonts/OFL.txt).