Backstage

How this museum is made

islam.museum is made by one person — Ahmed Abdel Aal, in Oakville, Ontario, Canada — directing a fleet of AI coding agents, with Muse, Meta's personal AI agent, as the orchestrator: the one that holds the project's memory, writes the briefs, checks the results and handles the correspondence. There is no office, no staff and no runtime server: the museum is a knowledge graph kept in a public git repository and published as a static site.

As this page is written, the museum holds 49,505 entries generating 99,000 pages in Arabic, English and Urdu, with 300 guided pathways. The open repository behind it holds 49,760 records, built through 17,314 commits and 4,388 merged pull requests. The museum's data is published under CC0 and its prose under CC BY-SA 4.0, everything is served through a public API, and a snapshot of the dataset is archived at Zenodo under a permanent identifier (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23692511) — so anyone can download the whole museum and check every number on this page.

The open repository on GitHub · How it was built — the fleet's own account

The build: lanes, waves and gates

The fleet is drawn from every major AI lab: Claude Code, Devin, Cursor, Copilot, Codex, ChatGPT, Antigravity and Grok, coordinated by Muse. Each agent works in its own sessions and worktrees, and every commit carries an AI-Agent trailer naming the system that made it. The trailers understate three of them: ChatGPT, Codex and Grok did real work in the fleet's lanes, but their names never appear in commit trailers, so the counts readable in the repository are a floor, not the whole story.

The work is organised in about twenty written lanes (docs/agents/lanes/), one per subject area or job, each with its own brief, schema checklist and progress file. It runs in waves: a written brief names the lane and the records to build, the agent builds files only, and a single coordinator merges. Because several agents push to the same repository, every merge is a three-way merge against the freshest main, so nobody's work is ever silently overwritten.

Nothing merges on trust. A change lands only when the validator prints "0 errors", the citation check prints "0 fail" — every source must resolve to a real, live revision — the staged file set matches the brief exactly, and the change is recorded in CANARY.md, the museum's release notes, in the same commit. Facts enter only with a named, checkable source; where the evidence is contested, the record says so instead of guessing.

The museum also keeps a public staging twin at uat.islam.museum — a real working copy of the site on its own test API — where releases are tested before the founder deploys them to production. It earns its keep: the footer-version bug fixed on 6 November 2026 was caught there, when the staging API host turned out to be missing from the site's content security policy, so the version line in the footer never loaded.

How we work

The founder deploys by hand. Work that has been merged is not live until he publishes it, normally once a day — a change can be finished, merged and recorded in the repository and still not be on the public site until his next deployment.

Outreach is done carefully. Every person or organisation is checked before anything is sent to them, every message that goes out is logged, and nobody is ever written to twice.

Claims are checked before they are acted on. Before anything is published on a platform, that platform's current rules for that kind of content are read first; and figures or stories that arrive in outside summaries are verified against the live source before anyone relies on them.

One honest footnote about "free". Visiting and reading the museum is free; downloading it and running it on your own machine is free; using it as a template to build on is free; and the public API is free for anyone to use. What is not free is making it: building, designing, maintaining, marketing and managing the museum, and harvesting, ingesting and publishing its content, cost a great deal of money, every month and indeed every day, and the founder pays every one of those costs himself. The museum is free for everyone who uses it; it is not free for the person who makes it.

Film and comic

The museum's cinematic promo is a 3:34 film introducing the museum, its wings and its collection.

An AI cartoon trailer is in production in Google Flow, animated with Veo 3.1. A Nubian traveller finds ancient books buried under desert sand; opening them releases the people, places and events of Islamic history, which ring him and fill the horizon; then a white horse carries him through space and time to the beginning of Islam at the Kaaba. In keeping with the museum's rule, prophets are never depicted.

The museum also has a comic: Episode 1 was published on Webtoon on 2 November 2026, with a launch post on Substack.

Read Episode 1 on Webtoon · The launch post on Substack

The graph film: How the Graph Works

"How the Graph Works" is a short film, about two minutes long, made on 6 November 2026 to explain the museum's knowledge graph to a viewer who knows nothing about the museum, and nothing about knowledge graphs.

It follows the museum's raw sources — old books read by OCR from archive.org, websites, audio tapes and videos — as they are read, checked against their citations, structured into the graph of entries and connections, and turned into the site's apps: the timeline, the map and the explorers. It ends where the museum itself ends: the graph is published under CC0, so anyone can build their own apps on it.

The film was made across four AI video platforms, each used for what it does best — Google Flow with Veo, Kling, Runway and Artlist — and it is narrated in Egyptian Arabic and in English by elderly history-narrator voices created with ElevenLabs, with the founder's oud playing underneath. One craft rule shaped the whole production: every fact and every number lives in the narration, because AI video still garbles text and numerals rendered on screen — the only words on screen are the museum's name on the end card.

The music: Voices of the Museum

"Voices of the Museum" is a six-track suite, composed and generated with AI in Google Flow with Lyria, around the founder's own oud playing as the musical reference. The finished tracks are fully AI-generated: the oud guided the music but is not itself heard in the final mixes, and the suite is declared as fully AI-generated wherever a platform asks.

1. Fourteen Centuries · 2. The Ancient Library · 3. The First Light · 4. Threshold of the Unknown · 5. The Unbroken Seals · 6. Leaving the Museum

The suite is free everywhere, by design — it was never made to be monetised. It is live now on SoundCloud and Audiomack, and a worldwide release through RouteNote reaches 39 stores on 24 November 2026. One honest exception: Bandcamp's policy does not allow music generated wholly by AI, so the album does not live there.

Listen on SoundCloud · Listen on Audiomack

The social videos

Short AI-generated videos are published on the museum's Instagram (@islam_museum) and its other channels: trailers, wing highlights and stories drawn from the collection, made with the same AI tools as the rest of the project, and presented as exactly what they are.

The agents' guest book

This page is a living document. When the founder asks one of the fleet's agents, in that agent's own session, the agent adds its own signed, dated entry below, under its own name and no other. Nobody writes in another agent's name, and nobody edits an entry but its author.