al-Maktaba al-Shamela (the Comprehensive Library)

al-Maktaba al-Shamela is a free program and website for browsing and searching Islamic and classical Arabic books, holding some eight thousand of them. Manuscript, printed and scanned books are turned into digital books that can be searched, browsed, copied and downloaded through the program or the website, and books in other text formats can be imported into it. ¹

The first release came on 1 April 2005 (Safar 1426 AH), for personal use, without a way to add books. ¹ The article says the second release (Dhu al-Hijja 1426, January 2006) made adding and removing books easy, and the third (Jumada al-Akhira 1429, June 2008) linked the text of each book to its scanned copy, so the text can be checked against its source with one click. ¹ From Rabi' al-Akhir 1433 (March 2012) the program was sponsored by the cooperative office for da'wa, guidance and community education in al-Rawda. The fourth release brought a fast search engine and automatic updates with links to the scans; Shawwal 1444 brought morphological search; and Dhu al-Qa'da 1447 a release for macOS and Linux. ¹

Its books are arranged in sections that include creed, tafsir and the Qur'anic sciences, hadith texts and commentaries, the Sira, biographies, history, fatwas, legal theory, general fiqh and the fiqh of the four schools, language and literature, and sections for the works of Ibn Taymiyya, Ibn al-Qayyim, al-Albani and Ibn Abi al-Dunya. ¹ It has an official web interface and apps for Android and iOS, and other programs and websites have been derived from it. ¹

The Riyadh daily al-Riyadh called it, on 18 January 2008, "an achievement the Arab states could not manage". ¹

The site is active at shamela.ws, and many records in the museum cite editions of books as Shamela presents them. It has articles in nine Wikipedia editions, among them Urdu, Bengali and Indonesian. ²

• Arabic Wikipedia, «المكتبة الشاملة», revision 76754458. ¹
• Wikidata Q12194101. ²