"One of the great tragedies of the contemporary Islamic world today is almost 80% of Islamic knowledge is still in manuscripts. Unread. Uncatalogued. Untranslated."
— Dr. Samir Mahmoud, Cambridge Muslim College, March 2026
Wuquf is a framework for building digital infrastructure using the historical waqf model — an Islamic endowment where revenue-generating assets fund public goods in perpetuity.
The internet has two dominant funding models: subscriptions (continuous extraction) and advertising (behavioral harvesting). Both optimize for engagement over preservation. Wuquf proposes a third: infrastructure as endowment — where the system that generates revenue also permanently funds the public good it serves.
The first wuquf project is Versed — a bilingual reading app for classical Arabic texts. The business (school licenses, personal subscriptions at versed.page) funds the public library (free texts at versed.wuquf.org).
Multi-Tier Preservation
No single storage system lasts forever. Our approach: store everything in multiple places with different failure modes, so texts survive even if individual systems fail.
Active · real-time
Supabase
Application serving layer. Word-level data, audio, search. The live reading experience.
Decades · version-controlled
GitHub
Open source, forkable. Anyone can clone the entire library. Auditable commit history.
Decades · institutional
Internet Archive
501(c)(3) nonprofit digital library. Public metadata, full-text search, Wayback Machine.
200+ years · on-chain
Arweave
Permanent storage blockchain. Economic model guarantees data availability for 200+ years. ~$0.02/book.
Decades · research
Hugging Face
Research dataset hosting. Discovery-friendly for scholars and ML researchers.
1000+ years · physical
M-Disc
Rock-like optical media rated for 1000 years. Offline validators in sealed glass vessels. Readable on standard DVD drives.
Content Integrity
Every text is SHA-256 hashed at ingestion. The hash is recorded on every archive tier. Anyone can independently verify that the text hasn't been altered by downloading from any tier and comparing hashes. No trust required.
Open Source Health Checker
An independent verification tool that checks preservation status across all tiers:
pip install versed-health
Zero dependencies. Checks Arweave transaction status, Internet Archive availability, GitHub presence, Hugging Face datasets. Returns a preservation score (0–5) per book. JSON output for automation.
Projects
Versed · Classical Arabic Reading App
Bilingual reading app for classical Islamic texts. Word-level audio highlighting, Arabic TTS with scholarly diacritization (CATT), grammar-informed prosody, English translations. OpenITI corpus of 15,000+ pre-modern texts. Fund-a-book sponsorship model with transparent cost breakdown (murabaha pricing).
Tetsuo Harada Archive · Art for Peace
Collaboration with Cesar & Annie Harada, Paris
Digital preservation of sculptor Tetsuo Harada's life work — 872,000+ items including monumental granite sculptures, 150,000 sketches, 200,000 photographs, and 500,000 text documents. Shared archival infrastructure: Arweave for permanent online storage, M-Disc offline validators in hand-blown Murano glass vessels for 1000-year physical preservation. The archive serves as a proof-of-concept for preserving any cultural heritage using the wuquf multi-tier model.
OpenITI Corpus
The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative has digitized thousands of pre-modern texts spanning nine centuries of Islamic intellectual tradition. These texts are freely available but difficult to read — they exist as raw mARkdown files in GitHub repositories, not as accessible reading experiences.
Wuquf's first project (Versed) ingests OpenITI texts and transforms them into audio-enabled, word-aligned, bilingual reading experiences — then archives the enriched versions across all preservation tiers. The original OpenITI text is always preserved alongside any enrichment.
Currently available
إحياء علوم الدين · Ihya Ulum al-Din
The Revival of the Religious Sciences. Audio-enabled Arabic with word-level highlighting.
الاقتصاد في الاعتقاد · al-Iqtisad fi'l-I'tiqad
The Economy of Belief. 471 blocks ingested from OpenITI.
تهافت الفلاسفة · Tahafut al-Falasifa
The Incoherence of the Philosophers. 1,509 blocks.
كتاب الشفاء — الإلهيات · al-Shifa (Metaphysics)
The Book of Healing, Metaphysics section. 369 blocks.
The OpenITI corpus contains 15,000+ texts. Community sponsorship funds the processing pipeline (AI enrichment, audio narration, translation, archival) for each book. Sponsor a book.
Collaborate
Wuquf's preservation infrastructure is designed to be shared. If you have cultural heritage, scholarly texts, art archives, or any knowledge that deserves to outlast its current storage, the multi-tier archival system is open.
Current collaborators
- Bilal Ghalib — Versed / wuquf.org. Classical Arabic texts, OpenITI corpus.
- Cesar & Annie Harada — Tetsuo Harada Archive. Art for peace, 872K items, M-Disc physical preservation.
The Waqf Charter — the founding document that makes the endowment irrevocable — will be published on Arweave. Once published, archived texts cannot be deleted, fully-funded content cannot be gated, and the preservation guarantee survives even if the organization does not.
Contact: bilal@versed.page