Boston University researchers led by anthropologist Fallou Ngom have digitised more than 52,000 pages of Arabic and Ajami manuscripts from Guinea and Senegal, with support from the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme. The two-year effort is described as the largest digital collection of its kind in the

A study published in MURAJA'AH: Journal of Islamic Studies examines how Indonesia's Perguruan Tinggi Keagamaan Islam — its Islamic religious higher education institutions — are absorbing generative AI with no governance framework in place at all. The paper identifies three structural drivers: the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which

Bodhan AI, an IIT Madras-incubated centre, has released a suite of open foundational models for Indian languages, built with NVIDIA and AI4Bharat. Four capabilities ship together: speech recognition (Indic-Transcribe), text-to-speech (Indic-Speak), machine translation (Indic-Translate) and optical character recognition (Indic-OCR). Translation covers 22 languages, speech synthesis 23, and transcription 26 Indian

On 3 September the Institute of Foundation Models, launched by Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in May 2025, released K2 Horizon: six foundation models from 0.9 billion to 375 billion parameters, all under Apache 2.0. What distinguishes the release is not the size range but what

The UK government is expected to open a consultation in September on giving religious education national-curriculum status in England for the first time -- a shift Muslim education leaders have welcomed as a fix for patchy, locally variable RE teaching. Since a 1988 law made RE compulsory but left syllabuses

Oman's Ministry of Education has opened registration for its 2026-27 literacy and adult-education programmes, with applications open through August 30 for literacy classes and October 22 for adult education. The push has already moved the national illiteracy rate to 2.5 percent, and to just 0.5 percent

The Foundations Press's FISLI programme sequences Sirah, Aqidah, Ulum al-Qur'an, hadith sciences and Mantiq in the classical order — Prophetic biography first, logic last — for Islamic schools and hifz academies across North America, restoring a pedagogical sequence that centuries of scholarship converged on and that many modern

A peer-reviewed paper published in Frontiers in Education this month proposes a governance framework for artificial intelligence in Islamic higher education built on maqasid al-shariah — the classical framework of the objectives of Islamic law — rather than importing Western AI-ethics checklists wholesale. The authors argue that university AI policy needs criteria

Inception42 and Microsoft launched Seraj on 2 July, an enterprise AI model built on GPT-4.1 and mid-trained on curated Arabic datasets covering linguistics, cultural knowledge and domain content. The stated target list is telling: government services, legal analysis, education, media, financial services — and Islamic studies, named explicitly as an

Arabic Collections Online, run by NYU Abu Dhabi with partner libraries, has digitized nearly 18,000 out-of-print Arabic volumes and made them free to read and download. Most of these books exist in a handful of library basements; commercially they are dead, which means without deliberate digitization they simply exit

The New York Public Library has received a $2.5 million grant from the Lilly Endowment to catalog, digitize, and conserve its Middle Eastern and Islamic manuscript holdings — a collection that has sat largely uncatalogued and therefore invisible to scholars and the public. The project goes beyond scanning: it funds

Projects such as OpenITI and KITAB are assembling the first large-scale, computationally analysable corpus of the premodern Arabic book tradition. The ambition is to turn a millennium of classical texts into a machine-readable substrate that scholars can search, compare and trace at scale — mapping how passages were quoted, reused and

A consortium led by the Free Library of Philadelphia, working with the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia and backed by a Mellon-funded grant, has digitised 576 Islamic manuscripts and 827 paintings spanning roughly 1000 to 1900 and released them for free public access. The scholarly value is obvious; the institutional

UNESCO has launched a year-long programme, anchored at Saint Joseph University of Beirut, to help higher-education institutions build their own capacity to teach and govern artificial intelligence rather than simply procure it ready-made. The design is the point. Instead of treating AI as a product to be bought from a