The Hadith Library

Al Islam's Hadith section provides access to 33 Hadith collections with support for 5 languages (Arabic, English, Urdu, Hindi, and Bangla). The section features rich metadata, granular search and sorting, detailed preview screens with swipable navigation, and comprehensive hadith grading information.

Overview

The Hadith section is accessible from the bottom navigation bar under Tools. When you open it, you'll see a list of all available Hadith collections with detailed information about each.

Terminology

To avoid confusion, Al Islam uses specific terminology:

This terminology is used throughout the Hadith section interface for consistency.

Content

Collections Available

Al Islam currently supports 33 Hadith collections, including:

• Sahih al-Bukhari
• Sahih Muslim
• Sunan Abu Dawud
• Sunan al-Tirmidhi
• Sunan an-Nasa'i
• Sunan Ibn Majah
• Musnad Ahmad
• See more

The collection includes Sahih Sittah (the six most authentic collections) and other mainstream hadith books across different categories (Sahih, Sunan, Musnad, Jami', Siyar, etc.).

Languages Supported

Currently, Hadith collections are available in 5 languages:

• Arabic (العربية)
• English
• Urdu (اردو)
• Hindi (हिंदी)
• Bangla (বাংলা)

New languages and collections are continuously being added with each update.

Collections List View

When you open the Hadith section, you see all available collections listed with rich metadata:

Information Displayed per Collection

Each collection displays:

• Collection name — the title of the hadith book
• Compiler name — who compiled the collection
• Total hadith count — number of narrations in the collection
• Total chapters — number of chapters (Kitab)
• Available languages — which languages have been downloaded
• Compilation date — when the collection was originally compiled
• Reading progress — a progress bar showing how much you've read
• Progress percentage — percentage of the collection you've completed
• Last read date — when you last opened this collection
• Category — the type of collection (Sahih, Sunan, Musnad, Jami', Siyar, etc.)

Searching Collections

A search bar lets you find collections by name. You can:

• Search by collection name
• Search instantly as you type

Sorting Collections

Tap the Sort button to arrange collections by:

• Collection name — alphabetical order
• Arabic name — alphabetical order in Arabic
• Chapter count — number of chapters
• Total hadith count — total narrations
• Compilation date — when originally compiled
• Available translations — number of languages
• Read progress — how much you've read
• Read count — total hadith you've read from this collection
• Last read — most recently opened collections

Each sort option can be in ascending or descending order.

Default Collections

By default, Sahih al-Bukhari is provided in English and Urdu as a starter collection.

Country-specific resources may be pre-provided based on your region, but you can download any collection and language on demand.

Downloading Collections

How to Download

1. From the Collections List, tap on a collection you want to download
2. Select the language you want to download
3. The download happens instantaneously

Data Compression

All hadith data is heavily compressed for fast download and efficient storage.

Managing Downloads

You can:

• Download multiple languages for the same collection
• Delete downloaded collections if you need to free storage

To delete a collection:

1. From the Collections List, tap on a collection
2. Tap Delete (or similar option)
3. The collection and its associated data are removed

Chapters View

When you tap on a specific collection from the Collections List, you enter the Chapters view, which shows all chapters (Kitab) within that collection.

Information Displayed per Chapter

Each chapter shows:

• Chapter name — the title of the chapter
• Chapter number — position within the collection
• Starting hadith number — first hadith in the chapter
• Ending hadith number — last hadith in the chapter
• Total hadith count — number of narrations in this chapter

Changing Language

At the top of the Chapters view, there's a language button. Tap it to:

• Switch to a different language for this collection
• Chapter names and text update instantly

The language change applies to all subsequent views in this collection.

Searching Chapters

A search bar lets you find chapters by:

• Chapter name — search by title
• Chapter number — search by position
• Any field — search across available chapter metadata

Sorting Chapters

You can sort chapters by various criteria (similar to collection sorting options).

Text Customization

You can customize the text appearance of chapters using the Text Customization feature. Tap the ⋮ (More) menu and select Customize Text to adjust:

• Font size
• Line height
• Colors
• Fonts
• Other typography settings

Collection Details

Tap the ⋮ (More) menu and select Details to view:

• Book information — comprehensive information about the collection
• Metadata — details about compilation, categories, narrators, etc.

Hadiths View

When you tap on a specific chapter, you see a list of all hadith narrations in that chapter.

Hadith List Display

Each hadith in the list shows:

• Hadith number — position within the chapter
• Hadith text preview — a snippet of the narration
• Current language — the language you're viewing

Actions from the List

From the hadith list, you can:

• Bookmark — save to Collections
• Copy — copy the full hadith text
• Change language — switch to a different language translation
• Customize text — adjust typography for this view
• Preview — open the detailed preview screen

Hadith Preview Screen

Tap on any hadith to open the preview screen, which displays the hadith with detailed metadata and navigation.

Swipable Navigation

The preview screen supports swipable navigation:

• Swipe left — move to the next hadith
• Swipe right — move to the previous hadith

This lets you read through hadith sequentially without returning to the list view.

Go to Hadith Function

If you want to jump to a specific hadith number:

1. Tap the Go to Hadith button
2. Enter the hadith number
3. The screen scrolls instantly to that hadith

Main Actions

From the preview screen, you can:

• Bookmark — save this hadith to Collections
• Choose what you read it in — open the resource sheet and build your reading stack (see below)
• Copy — copy the hadith text (long-press to copy everything, including metadata)
• Customize text — adjust typography for this view
• Translate · Listen · Ask — the Intelligence row, beneath the narration
• Write a note — attach a Qalam note to this narration

The Reading Stack — Reading Several Renderings at Once

This is the largest change to the reading experience since the section was built, and it is worth reading carefully.

Previously you chose one language and read it. One translation on screen, and switching meant leaving the one you had. That is no longer how it works.

You can now put as many renderings of a narration on screen as you like, at the same time, arranged in the order you want to read them.

Building the stack

Open the resource sheet from the preview screen. It lists every rendering of this collection you have downloaded, and you tick as many as you want.

• Tick the Arabic and an English translation to read them together.
• Tick three English translations to compare how different translators handled the same wording.
• Tick Arabic, Urdu and English to read across all three at once.
• Tick nothing at all — a real and supported choice, covered below.

Each rendering you tick appears as its own card in the reading stack, one below another, each in its own typography from Text Customization.

Arranging the stack

The cards are draggable. Press and hold a card and move it up or down, and the stack keeps that order for this collection from then on.

This matters more than it sounds. A reader who wants the Arabic first and the translation beneath it, and a reader who wants the translation first with the Arabic underneath for reference, are both accommodated without either being the "default" imposed on the other.

The primary resource

With several renderings on screen, one question needs an answer: which one is authoritative?

That rendering is the primary, and you choose it explicitly. The primary is the rendering that:

• All the metadata is taken from — the grading, the reference numbers, the narrator chain, the chapter information
• Is used as the source text when something needs one specific version to work from
• Is carried through even when it is not visible on screen

Order and primacy are deliberately separate choices. Where a rendering sits in your stack is about how you like to read. Which one is primary is about which is authoritative. The app does not conflate them, and it does not force the primary to the top of the stack — it simply marks it, with a badge that appears only when more than one rendering is on screen, because with a single card the question does not arise.

So you can read an English translation first, with the Arabic beneath it, while the Arabic remains the primary that metadata comes from. Both preferences are yours and neither has to be sacrificed for the other.

Selecting nothing at all

An empty selection is a real preference, not an error state — and the app distinguishes it from never having chosen.

Someone who reads only their own AI translations may legitimately want no published rendering on screen at all. That is supported: the stack shows only your AI cards, and the primary is still carried invisibly underneath so those AI translations always have a source to work from.

When a rendering is removed

If you delete a downloaded pack that your stack refers to, your choice is not silently rewritten. The app keeps what you asked for and reconciles it against what it can actually show, so reinstalling the pack restores your arrangement rather than leaving you to rebuild it.

Per collection, not global

The stack is remembered per collection. Bukhari can be Arabic-first with two English translations while Muslim is a single Urdu rendering. Each collection keeps the arrangement you gave it.

Intelligence on Every Narration

Every narration in the app carries the Intelligence row beneath it: Translate · Listen · Ask. These require Premium and run on your own AI provider account under your own key.

A short summary follows; the complete guide is in the Intelligence documentation.

Translate

One tap renders the narration into any language you choose.

• The result appears as a scholar-style card in the reading stack, laid out exactly like a published translation, in the same per-language typography as everything else. A translation reads as a translation regardless of what produced it.
• Every translation is saved to your Library, attached to the narration it came from — so the same passage is never paid for twice.
• Repeats are instant and free, served from your device rather than the network.
• If the underlying text is later updated, the saved translation is marked out of date, with one tap to refresh it.
• Translation lanes turn a favourite combination — Urdu via DeepL, say — into a single tap from the reading itself.

Listen

The narration read aloud in a natural voice — the Arabic, or any translation shown beneath it. Voice and speed are yours, and playback continues when you leave the screen with the player following you.

Ask

A conversation about the narration in front of you, appearing inside the screen you are already reading. Follow-up questions keep their memory, and each narration keeps its own thread so moving between hadith does not mix them up.

The instructions behind Ask are written specifically for Islamic source material: stay faithful to the text, invent no rulings and no attributions, preserve honorifics, and say plainly when something is uncertain.

Verify anything consequential. AI output can be fluent and entirely fabricated, including invented chains of narration that read exactly like real ones. It is a study aid, never a religious authority. See the limits section.

AI translation slots

Beyond one-off translations, a language can be pinned to stay — an AI slot that sits in your reading stack permanently.

Set a slot to Urdu and every narration you open in that collection arrives with Urdu already beneath it, filling in as you read rather than waiting to be asked.

Slots behave as first-class members of the reading stack:

• More than one at a time — Urdu and Turkish together, each its own card.
• Automatic or manual. A slot either translates the moment you open a narration, or sits showing a Translate button until you ask. Your choice, per slot.
• Chainable. A slot can read another slot's output rather than the original — take a scholar's English rendering and produce Turkish from that, rather than from the Arabic.
• They know where they belong. A slot built from one collection's published translation appears only in that collection. One built from the narration itself works everywhere, including the Random Hadith card on the home screen, where the narration belongs to no particular book.
• They report themselves. A slot never silently disappears. If the connection behind it is deleted, switched off, left without a route, or if the rendering it reads was removed, the card says which — and each of those is repairable.

The states a slot can report are deliberately distinct, because each needs a different fix: no model assigned, connection missing, connection switched off, source rendering missing, and waiting for the slot it is chained to.

Hadith Metadata

The preview screen displays comprehensive metadata for each hadith:

Authenticity & Grading

• Authenticity grade — is it Sahih (authentic), Hasan (good), Da'if (weak), or another grade
• All applicable grades are listed

Reference Information

• Reference number — the hadith's position
• Collection reference — which collection this is from
• Progress bar — showing how many hadith you've read out of the total in this collection
• Percentage — what percentage of the collection you've completed

Chapter Information

• Chapter number — which chapter this hadith belongs to
• Chapter name — the chapter title
• Chapter position — how many chapters into the collection
• Chapter progress bar — showing progress through the chapter
• Percentage of chapters — what percentage of chapters you've completed

Position within Chapter

• Position number — which hadith in this chapter
• Total in chapter — how many hadith are in this chapter
• Progress bar — showing progress through the chapter

Titles

• Arabic title — the original Arabic title/heading

Narrator Information

• Narrator — who narrated this hadith

Collection Details

• Collection category — Sahih, Sunan, Musnad, Jami', Siyar, etc.
• Compilation date — in both Hijri (Islamic) and Gregorian calendars
• Total chapters — in the collection
• Total languages — available translations
• Last read — when you last opened this collection
• Total hadith — count in the collection

Reading Progress

• Your reading progress — how much of the collection you've read
• Reading statistics — reflects your actual reading history

Swipable Progress Bar

You can swipe the progress bar to quickly jump to a different position in the collection. Tap Go to Hadith to enter a specific number.

Random Hadith

The hadith card on the home screen has been rebuilt into a proper daily-reading engine. It is no longer a random pull from whatever you have downloaded — it is a draw you define, on a cadence you choose, that tells you what it did.

Draw settings — saying exactly what may be drawn

A Draw settings screen defines what the card may reach for. Every filter is independent and they combine, so the Urdu renderings of Bukhari and Muslim, sahih only, short, that I have not read before is a single ordinary thing to ask for.

Some deliberate details in how these behave:

• Every list leads with its way out — All books, Any language, Any grading — so a filter is never something you can enter and not leave.
• Each setting states its own answer in plain words, on a single line. An empty selection reads All books, not none.
• Counts appear as sentences beneath the setting they belong to — 1,203 hadith available — so you can see the pool shrinking as you narrow it.
• When a combination reaches nothing, the screen says so before you leave it, rather than leaving you to discover it on the home screen afterwards.

More than one set of settings

Save as many sets as you like. A long contemplative set for the evening; a short sahih one for the commute; a Ramadan set built around fasting and patience.

• The set you are editing is the first thing on the screen — named, switchable with one tap, renameable, and deletable when you are finished with it.
• There is no Save button. The screen keeps your changes as you make them, and nothing is lost by leaving.
• Changing your settings does not take the hadith away. It stays on screen for as long as your new settings still permit it, and if only the rendering changed, only the rendering changes.

Deciding when it changes

A hadith of the day now genuinely lasts the day. Rotating the phone, scrolling away, opening another screen and coming back all leave it exactly where it was.

It tells you what it did

When your settings are narrow enough that nothing matches — a translation was removed, everything short has been read, not read before has run its course — the card widens the search one careful step at a time, and says which step it took.

It gives ground in the order that costs you least:

1. How recently you saw something
2. Unread-only
3. Length
4. Gradings
5. The six-collections restriction
6. Specific renderings
7. Languages
8. The books themselves, last of all

Short sahih hadith from Bukhari surrenders shortness long before it surrenders Bukhari.

Read it in

A picker on the card answers one question only: what do I read this in?

• Languages lead, because a language decides whether a narration is readable at all.
• Languages already on the device sit at the top; those still to be downloaded sit beneath them, one tap from the same answer.
• The full translation library is one level further down, for anyone who wants an exact edition.
• Beneath them sits AI translation — a standing instruction that renders whatever is drawn into a language nothing on the shelf was ever published in, and keeps doing so as the draw moves from book to book.

Choosing a language keeps the hadith you are looking at and re-renders it, drawing a new one only if this narration genuinely does not exist that way.

Actions on the card

• Draw again — a fresh narration immediately
• Bookmark — save to Collections
• Language picker — as above
• Copy — copy the narration text
• Preview — open the full preview screen
• Translate · Listen · Ask — the same Intelligence row as every other reading surface
• Customize text — adjust typography

The actions you reach for most — a fresh draw, a bookmark, the language picker — sit in the open along the card's title rather than behind a menu.

Standing translations work here too

AI translation slots built from the narration itself appear on the card exactly as they do in the reader, filling in as each new hadith is drawn. Slots built from a specific book's published translation do not — the drawn hadith belongs to no particular book, so there is nothing for them to read from.

It remembers

Every hadith the card draws is written into your History like any other reading, so what you were given last Tuesday is still there to find.

Performance

Selection is instant regardless of how many collections you have downloaded or how narrow your filters are.

Text Customization

You can customize how hadith text appears throughout the section using the Text Customization feature. This applies to:

• Chapter listings
• Hadith previews
• Random hadith
• All other hadith views

Access it by tapping ⋮ (More) → Customize Text.

Current Status & Updates

Current state:

• 33 Hadith collections available
• 5 languages supported (Arabic, English, Urdu, Hindi, Bangla)
• Includes Sahih Sittah and other mainstream collections

Ongoing additions:

• New hadith collections are continuously being added
• New languages are regularly added
• Each app update includes improvements and additional resources

Best Practices

1. Download strategically — download collections and languages you'll actually use
2. Use search — faster than browsing if you're looking for a specific collection
3. Leverage sorting — arrange collections by your most-used criteria
4. Explore metadata — the detailed references and grading information is comprehensive
5. Use Random Hadith — great way to discover hadith across all your downloaded collections
6. Bookmark favorites — save important hadith to Collections for easy reference
7. Customize typography — adjust text appearance for comfortable, extended reading

Troubleshooting

"Collection won't download"

Possible causes:

1. Internet connection is unstable
2. Storage space is full
3. Download server is temporarily unavailable

Fix:

• Check internet connection
• Free up storage space
• Try downloading again

"Language switch didn't work"

Cause: The language you selected may not be available for this collection.

Fix:

• Check the Collections List to see which languages are available for this collection
• Download the language first if it hasn't been downloaded yet

"Random Hadith is slow"

Cause: Very large number of hadith downloaded across many collections.

Fix:

• Random selection is optimized and should be instant, but if you experience delays, try closing and reopening the app

"Hadith metadata seems incomplete"

Cause: The collection data may not have fully downloaded or may be corrupted.

Fix:

• Delete the collection and re-download it
• Ensure you have enough storage space.

"The metadata is showing the wrong translation's details"

Cause: Metadata comes from whichever rendering is set as primary, and that is a separate choice from where a rendering sits in your stack.

Fix:

• Open the resource sheet and set the rendering you consider authoritative as the primary
• The primary is marked with a badge whenever more than one rendering is on screen
• See The Reading Stack

"A rendering vanished from my stack after I deleted a pack"

Cause: Your stack still refers to it — the app keeps your choice rather than rewriting it.

Fix:

• Re-download the pack and your arrangement returns exactly as it was
• Your selection is never silently rewritten when a pack is removed

"My AI translation slot says it can't produce anything"

Cause: A slot reports precisely which link is broken, and each has a different fix.

Fix:

• No route — assign a model for translation in the Intelligence routing table
• Connection missing — the connection it named was deleted; point the slot at another
• Connection switched off — re-enable it from the Intelligence hub
• Source missing — the rendering it reads from is no longer in your stack; re-add it
• Waiting for source — it is chained to another slot that has not produced text yet
• See the Intelligence documentation

"Random Hadith keeps giving me something outside my filters"

Cause: Your filters matched nothing, so the card widened the search — and it will have told you which step it took.

Fix:

• Read the note on the card; it names the filter it relaxed
• Loosen that filter yourself, or turn off Only ones I have not read if you have exhausted the pool
• Check the availability count in Draw settings before leaving the screen

Related

• Intelligence — the full guide to Translate, Listen, Ask, slots and standing translations
• Premium — what unlocks the Intelligence features described here
• Quran — the same reading stack and Intelligence layer, applied to ayat
• Collections — where bookmarked narrations go
• Notes — Qalam — attaching your own writing to a narration
• Search — finding narrations across every collection
• History — what you have read, including every drawn hadith
• Text Customization — typography for every rendering in your stack