Editorial policy

How we source

Silsila publishes true stories from Islamic history — prophets, companions, scholars, and the events the tradition actually records. That only means something if you can see where each claim came from. This page is the whole process, including the parts most sites leave out.

Who writes it

Silsila Stories is an independent publisher, not an institution and not a school of law. Articles carry the byline Silsila Research Desk because they are assembled by one small team working to the process below, rather than signed by a scholar. We are not issuing fatwa and we do not adjudicate between madhabs. Where the tradition itself disagrees, the article says so instead of picking a side quietly.

If a question needs a ruling rather than a history, take it to a qualified scholar. What we can honestly offer is the record: what happened, who reported it, and how strong the report is.

Where the material comes from

Every article is built from named primary and classical sources, not from memory and not from other websites. In practice that means:

  • Qur'an — text, translation and tafsir are pulled from a verified Qur'an data service backed by quran.com for every single citation. Nothing Qur'anic is ever written from recall, including in translation.
  • Hadith — quoted with its collection and number, and verified against the published collection rather than a secondary quotation.
  • History and sirah — classical works, chiefly Ibn Kathir's Al-Bidaya wa'l-Nihaya, Ibn Hisham's Sirah, and the tafsir literature, read in the original edition rather than in summary.

Each published article lists its sources on the page itself — open the Sources panel on any article and you will see the exact works and numbers the piece was built from.

How claims are graded

Every article carries a grade describing the strength of the material behind it. The library as it stands today:

GradeArticlesWhat it means
Sahih 70 Built on reports graded rigorously authentic in the collections cited.
Sourced 8 Every claim is traced to a named classical source, without a single hadith grading standing behind the whole piece.

Where a report is weak, disputed, or famous but unreliable, the article says so in the body rather than burying it. A story being well known is not evidence that it happened.

Where AI sits in this

We use AI assistance in producing this site, and we would rather tell you plainly than have you guess. Research, drafting and translation are done with AI tools under human direction. What AI is not allowed to do here is supply the facts: citations are fetched from the verified sources named above and checked against them, never generated from a model's memory, because a fluent invented reference is the exact failure mode these tools have. Every article passes a human review gate before it is published, and cover images are generated art, not photographs of historical events.

Urdu versions are translated from the reviewed English article and carry the same sources.

When we get it wrong

We do, and the fix is public. Corrections to anything already published are logged with their date on the corrections page, rather than edited away silently. If you find an error — a citation, a wording, a fact — tell us through the Join page and we will check it against the sources and correct it if you are right.

Why the site exists

Because this history is usually delivered either as a dry reference or as a story with the sources stripped out, and both lose something. Silsila tries to tell it as the gripping thing it is while showing its working. There are 78 articles and a growing library of long-form stories on that basis.