Method
How fifty years of a printed Urdu monthly became a searchable archive in which every statement can be checked against the page.
The archive
Al-Risala, the monthly founded by Maulana Wahiduddin Khan in October 1976, is held here from its first issue to 2026: 559 issues, 29,071 printed pages, divided into 951,969 sentences. A few issues are not in the archive yet; they are listed below. Every sentence has a permanent identifier, so a citation always points to the same words on the same page.
What the archive holds
Everything below is counted from the archive itself. Each dot is one month.
Al-Risala in Urdu
Monthly from October 1976. A few issues of 2020 and 2021 cover two or three months, and from 2022 every issue covers two.
Al-Risala in English
Every issue from February 1984 to September-October 2002 is here, with the special issue of August-September 2021. The issues of 1985 to 1999 come from CPS’s Word files of the articles, so they have no printed page to open. No English issue after 2002 has been found yet; Spirit of Islam continued from January 2013.
Spirit of Islam
Monthly until March 2021, then every two months.
Books
All 162 English titles
Short leaflets (2 to 4 pages)
All 133 Urdu titles
Talks
The words of the talks come from computer transcripts that no one has checked yet. Talks from 2021 onward are not used.
What a question searches
When you ask a question here, or with Ask Out Loud on quran.spiritualmessage.org, the search reads all of the writing above: 291,008 passages of Al-Risala in Urdu and English, Spirit of Islam, and his English and Urdu books. Moments from his talks are shown beside the written answer. Both use the same search and the same counts.
How the text was made
- Read from the print. Two different AI readers transcribed every page from the scan, independently.
- Checked against the publisher. Where CPS International's own Word files exist, the readings were compared with them word by word. Where they do not, a third reading broke ties.
- Doubtful places listed. Every place where the readings and the Word file disagree is kept as an open question, with a cut-out of the printed line.
- Settled by AI and scholars. Three AI agents settle the clear cases only when they all agree; one in twenty of their answers is checked by a scholar. The rest are decided by scholars, one tap at a time.
- Every change kept. A correction never overwrites: it becomes a new version of the sentence, with who made it, when and why. Readers can report a mistake from any page.
Answers and articles
Questions are answered only from the archive. The search finds passages both by their words and by their meaning, in Urdu or English. The answer may use only those passages, and every sentence of it names the sentences it rests on. A second AI then checks each statement against its sources; anything it cannot confirm is removed, and the number removed is shown.
The Index
Qur'anic verses, hadith and the events of the Prophet's life were found where Al-Risala cites them in its standard forms. Topics, people, places, events and years were listed for every passage of the archive. Each entry leads to the passages themselves, dated and paged.
Limits
Corrections are still in progress, so a small share of sentences may contain reading errors; such pages are marked. Summaries and articles are written by AI from the archive and checked, but they are aids to study, not substitutes for Maulana's own words — which are always one tap away.
Cite
Al-Risala Research Archive. CPS International, 2026. Individual entries and answers give their own citation.