omaressam1111/multi-tafseer-quran-rag

Quran Tafseer RAG Dataset

A structured Arabic dataset of Quranic tafseer collected from eight classical and modern tafseer books. The dataset contains verse-aligned tafseer passages designed for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems and Arabic NLP research.

Each record links a Quran verse with its corresponding tafseer explanation from one of the tafseer books and includes rich metadata such as surah information, tafseer source, and embedding-ready text.

The dataset was created to support building systems such as:

• —Quran question answering systems
• —Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines
• —Semantic search over tafseer literature
• —Comparative tafseer analysis across different scholars

Dataset Statistics

Tafseer Sources

The dataset includes tafseer from the following well-known books:

Dataset Structure

Each row represents a tafseer passage associated with a specific Quran verse.

Example row identifier format:

book_slug_surah_ayahStart_ayahEnd

Example:

almuyassar_1_1_1

Meaning:

• —Tafseer source: Al-Muyassar
• —Surah: 1 (Al-Fatiha)
• —Verse range: 1–1

Fields

Example Record

Below is a simplified example extracted from the dataset.

{
  "chunk_id": "almuyassar_1_1_1",
  "book_api_id": 1,
  "book_slug": "almuyassar",
  "book_name_ar": "التفسير الميسر",
  "book_name_en": "Al-Muyassar",
  "author": "مجمع الملك فهد لطباعة المصحف الشريف",
  "surah_number": 1,
  "surah_name_ar": "الفاتحة",
  "surah_name_en": "Al-Fatiha",
  "revelation_type": "مكية",
  "ayah_number_start": 1,
  "ayah_number_end": 1,
  "juz": 1,
  "ayah_text": "بِسْمِ ٱللَّهِ ٱلرَّحْمَٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ",
  "tafseer_text": "سورة الفاتحة سميت هذه السورة بالفاتحة؛ لأنه يفتتح بها القرآن العظيم...",
  "text_for_embedding": "passage: سورة الفاتحة - الآية 1\nالآية: بِسْمِ ٱللَّهِ ٱلرَّحْمَٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ\nالتفسير (التفسير الميسر): سورة الفاتحة سميت هذه السورة بالفاتحة...",
  "word_count": 73,
  "char_count": 435
}

Example Usage

You can load the dataset using the datasets library.

from datasets import load_dataset

dataset = load_dataset("omaressam1111/quran-tafseer-rag")

print(dataset["train"][0])

Intended Use

This dataset is designed for research and applications in:

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

Example pipeline:

User question
      ↓
Vector search
      ↓
Retrieve tafseer passages
      ↓
LLM generates synthesized answer

Example question:

ما تفسير آية الكرسي؟

The system retrieves tafseer explanations from multiple sources such as:

• —Tafsir Ibn Kathir
• —Tafsir Al-Tabari
• —Tafsir Al-Qurtubi

Then the LLM combines them into a single explanation.

Possible NLP Applications

This dataset can support many Arabic NLP tasks:

• —Quran question answering
• —Semantic search
• —Tafseer comparison across scholars
• —Knowledge retrieval systems
• —Topic modeling
• —Text summarization
• —Islamic knowledge graph construction

Data Collection

The tafseer passages were programmatically collected and structured into a unified dataset format. Each tafseer text was aligned with its corresponding Quran verse and enriched with additional metadata.

The dataset also includes a pre-formatted text field (`text_for_embedding`) designed to improve semantic retrieval performance for embedding-based models.

Limitations

• —Tafseer texts originate from classical sources and may contain variations in interpretation.
• —The dataset currently focuses on Arabic language tafseer.

License

This dataset is released under the CC-BY 4.0 license, allowing reuse with attribution.

Citation

If you use this dataset in research, please cite:

@dataset{quran_tafseer_rag,
  title={Quran Tafseer RAG Dataset},
  author={Omar Essameldin},
  year={2026},
  publisher={Hugging Face},
}

Author

Created by Omar Essam.

The dataset was developed as part of research and experimentation in Arabic NLP and Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems.