Skip to main content
NC State Home
Khayrallah Center Thinks Bigger With Research Facilitation Service

Fihris

Feb 18, 2026

Reading the Unreadable: AI & Early Arab-American Stories

Arabic handwriting is notoriously hard to read. Now, a project called Fihris is using custom-trained AI to decipher the complex Ruq’ah script. We spoke with Arabic for Nerds to explain how and why Fihris came to be.
The homepage of Fihris.org, reading "Explore Arab American History" with a search bar.

Feb 9, 2026

Fihris.org

The Khayrallah Center is thrilled to announce that Fihris.org — your resource for searching and translating the archive’s Arabic manuscripts — is now available for public use. Fihris revolutionizes the Arabic archive as we know it. It renders previously inaccessible documents immediately accessible from anywhere in the world by not only hosting manuscript images but also…

Oct 16, 2025

Khayrallah Center Thinks Bigger With Research Facilitation Service

Since the Khayrallah Center first released its Arab American Newspaper Database in 2020, the collection has grown to nearly 500,000 pages of historical texts. The database helps fill a digital gap in Arab American archival material, which is challenging to digitize with common optical character recognition software.