From Palestine to Tipu Sultan: the free research atlas giving Muslim history its footnotes back
Islamic Divine System (IDS) publishes long-form, fully sourced dossiers in English and Urdu, updated as events move, for readers tired of viral claims they cannot check.
When the United Kingdom’s Palestinian mission in Hammersmith was raised to a full embassy on 5 January 2026, the footage travelled fast. Months later it is still circulating, often reposted as if it happened yesterday. It is a small example of a large problem: on the subjects that matter most to Muslim readers, the history of their own lands and causes, most of what circulates online arrives without a date, a source or any way to check it.
Islamic Divine System (IDS), a free website published in English and Urdu, has built a section designed as the opposite of that feed. It calls it the Atlas.
A dossier, not a post
The Atlas holds 15 long-form research dossiers, every one of them published in both English and Urdu. They range across lands and causes (Palestine, the 57 member states of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation), sacred history (Isa, peace be upon him, and Adam, peace be upon him), civilisation (the Mysorean ruler Tipu Sultan, the Muslim scientific heritage) and the scholarly record (every Companion named in the classical biographical dictionary Usd al-Ghaba).
The format is closer to a reference work than a blog. Each dossier opens with a fact box of dates and figures, is organised into staged sections a reader can skim or study in depth, and closes with its sources. Every Qur’anic verse cited links to that exact verse in the site’s own Qur’an explorer, and every hadith links to its collection, so a reader never has to take a quotation on trust.
Updated when the facts change
The Palestine dossier shows the approach most clearly. Rather than freezing at the moment it was written, it carries a dated “recent developments” section that is revised as events move. Its latest update, in September 2026, records that recognition of the State of Palestine stands at 157 of the 193 UN member states, unchanged since the wave of Western recognitions in September 2025. It also tracks something that received less attention: recognition turning into embassies. Palestinian missions have been raised to full embassies in Dublin and Madrid (2024), Oslo, Valletta and Lisbon (2025), London (January 2026) and Paris (March 2026), with Canberra and Ottawa due to follow.
The same update corrected an older table in the dossier that still listed Spain, Ireland, Norway and the UK as countries merely “expected” to recognise Palestine. Each figure carries its date and its source, and the page states plainly that the numbers will keep changing.
Rescuing a forgotten story
Where the Palestine dossier follows the news, the Tipu Sultan dossier recovers a history. It began as a short Urdu essay by Professor Tahir Malik asking why Pakistan remembers soldiers decorated with the Victoria Cross while the ruler of Mysore, who died defending his capital against the East India Company on 4 May 1799, passes his anniversary in silence.
IDS kept the professor’s essay at the head of the page and built a full study around it: the iron-cased Mysorean rockets that British engineers studied at Woolwich and turned into the Congreve rocket; a 1796 naval ordinance for a fleet of 40 ships; the silk industry that began with a 1786 letter to Tipu’s agent in Muscat; and an hour-by-hour account of his last day, drawn from the British army’s own published records. The dossier is illustrated with 17 public-domain and openly licensed images, from Robert Home’s watercolour of a Mysorean rocket soldier to the mechanical “Tipu’s Tiger” now in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.
It does not avoid the contested ground. A full section sets out the evidence on Tipu Sultan’s religious policy from both directions: his documented grants to Hindu temples and his letters to the Sringeri monastery, alongside the forced deportations recorded in Coorg and Malabar, together with the historians’ warning that many of the hostile figures come from officers who fought against him.
Why bilingual matters
Publishing every dossier in Urdu as well as English is a deliberate choice. Urdu is the reading language of well over a hundred million people across Pakistan, India and the diaspora, yet careful, sourced long-form history in Urdu is scarce online. The Urdu editions follow the conventions Urdu readers expect, including honorifics for past scholars and the original Arabic script for quoted texts, rather than reading as machine translations.
The wider project
The Atlas sits inside a larger free library. IDS also publishes an introduction to Islam for newcomers, a Qur’an explorer covering all 114 surahs word by word, 17 major hadith collections with graded narrations, a graded Arabic grammar course, and structured studies of the Pakistani speaker Sahil Adeem’s lectures. The site is founded and written by Abu Ibrahim, and invites readers to send corrections, which it says it will act on.
For readers who want Muslim history with its footnotes intact, and dated when the facts move, it is a resource worth bookmarking.
Website: https://islamicdivinesystem.com/atlas
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