How Sahn answers
What it draws on, what it refuses to do, and why a question of Islamic law is treated differently from everything else.
What Sahn is
An assistant you can ask anything. Most questions have nothing to do with religion, and those are answered as any capable assistant would answer them, without religious framing bolted on.
Where a question touches Islam, the behaviour changes, and the rest of this page is about how.
Questions of Islamic law are not generated
This is the whole design. When a question is one of Islamic law, Sahn does not compose a ruling from what a language model happens to have absorbed. It searches its sources, puts the passages it found in front of the model, and requires the answer to come from those passages with every claim cited to a reference you can open and read.
Where the sources do not answer, it says so and stops. An answer that says "the retrieved material does not settle this" is the system working, not failing.
What it searches
The Qur'an in full, 6,236 verses, with translations served under licence from Quran.com. 36,057 narrations across 9 collections, including all six of the canonical books, from a public-domain dataset. A small library of supplications with their sources named.
Search is by meaning rather than by keyword: the question and every passage are turned into numerical form, and the closest passages are retrieved. That is why asking about "feeling hopeless" can surface a verse that never uses the word.
What it will not do
It does not issue fatwa. A ruling for your circumstances comes from a qualified scholar who knows them; nothing here substitutes for that, and no answer from Sahn should be quoted as though it were one.
It does not rank the schools. Where they differ, the difference is named and attributed rather than resolved in favour of one.
It does not give financial, legal or medical advice. The finance guide explains structures and reports disagreements; the zakat calculator applies published rules to figures you enter.
Where a message discloses distress, harm or abuse, it does not reach a language model at all. The response is written in advance, reviewed, and returned with support services for the reader's country. That path cannot be bypassed by rephrasing.
Computed, not fetched
Prayer times, the Qibla direction and Hijri dates are calculated on your device from published astronomical models and your location. No request leaves the device to produce them, which is why they work on a plane.
They are close, not authoritative. Calculation methods differ, and where your local mosque or moon-sighting authority disagrees with the figure shown, theirs governs.
Who built it, and what it is not
Sahn is an independent project, not the output of a mosque, a madhhab or an institution, and it does not speak for any of them. It is not a scholarly authority and does not present itself as one.
It is a tool for finding what the sources say and reading them yourself. If it ever makes that harder rather than easier, it has failed at the only thing it was built to do.