We present Fanar 2.0, the second generation of Qatar's Arabic-centric Generative AI platform. Sovereignty is a first-class design principle: every component, from data pipelines to deployment infrastructure, was designed and operated entirely at QCRI, Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Fanar 2.0 is a story of resource-constrained excellence: the effort ran on 256 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, with Arabic having only ~0.5% of web data despite 400 million native speakers. Fanar 2.0 adopts a disciplined strategy of data quality over quantity, targeted continual pre-training, and model merging to achieve substantial gains within these constraints. At the core is Fanar-27B, continually pre-trained from a Gemma-3-27B backbone on a curated corpus of 120 billion high-quality tokens across three data recipes. Despite using 8x fewer pre-training tokens than Fanar 1.0, it delivers substantial benchmark improvements: Arabic knowledge (+9.1 pts), language (+7.3 pts), dialects (+3.5 pts), and English capability (+7.6 pts). Beyond the core LLM, Fanar 2.0 introduces a rich stack of new capabilities. FanarGuard is a state-of-the-art 4B bilingual moderation filter for Arabic safety and cultural alignment. The speech family Aura gains a long-form ASR model for hours-long audio. Oryx vision family adds Arabic-aware image and video understanding alongside culturally grounded image generation. An agentic tool-calling framework enables multi-step workflows. Fanar-Sadiq utilizes a multi-agent architecture for Islamic content. Fanar-Diwan provides classical Arabic poetry generation. FanarShaheen delivers LLM-powered bilingual translation. A redesigned multi-layer orchestrator coordinates all components through intent-aware routing and defense-in-depth safety validation. Taken together, Fanar 2.0 demonstrates that sovereign, resource-constrained AI development can produce systems competitive with those built at far greater scale.
Large language models (LLMs) can answer religious knowledge queries fluently, yet they often hallucinate and misattribute sources, which is especially consequential in Islamic settings where users expect grounding in canonical texts (Qur'an and Hadith) and jurisprudential (fiqh) nuance. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves grounding, however, a single retrieve-then-generate pipeline is insufficient for diverse Islamic queries, including verbatim scripture, citation-grounded guidance, and rule-constrained computations such as zakat and inheritance. To address these challenges, we present Fanar-Sadiq, a bilingual Arabic-English Islamic QA system built on a multi-agent, tool-augmented architecture. It is a core component of the Fanar AI platform. Fanar-Sadiq routes Islamic queries to specialized modules within an agentic tool architecture. It supports intent-aware routing, retrieval-grounded fiqh answers with normalized citations and verification traces, exact verse lookup with quotation validation, and deterministic Sunni zakat and inheritance calculators with madhhab-sensitive branching. We evaluate the end-to-end system on public Islamic QA benchmarks and show strong effectiveness and efficiency. It is publicly accessible through an API and Web application and has received over 1.9M accesses in less than a year (https://api.fanar.qa/docs).
Ummar Abbas, Mourad Ouzzani, Mohamed Y. Eltabakh +7
We present Muslim, a production Arabic voice AI platform serving grounded, sourced Islamic knowledge to real users. Beyond a real-time voice pipeline (NeMo Arabic ASR, an OpenAI-compatible LLM endpoint, self-hosted TTS) and a deterministic multi-source retrieval layer routed across six Model Context Protocol servers, we report three things a research prototype typically lacks. First, a released family of fine-tuned Arabic Islamic model artifacts: an efficient tool-routing LLM (Muslim-6B-PRO, 5.94B parameters) and a Modern Standard Arabic TTS model (Fasih-TTS-V1) that ranks 5th of 17 overall and 2nd of 11 open-weight systems on the community-voted Arabic TTS Arena for MSA. Second, an account and metering layer - a free per-account turn allowance, capacity-aware refusal, and email verification deferred to the point it actually matters - that turns an open demo into an operable, abuse-resistant product. Third, a three-layer observability stack (liveness, error reporting, product analytics) built specifically around the system's characteristic failure mode: a GPU-bound agent host going silent while the web tier keeps serving normally. We report real, measured latency and accuracy figures (98.4% recitation-validation accuracy on 124 cases; end-to-end voice latency of 0.9-1.7s) and discuss the concrete engineering trade-offs and limitations of running an Islamic-knowledge voice product in production.
Open Arabic large language models split into two classes: sub-1B multilingual models that treat Arabic as an afterthought (Qwen2.5-0.5B, Falcon-H1-0.5B), and 7B-70B Arabic-specialized models that require a server to run (Jais, AceGPT, ALLaM, SILMA). The one published attempt at a sub-2B Arabic-specialized model, Kuwain-1.5B, never released its weights. We present RightNow-Arabic-0.5B-Turbo, a 518M-parameter Arabic-specialized decoder LLM built on Qwen2.5-0.5B. The pipeline adds 27,032 Arabic tokens via mean-subtoken initialization, continues pretraining on 504M Arabic tokens on 8xH100 with FSDP, FlashAttention varlen packing, and Liger fused kernels, then applies supervised fine-tuning on 129,116 Arabic instruction pairs with response-only loss masking, direct preference optimization on 6,750 Arabic preference pairs, and weight soup merging across three checkpoints. On three lm-evaluation-harness Arabic benchmarks (COPA-ar, Arabic HellaSwag, ArabicMMLU) the merged model reaches 35.9% mean accuracy, beats every same-class open model, ties Falcon-H1-1.5B on COPA-ar (58.4%) at one-third the size, and recovers 67% of SILMA-9B's mean at 1/18 the parameters. The edge build quantizes to 398 MB (q4_k_m) and delivers 635 tokens/s at batch size 1 on a single H100 via llama.cpp. All code (5,555 lines across 25 scripts), weights (bf16, int8, and four GGUF quantizations), and benchmark scripts are released at https://huggingface.co/RightNowAI/RightNow-Arabic-0.5B-Turbo.