Arabic poetry is one of the deepest literary traditions in the world - and one of the hardest to build software for. The text itself carries layers of meaning that don't exist in most other languages: diacritical marks that change a word's grammar and meaning, prosodic structures (meters, feet, rhyme) that define a poem's form, and editorial conventions for arranging poems into diwans and anthologies that have developed over more than a thousand years.
Off-the-shelf content platforms treat Arabic as a Unicode block. They render the script and stop there. What this client needed was different: a system that understood the literary domain - that could index by meter, search across diacritical variants, present a poem with the visual integrity of a printed diwan, and let a scholar move between a verse, its author's biography, the meter it sits in, and the dictionaries that gloss its vocabulary.
And it had to work for everyone - not only specialists. A student looking up a half-remembered line, a teacher building a lesson, a researcher running a corpus query, and a casual reader listening to a poem aloud all needed to find what they were looking for, on whatever device they were holding.