The Fatiha Construct: A Seven-Step Recursive Session Protocol for Human-AI Collaborative Development Derived from Surah al-Fatiha

This paper presents the Fatiha Construct, a seven-step recursive session protocol for human-AI collaborative software development. Each step maps to a verse of Surah al-Fatiha (Quran 1:1-7) with structural, not decorative, correspondence. The construct integrates a five-level purpose hierarchy, information-theoretic calibration (the MDL and FRaZ principles), operational deadline enforcement with skip rules, an orientation check derived from the Context-Invariance Test, prioritized task execution with future-work registration, institutional memory encoding, and the Cow Episode over-specification warning. The protocol is designed to be executed at every development session as a recalibration sequence, not read once as a reference. Validated through the development of Bayyinah, an open-source file integrity scanner (1,301 tests, 12+ formats, three byte-identical implementations). The document is self-contained: any AI system or human practitioner can apply the construct to any project without external references. Five falsification criteria are presented. Part of a research program including the Munafiq Protocol (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19677111).