Content Licence

Risalah Content Licence (RCL) 1.0

This is the complete text of the Risalah Content Licence, version 1.0.

It applies to original content created by Risalah — editorial articles, translations, transliterations, summaries, explanatory notes and compiled metadata — and to contributions whose authors license them under it when they submit them. Items under it are marked RCL-1.0.

It does NOT apply to third-party works in the library, which keep their own licence. A public-domain book from Project Gutenberg is not covered by this document, and neither is the CC BY-SA transcription of Nawawī's Forty Hadith. A contribution built on a third-party work — a translation of a CC BY-SA source, for instance — keeps that source's licence. Each item shows its own licence.

0. Definitions

“Risalah”, “we” and “us” mean the operator of the Risalah platform.

“A contributor” means an author who licenses their own work under this licence when they submit it to Risalah.

“The rights holder” means Risalah, for content it created, and the contributor, for a work they have licensed under this licence. A contributor keeps the copyright in their own work; licensing it here does not transfer it.

“You” means any person or organisation exercising rights under this licence, including any entity you control or that controls you.

“Licensed Content” means content whose licence is recorded as RCL-1.0, whether Risalah's own or a contribution.

“A work” means one content item — one article, one supplication, one book chapter — and not the collection.

“The collection” means the Licensed Content in aggregate, and any substantial subset of it.

“At scale” means more than incidental: any reproduction of a whole work, of more than the quotation allowance in §2(2), or of more than 20 works in total, by any means.

“Machine-learning use” means using content as training, fine-tuning, evaluation, embedding, retrieval or grounding data for any automated system that produces output.

To tell what is covered, do not guess: every item carries its own terms. The app shows them on the item, and the API returns them with every single-item response as a licence code, which is authoritative. A public-domain book in the same library is not Licensed Content, and this licence does not restrict it.

1. Why this licence exists

Risalah's original content is expensive to produce. Translation, review by qualified scholars and editorial work all cost money, and that cost is what the premium tier funds. The content is free to read. Free to read is not free to take.

So this licence permits generous personal use while keeping redistribution, bulk extraction and commercial exploitation under Risalah's control.

Contributors who license their work here do so on the same terms, so a reader meets one set of rules across the library, and a contributor's work is protected by the same restrictions as Risalah's own.

It is deliberately not an open-content licence and does not claim to be one: it is revocable, and it restricts commercial use and machine-learning use. Where Risalah wants a work to be freely reusable, it will say so by applying an actual open licence to that item.

2. What you may do

Subject to §3 and §4, the rights holder grants you a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, revocable licence to:

(1) Read, study and privately keep this content.

(2) Quote it — in reviews, teaching, research, sermons, articles and social posts — with the attribution in §3. For each work you may quote whichever is greater of 200 words or 10% of the work, but never more than 500 words, so a short piece may be quoted up to 200 words even where that is more than 10% of it. A supplication or a hadith may always be quoted in full: the transmitted Arabic is not ours to restrict, and a supplication quoted in part is of no use to anyone.

(3) Share links to it freely.

(4) Print single copies for personal or classroom use, attribution intact.

(5) Recite, teach and perform it, including in a khutbah, a class or a broadcast, with spoken or on-screen credit where the format allows.

No fee is required for any of the above, and no permission request is necessary.

3. Attribution — required in all cases

Any public use of this content, including permitted quotation, must carry a visible credit. For Risalah's own content the credit is: © Risalah — reader.risalahapi.net

A contribution carries its own credit naming its author — © followed by the author's name, then “published on Risalah under the RCL 1.0” — and that exact text must be used.

Where the medium allows a link, the credit must link to the work's page on Risalah. Where an item specifies its own attribution text, that exact text must be used — the app shows it on the item.

Acceptable places for the credit are beneath or beside the quotation, in a caption, or in a visible credits line on the same screen or page. Not acceptable: a link in a site-wide footer, a collapsed list of sources, alt text, an HTML comment, or a separate page the reader has to go looking for.

Attribution may not be removed, obscured, minimised, or moved somewhere a reader would not reasonably see it. Content presented without the required attribution is used without licence.

Where an item carries a third-party obligation as well — the CC BY-SA transcription of Nawawī's Forty Hadith, for instance — both credits must be shown. Satisfying one does not discharge the other.

4. What requires written permission

The following are not granted by this licence and need a separate written agreement:

(1) Redistribution at scale — republishing whole works, or substantial portions of them, on any other website, app, channel or publication.

(2) Bulk extraction — scraping, crawling, automated downloading, database reconstruction, or any systematic copying of the collection or a meaningful part of it.

(3) Commercial use — selling, licensing, bundling, or including this content in a paid product or service, or in an advertisement-supported one.

(4) Machine-learning use — training, fine-tuning, evaluating or grounding any machine-learning model on this content, including retrieval-augmented systems. This applies whether or not the output reproduces the content.

(5) Derivative translations or adaptations offered publicly.

(6) Removing or altering attribution, licence notices, or the AI-disclosure and review-level information described in §6.

(7) Misrepresenting provenance — presenting this content as your own work, or as reviewed by a scholar when the record says otherwise.

4.1 Reservation of text and data mining rights

The rights holders expressly reserve the rights of text and data mining and of machine-learning use in the Licensed Content — Risalah for its own content, and each contributor, by licensing their work under this licence, for theirs — including for the purposes of Article 4(3) of EU Directive 2019/790 and any equivalent provision elsewhere. A contributor authorises Risalah to express that reservation on their behalf, including in the machine-readable forms below. The reservation binds others: it does not limit Risalah, which holds its own licence to each contribution under §12.

The reservation is expressed in machine-readable form, which is what makes it operative. Every API response carries TDM-Reservation and TDM-Policy headers. Both the API and the reader publish a W3C TDM Reservation Protocol policy at /.well-known/tdmrep.json. Both disallow AI crawlers by name in robots.txt. And every single-item response states the item's licence. None of them permits automated collection for machine-learning purposes.

This is not hostility to the technology — Risalah uses language models itself and says so (§6). It is that content produced and reviewed at this cost should not be absorbed without agreement.

The reservation covers Licensed Content only. The public-domain and CC BY-SA works in the same library keep their own terms; Risalah has no standing to narrow them and does not try to.

4.2 Requesting permission

Anything in §4 may be granted. Write to support@risalahapi.net saying who you are, which works you want, what you intend to do with them, and for how long. Non-commercial educational and daʿwah projects are the cases most likely to be granted at no charge, and are welcome to ask. That includes contributed works: each contributor licenses their work to Risalah in terms that let it grant these permissions itself (§12).

Silence is not consent. If you have not received a written grant, you do not have one.

5. API and third-party distribution

Programmatic access for third parties is by API key under a separate commercial licence. Keys carry their own terms, rate limits, attribution requirements and fees.

Using the public API does not grant redistribution rights. Using an undocumented, internal or another party's key, or exceeding a key's terms, ends this licence immediately.

Every single-item API response carries the item's licence, its attribution obligations, and its provenance and review level, so whoever receives it always knows the terms of what they received.

6. Disclosure obligations

Risalah records, for every item, whether a machine was involved in producing it and who has reviewed it, and shows that on the item and in every API response.

If you display this content under §2, you must not strip that disclosure. Specifically, you may not present AI-drafted material as human-authored, or unreviewed material as scholar-reviewed.

Risalah publishes this information about its own content, including where that content was AI-drafted and unreviewed, and licensees are held to the same standard.

7. Religious content

Risalah makes no claim that content marked unreviewed is religiously reliable. Content that reaches readers as published has passed the review recorded against it. Anyone seeking a ruling should consult a qualified scholar directly; nothing here substitutes for that.

Where you reuse religious content under §2, you take on the same duty of care: do not present an unreviewed translation to your own audience as though it had been verified.

8. Termination

This licence ends automatically if you breach it. On termination you must stop using the content and remove copies you have published. Your right under §2(1) — private reading of what you already hold — survives.

Reinstatement: if you cure a breach within 30 days of becoming aware of it, the licence is reinstated automatically from the date the breach was cured, for the first such breach. This is not a waiver of any remedy for the period of the breach.

Risalah may revoke or vary this licence for future content at any time. Content you have already obtained stays under the version in force when you obtained it, and a contribution stays under the version its author licensed it under.

9. No warranty

The content is provided as is, without warranty of any kind, by Risalah or by any contributor. Neither is liable for any loss arising from its use, to the fullest extent permitted by law.

Nothing in this licence excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited.

10. General

Severability: if any provision is held unenforceable, it is modified to the minimum extent needed to make it enforceable, and the rest of the licence remains in force.

No waiver: a failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.

No trademark licence: this licence grants no rights in the Risalah name, logo or other marks beyond the attribution required by §3.

Relationship to the Terms of Service: the Terms govern your use of the platform, and this licence governs your use of the content. Where they overlap on reusing content, this licence is the more specific and controls.

Versioning: this is RCL 1.0. A later version will carry a new identifier, such as RCL-1.1 or RCL-2.0, and each item states which version applies to it. Existing items are not silently moved to a new version.

11. Contact

Permission requests, API licensing, attribution questions and licence enquiries: support@risalahapi.net

Copyright and infringement claims: support@risalahapi.net, with enough detail to identify the work and the basis of the claim.

12. Contributed works

A contributor licenses their work under this licence when they submit it, and confirms they hold the rights needed to do so. They keep the copyright: licensing it here does not transfer it.

Alongside that licence to readers, a contributor grants Risalah the licence the Terms of Service describe: a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive licence to use the work however Risalah chooses, including commercially, to license it to others, and to train, fine-tune or ground machine-learning models on it. They also authorise Risalah to express the reservation in §4.1 on their behalf. Non-exclusive means the contributor stays free to publish the work anywhere else.

This licence covers only a work its author submits for publication and signs for. It does not reach anything else a person writes on Risalah — comments, questions, notes, highlights or searches.

A contributor may withdraw their work. We then stop publishing it and making new use of it, but withdrawal does not undo what was done before: anyone who obtained it under this licence keeps the rights it gave them, on the version in force when they obtained it, and a use Risalah had already made — a licence granted, a copy sold, a model trained — stands.

If a contributor deletes their account, the work stays licensed and they remain its rights holder, so its credit continues to name them. If they would rather their name came off, they can ask us to remove the work.

Where the library's texts come from

This licence covers Risalah's own content and the works contributors license under it. The library around them was assembled from named sources, and how that was done is part of what makes the collection checkable rather than merely asserted.

Every file the pipeline downloaded is recorded with its source, the request that fetched it, its size and a SHA-256 hash of its contents. Anyone auditing a text can be shown that the copy parsed is the copy received.

Every item carries a provenance record: whether it was written by a person, drafted by a model, written by a person and edited by a model, reproduced from a published work, transcribed from a text or a recording, or translated by a person or by a model — together with who reviewed it and to what level. That record is what §6 requires you to preserve.

Scans of modern printed editions are held privately for verification and are never published. A modern edition of a classical text carries its own rights even where the text itself does not, and checking a published text against one is a far narrower use than republication.

Works withdrawn from the library are archived with the reason for their withdrawal rather than deleted.

In short — not a substitute for the terms above

Free, with credit: read and study; quote each work up to 200 words or 10% of it, whichever is greater, never more than 500; quote a supplication or a hadith in full; share links; recite or teach; print single copies.

Needs written permission: republishing whole works; scraping or bulk downloading; selling or bundling commercially; training or grounding a machine-learning model, for which the rights are expressly reserved; and removing or altering the attribution or the AI disclosure.

Contributed works: the same rules for readers, with a credit naming the author. Their authors also license them to Risalah, so anything needing permission is Risalah's to grant.

Third-party API access: an API key under a commercial licence.