Content Licence
Where the texts in the Risalah library come from, and how they may be used.
Risalah Content Licence (RCL) 1.0
Applies to content created by Risalah: editorial articles, translations, transliterations, summaries, explanatory notes and compiled metadata. Items under this licence are marked RCL-1.0 in the app.
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. Each item shows its own licence.
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 is deliberately generous about personal use and study, and deliberately restrictive about redistribution, bulk extraction and commercial exploitation.
What you may do
Read, study and privately keep this content.
Quote it — up to 500 words or 10% of a work, whichever is smaller — in reviews, teaching, research, sermons, articles and social posts, with the attribution below.
Share links to it freely.
Print single copies for personal or classroom use, attribution intact.
No fee is required for any of the above.
Attribution — required in all cases
Any public use, including permitted quotation, must carry a visible credit: © Risalah — risalahapi.net
Where the medium allows a link, the attribution 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.
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.
What requires written permission
Redistribution at scale — republishing whole works, or substantial portions, on any other website, app, channel or publication.
Bulk extraction — scraping, crawling, automated downloading, database reconstruction, or any systematic copying of the collection or a meaningful part of it.
Commercial use — selling, licensing, bundling, or including this content in a paid or advertisement-supported product or service.
Machine-learning use — training, fine-tuning, evaluating or grounding any model on this content, including retrieval-augmented systems. This applies whether or not the output reproduces the content.
Derivative translations or adaptations offered publicly.
Removing or altering attribution, licence notices, or the AI-disclosure and review-level information.
Presenting this content as your own work, or as scholar-reviewed when the record says otherwise.
Disclosure obligations
Risalah records, for every item, whether a machine was involved in producing it and who has reviewed it, and displays that on the item.
If you display this content under the permissions above, you may 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. Licensees are held to the same standard.
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.
API and third-party access
Programmatic access for third parties is by API key under a separate commercial licence, with its own terms, 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.
Termination, changes and warranty
This licence ends automatically if you breach it. On termination you must stop using the content and remove copies you have published. Private reading of what you already hold survives.
Risalah may vary this licence for future content. Content you already obtained stays under the version in force when you obtained it.
The content is provided as is, without warranty of any kind, to the fullest extent permitted by law.
Permission requests
Licensing, permission and attribution enquiries: support@risalahapi.net
The full text of this licence, including clause numbering, is maintained alongside the platform documentation as RCL 1.0, first issued 27 July 2026.