Terms of Service
The terms that govern your use of the Risalah apps and API.
1. Who we are
Risalah is an Islamic knowledge platform offering a library of books, lectures, supplications, articles and religious rulings, together with prayer times, a qibla compass and related tools. These terms govern your use of the Risalah applications and API.
By creating an account or using the service you agree to these terms. If you do not agree with them, please do not use the service.
2. Your account
You must provide accurate registration details and keep your password secure. You are responsible for activity that happens under your account. Tell us at support@risalahapi.net if you believe your account has been accessed by someone else.
You can see every active session and revoke any of them from Settings. Accounts with administrative privileges are required to have two-factor authentication enabled.
You may delete your account at any time from Settings. Deleting your account removes your profile and personal data as described in the Privacy Policy.
3. Library content and licensing
The library holds material under three different arrangements, and the terms differ by item. Every item records its own licence, which the app displays alongside it.
Public-domain works, from sources such as Project Gutenberg, and narration from LibriVox. Public-domain status is jurisdictional: a work may be out of copyright in one country and not another, and the record for each item states where the claim holds.
Openly licensed works, which carry their own obligations. Where a licence requires attribution or share-alike — as the CC BY-SA transcription of Nawawī's Forty Hadith does — those obligations pass to you when you reuse the material.
Risalah's own content — editorial articles, translations, transliterations, summaries and explanatory notes — under the Risalah Content Licence (RCL 1.0), which is reproduced in full in the Content Licence page. In short: read, study, print for personal or classroom use, and quote up to 500 words or 10% of a work with visible credit. Republishing at scale, scraping or bulk downloading, commercial use, and using the content to train or ground a machine-learning model all require written permission.
If you believe material on Risalah infringes your rights, write to support@risalahapi.net with enough detail to identify the work and your claim, and we will investigate and remove it where the claim is substantiated.
4. AI disclosure
Some content on Risalah was drafted by a language model. Where that is the case we say so on the item itself, along with whether a person has reviewed it. This is recorded in the database rather than left to editorial memory, and the record is served to every client.
We currently disclose that the supplication translations, transliterations and benefit notes, the editorial articles, and the Arabic and Urdu titles and summaries of the library books were AI-drafted. The Arabic of the supplications is the transmitted wording, unchanged, and the book bodies are human-authored published translations.
AI-drafted religious content cannot be published without scholarly review. That is enforced by the database, not by policy alone: an attempt to publish an unreviewed AI-drafted supplication or ruling is rejected.
If you reuse Risalah content under the permissions above, you must not strip this disclosure — presenting AI-drafted material as human-authored, or unreviewed material as scholar-reviewed, ends your licence.
5. Content you contribute
Authors, scholars and editors may submit content. You keep ownership of what you write. By submitting it you grant Risalah a non-exclusive, worldwide licence to host, display, translate and distribute it through the platform, which we need in order to publish it at all. You can withdraw content, and withdrawal ends that licence for future distribution.
You must have the right to submit what you submit. Do not upload text, audio or images that belong to someone else without permission.
Comments, collections and other contributions from readers are subject to the same rules.
6. Review of religious content
Religious material is checked by a qualified reviewer before it is published. Nothing reaches readers automatically: submissions move through draft, review and approval, and the platform serves only published content. Arabic text, translations and attributions are verified rather than trusted because a tool produced them.
This is a deliberate editorial policy, not a technical limitation, and it applies to every future source of religious content.
7. Religious rulings are not individual guidance
Fatawa published on Risalah are the considered opinion of the scholar who issued them, given in a general context. They are not a substitute for guidance from a qualified scholar who knows your specific circumstances. Scholars may differ, and rulings may vary by madhab.
Risalah does not adopt or endorse a single madhab, and publishing a ruling is not an assertion that it is the only defensible position.
8. Prayer times, qibla and location tools
Prayer times and qibla direction are calculated from your location using standard astronomical methods and your chosen calculation parameters. They are estimates. Local conditions, the horizon, the convention your community follows, and your device's own location accuracy all affect the result.
Where certainty matters, follow your local masjid. Do not rely on the app alone for a decision that depends on exact timing.
Nearby-mosque data is served from Risalah's own geographic database. Results derived from OpenStreetMap carry the required attribution and are displayed with it.
The Hijri date shown is calculated from the Umm al-Qura calendar and then adjusted for the region you are in, because the date a community keeps is set by local moon sighting rather than by calculation. That adjustment is a best effort and can be corrected by hand in the app. For Ramadan, the two Eids and Hajj, follow your local moon-sighting authority.
9. Acceptable use
Do not use Risalah to post unlawful, abusive, defamatory or deliberately misleading material; to misrepresent religious scholarship or attribute statements to scholars who did not make them; to harass other users; to attempt to gain unauthorised access to any part of the service; or to interfere with its operation, including through automated scraping or excessive automated requests.
We may remove content, suspend an account, or restrict access where these rules are broken. Where we suspend an account we will say why, unless saying so would compromise an investigation or another person's safety.
11. Bring-your-own-key AI features
AI-assisted features run against an API key that you supply for your own provider account. Your key is encrypted before storage and is used only to carry out the requests you make. You are responsible for the costs your provider charges, and your use of that provider is governed by its own terms.
Output produced by an AI model is a draft. It is not reviewed religious content and must not be published as such without human review.
12. Availability and changes
We aim to keep Risalah available and accurate, but we do not guarantee uninterrupted service. Features may change, and content may be corrected, updated or withdrawn — including when a review finds an error in a translation or an attribution.
The service is provided as is, to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.
13. Changes to these terms
We will update this page when these terms change and revise the date at the top. Where a change materially affects your rights we will give notice in the app or by email before it takes effect.
14. Contact
General enquiries: support@risalahapi.net Security reports: security@risalahapi.net