Terms of Service
The terms for the Risalah app, Studio, Premium, sponsorship and the API.
1. Who we are
Risalah is an Islamic knowledge platform: a library of books, lectures, supplications, articles and religious rulings, with prayer times, a qibla compass and related tools. These terms cover every part of it. Which of them apply to you depends on how you use it, as section 2 explains.
By creating an account or using any part of Risalah you agree to these terms. If you do not agree with them, please do not use it.
2. The parts of Risalah
The Risalah app: the Android app, and the web reader at reader.risalahapi.net. Anyone can read the library, listen to lectures and use the prayer tools without an account. An account adds bookmarks, notes and highlights, syncing between devices, and comments. Premium, a paid subscription, adds the features marked Premium in the app; section 13 covers paying for it, cancelling it and refunds.
Risalah Studio: the tool through which contributors we have approved — authors, scholars, editors and reviewers — prepare work and publish it in the library. It is open only to approved contributors, and applying involves the identity check described in section 2 of the Privacy Policy. Sections 7 and 8 set out what publishing through Studio means.
Sponsorship: organisations can sponsor placements in the app, by written agreement. Section 14 covers it.
The Risalah API: the service the app and Studio run on. It is not offered as a public developer service; section 15 covers using it from anything else.
Everything in the library that Risalah wrote itself is published under the Risalah Content Licence, which sets out how it may be reused. The Privacy Policy describes what each part of Risalah collects.
3. Your account
You must be 18 or older to create an account. Anyone can read Risalah without one.
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. What that removes, and what happens to anything you published, is set out in section 8 of the Privacy Policy.
4. 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 set out in full on the Content Licence page and governs how that content may be reused. In short: read, study and print it for personal or classroom use; quote each work with visible credit, up to 200 words or 10% of it, whichever is greater, never more than 500, and a supplication or hadith in full; and recite or teach it with 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.
Where our copy came from is recorded. For every file the pipeline downloaded we keep the source it came from, the request that fetched it, its size and a SHA-256 hash of its contents, so the copy we parsed can be shown to be the copy we were given. The downloaded files are kept in private storage and are not published.
We also hold scans of modern printed editions, privately, so a moderator can check a published text against a printed source. A classical work may be out of copyright while a modern edition of it is not — the vocalisation, apparatus, referencing and indices an editor adds are themselves scholarly work. These are used for internal verification only. They are never published and never served to readers, and each one records the rights its source declared, exactly as declared.
Material withdrawn from the library is archived with the reason for its withdrawal rather than deleted, so a later decision on a similar work can be made consistently and the record of what was removed is not itself lost.
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.
5. 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.
An AI-drafted supplication or ruling cannot be published without scholarly review, and that is enforced by the database rather than by policy alone: an attempt to publish one unreviewed 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.
6. What you write in the app
With an account you can write in the app: comments, and collections you make public with their descriptions. What you post must be yours to post. Posting it lets Risalah host and display it on the platform, and that is all: the broader licence in section 7 covers only a work you submit for publication through Studio and sign for. Risalah does not sell what readers post or license it to others, and does not use it to train machine-learning models unless the reader has separately agreed to that.
Unlike a signed work, what you post goes with your account; section 8 of the Privacy Policy explains how a comment that others replied to is kept as an empty marker so that their replies survive.
7. Publishing through Risalah Studio
Authors, scholars and editors may submit work for publication. You keep ownership of what you write. When you submit a work for publication — by signing the declaration and licence shown to you before it goes for review — you grant Risalah a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive licence to use it however Risalah chooses: to host, display, adapt, translate and distribute it, to sell it or include it in paid products, to license it to others, and to use it to train, fine-tune or ground machine-learning models, in any medium, on the platform or off it. Non-exclusive means you remain free to publish your work anywhere else.
You can withdraw content. We then stop publishing it and stop making new use of it, but withdrawal does not undo uses already made under that licence — a licence already granted to someone else, a copy already sold, or a model already trained on it.
When you submit a text you also license it to readers under the Risalah Content Licence, which lets them read, quote, recite and teach it on the terms set out there, with a credit naming you. You remain its rights holder. Anything that licence reserves from readers — commercial use, for instance — is Risalah's to grant, under the licence you give it above. A text built on someone else's work keeps that work's licence.
You must have the right to submit what you submit. Do not upload text, audio or images that belong to someone else without permission.
Before a text goes for review you are asked to declare how it was made, including whether a model was involved and which one. That declaration is shown to readers as the disclosure on the item, so it must be true.
Deleting your account does not withdraw what you have published. The work stays, shown as by "Removed account"; where you licensed it under the Risalah Content Licence you remain its copyright holder, so its licence credit continues to name you. If you want it withdrawn as well, ask us.
A work on Risalah can be credited to your account as its author only if you accept the credit when you are asked. If your account cannot answer — because it has been deactivated or suspended, or has not been signed into for ninety days — an editor checks the credit instead. Either way, you can remove a credit to yourself at any time.
8. AI tools in Risalah Studio
Studio's 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.
Administrators have one further AI-assisted tool: reading a photograph of a printed page into text so it can be compared with what the library publishes. It runs against that administrator's own provider key, it is available only to an administrator signed in with two-factor authentication, and the comparison itself is performed by Risalah rather than by a model — what the model returns is the reading of the page, and what a person judges is the difference.
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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
14. Sponsorship
Organisations may apply to sponsor placements in the app. A sponsorship is agreed in writing — what is placed, where, for how long and at what price — and nothing is bought or paid for through the app. Applicants are verified as section 2 of the Privacy Policy describes.
A sponsored placement is reviewed before it runs and is marked as sponsored wherever it appears. It is never shown beside texts whose publishers forbid advertising beside them.
15. The API and automated access
The Risalah API exists to run the Risalah app and Studio, and it is not offered as a public developer service. Reaching it from anything else — a script, a scraper or another app — needs our written agreement. Whatever is obtained through it remains under the licence of each item, and the Content Licence's limits on republishing at scale and on bulk downloading apply to it.
16. Availability and liability
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.
17. 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.
18. Contact
General enquiries: support@risalahapi.net Security reports: security@risalahapi.net