Terms of use

Sijill is a place to study: to read, take notes, memorise and revise, follow a study path, learn in a class with a teacher or in a study group with friends, find courses on the board, and follow the pages and events of teachers and institutes. Studying on Sijill is free. Teachers and institutes use it to run their classes, their student lists, their fees and their pages. Using it means agreeing to these terms.

Sijill is a tool. It does not give religious rulings, and nothing in it is a fatwa. Knowledge is taken from qualified teachers; what a teacher says in a class is their responsibility, not Sijill's.

One account per person. Keep your password to yourself and keep your recovery code somewhere safe: Sijill sends no email, so the recovery code is how you get back in if you forget your password.

Where the site offers it, you can also sign in with Google. Then Google confirms who you are, so keeping your Google account safe keeps your Sijill account safe too. If you have no Sijill account yet, continuing with Google makes one for you, and doing so means you agree to these terms. Signing in with Apple is coming soon.

You are responsible for what is done with your account.

What you write and upload stays yours. You give Sijill only the permission it needs to store it and show it to the people you choose to share it with.

Upload only what you have the right to share. A book you import for yourself stays private to you; a book you share with a class must be yours to share, out of copyright, or shared with the rights holder's permission. Record which one when you add it. A recording you upload to a class, or send to your teacher, must be your own voice, or shared with the speaker's permission. A picture you post on a page must be yours to share and must follow the image rule on the posting rules page.

Do not use Sijill to harass anyone, to spread falsehood, to post anything unlawful, or to attack the site or its users.

The books in Sijill's library are copied from the sources named with each book. Readers are checking them now, and until that work is done mistakes are possible. If you find one, please report it, and it will be corrected.

A recitation of a library text is published only with the reciter's written permission, and their name and that permission are shown with the recording.

You may print a text for your own study and teaching. Where a book's source does not allow its text to be hosted, there is nothing to print.

For anything that matters, check the text against a trusted printed edition and ask a teacher.

Every book and every dictionary in Sijill names the source it was copied from and the licence it is shared under. Sijill does not claim to own these texts. It keeps to each licence, and the people who made them available are thanked by name.

The word facts for the Quran come from the Quranic Arabic Corpus, used under its own terms (GPL): its file is kept unchanged, and wherever its facts appear they credit it with a link to corpus.quran.com. The Quran text inside it comes from Tanzil and is also kept unchanged.

The classical Arabic dictionaries come from the OpenITI project under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence, which allows them to be shared with credit for purposes that are not commercial. Sijill will have the permission it needs before it charges for anything that includes them. Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon is shared under CC BY-SA 3.0, with credit to Perseus and Alpheios, and the word analysis of CAMeL Tools is used under the GPL.

Some books are shown as coming soon because Sijill is still waiting for the permission of the people who hold their rights. They appear only once that permission is given.

You may use what you read for your own study and teaching. If you want to copy a text out of Sijill to publish it elsewhere, its own licence applies, so check the source named with it first.

Saying “I teach” opens the teaching tools. It is your own statement, not a check by Sijill. Your teaching profile, travel area included, must be true.

A teacher who uses Sijill is responsible for what they teach, for the quizzes they set, and for any certificate or ijaza they issue. Sijill records who issued each one and when, and shows whether that teacher has been verified by the site's administrators. Sijill itself does not grant ijazas and does not vouch for a chain of narration.

Marks, feedback, the checking of i'rab and every certificate are the teacher's own word. Sijill records them and shows who gave them, but it does not stand behind them, even where it adds up the answers to a quiz the teacher wrote. A memorisation certificate says that the named teacher heard the student recite the part written on it; that is the teacher's statement, not Sijill's.

Verification means an administrator has seen evidence about the teacher. It is not an endorsement of every view they hold.

The administrators of an institute are responsible for who they add to it, for its cohorts, and for what they post in its name. Its owner decides who holds which staff role, and the institute is responsible for what its staff do in its name.

Teachers and institutes are responsible for their pages, posts and events; for answering the enquiries they receive, and using the contact details in them only to reply about that enquiry; and for the fees they set, the payments they confirm and the refunds they give. A private lesson is agreed between the student and the teacher, and only the teacher confirms it.

Messages are for study: the class, the lesson, a student's progress and the arrangements around them. Write with the same truthfulness, courtesy and haya that the posting rules ask for, and remember that a parent may be reading.

A teacher may write to their own students and answer their parents. A teacher may not use messages to sell anything, to ask a student for money outside the fees shown in Sijill, or to ask a student to move the conversation somewhere their parent cannot see.

A teacher may not copy, forward, publish or keep a student's messages or recordings outside Sijill, and may use them only to teach that student. A recording a student sends is for the teacher they chose to listen to and comment on. The teacher cannot download it, may not record it another way, and the student can delete it at any time.

A teacher's own recordings for a class must be the teacher's own voice, or shared with the speaker's permission. They are for that class only, and a student may not pass them on without the teacher's permission.

Anyone who receives a message that troubles them may report it or block the sender. Messages that break these terms may be removed, and the sender's messages may be paused for 7, 30 or 90 days. Sijill never uses anyone's messages or voice to train AI.

Verified teachers and the administrators of an institute can post a course or a dawra. A site administrator checks each listing before anyone else sees it, may turn it down or close it, and sees it again whenever an approved listing is edited.

A listing must be true: its dates, place, how it is taught, access for women and price as written. Answer the people who apply, in the app.

Sijill takes no money for the board and is not a party to anything agreed between an organiser and the people who apply. Approval means a listing was checked against these terms; it is not a promise about the course.

Pages belong to teachers and institutes. Posts and comments follow the posting rules, drawn from our Code: speak the truth, haya in words and images, honour women in speech, mercy and adab when you disagree, no selling or spam, and nobody's private details. You agree to them once, before your first post or comment.

The page of a verified teacher or institute opens at once; any other page waits for a site administrator. The first few posts of every page are read by the Sijill team before they appear.

Taking things down: site administrators may hide or remove a post, comment or event, or pause a page, that breaks these terms or the posting rules. A page's own staff may hide comments on their page and stop someone commenting there. When enough people report something, it is hidden until a person looks at it; only people decide what is removed. Whoever a decision is about is told plainly, with the reason.

A second look: if a decision is about you, you may ask once for a second look, with a note, and a site administrator looks at it again. Removed posts and comments are deleted for good after 30 days, unless a second look is still waiting.

You may block or mute anyone. A block works both ways; a mute only hides someone from you. Neither tells the other person.

Events: the organiser is responsible for the event and for its details being true: the time, the place, who it is for, access for women, the number of places and the price. A paid event is paid to the organiser, the way they explain.

Sijill is not a party to payments between students and their teachers or institutes, and it never holds the money. Cash and transfers go straight from the payer to the teacher or institute, who confirms them in the app. Sijill keeps the record and writes the receipt.

Teachers and institutes set their own fees and decide their own refunds, and they are responsible for both. A receipt from Sijill is a receipt, not a tax invoice; each teacher and institute is responsible for their own taxes.

There are no late fees, no interest and no penalty of any kind on Sijill. An overdue fee only ever brings a gentle reminder.

Card payments are not switched on, and no payment company is connected yet. When one is, these terms will name it, and before you pay you will see Sijill's share and the company's fee, each on its own line. Today Sijill takes nothing from cash or transfers.

Institutes use Sijill free during the pilot. Prices after the pilot are to be confirmed, and will be published here before anything is charged.

Some things in Sijill are marked coming soon, such as signing in with Apple, card payments and some books. That label means they are planned. It is not a promise that they will arrive by any date, or at all, and nothing you do today depends on them.

Until one of them is switched on, nothing is sent anywhere because of it. Before it is, the privacy policy and these terms will say what changes.

Administrators may suspend an account that breaks these terms. A suspended account keeps its data but cannot sign in.

You can leave at any time by deleting your account, which removes everything that belongs to it, including your board listings and the applications sent to them, your page, your comments and your sign-ups. Orders stay with the teacher or institute you paid, as their record of money received, with your name only.

Sijill is provided as it is, free of charge. Care is taken to keep it working and your data safe, but no promise is made that it will always be available or free of errors. Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose: you can download all your data at any time.

As far as the law allows, the operator is not liable for losses caused by using or being unable to use Sijill.

If these terms change, the new version will be published here with its date before it takes effect. The country whose law governs these terms will be stated here when the site is published.

A contact address will be added here before the site opens to the public.