How El Fatwa works

El Fatwa does not issue rulings. It takes fatwas already published on Ftawy, then organizes them and links each one to its full text. The ruling on any page belongs to its source.

What we do

• Structure. We give each answer a clear title, a language, and its own web address. Then we put it where the right reader can find it.
• Link. Every answer points back to the full original on Ftawy.

What we do not do

We do not rule. No page here is a new fatwa, and nobody at El Fatwa decides what is permitted or forbidden.

The summaries were reviewed by El Fatwa's sharia committee; the site then shows them as they are, without rewording.

We do not translate rulings. The text in each language comes from Ftawy in that language, and a page exists in a language only when that text exists.

We do not add evidence. If the source cites one verse and no hadith, the page carries one verse and no hadith.

We do not change a grading. If the source calls a report sahih, the page says sahih. If the source gives no grading, the page gives none.

We do not fill gaps. A missing figure, name or condition stays missing, and the page sends you to the full answer instead.

How a page is built

1. The answer arrives from Ftawy. It is stored exactly as received. Wording, conditions and negations are never rewritten on the way in.
2. The page shows that source summary. What you read is the summary as we received it from Ftawy, not our restatement of the ruling.
3. We add the frame, not the content. Title, language, related questions, the date the answer was added here, and the link to the original.
4. Citations and gradings pass through as given. Qur'an by chapter and verse, hadith by collection and number, exactly as the source wrote them.
5. Anything unclear is flagged, not guessed. A page with a gap is marked for human review and the gap stays visible.

195,634 answers are published this way, all of them sourced from ftawy.com.

Short answers and full answers

Most pages show Ftawy's summary as received. That is the normal state of this site, not a gap waiting to close.

A short answer — one or two sentences at the top of a page — is editorial work. It has to be written by hand, one question at a time, and checked against the full answer. So short answers arrive for a subset of the library, starting with the most-read questions.

The rest will keep showing Ftawy's summary as received for as long as that remains true. We would rather show you the source than a quick line nobody checked.

How review works today

El Fatwa's sharia committee verifies all the material on the site, guides and summaries alike. Its members are postgraduate students of sharia and comparative fiqh, specialized sharia researchers.

Short answers, topic labels and the pages in this section are drafts until a person approves them. The guides under our byline follow their own process, set out below.

Source text is not rewritten on our side, so there is no wording of ours to approve: the committee checks the material, and the text itself is carried through.

Everything written on top of that source is saved as a draft and marked for review. That covers short answers, topic labels, and the pages in this section.

That review is done by hand today. There is no automatic approval step, and no tool publishes on its own.

Who writes the guides

Our blog posts, collections and season guides carry one byline: The Fatwa Scholarly Team. It names the site's editorial process, not one person. These explainers are written through that process. Every claim about a ruling cites a published answer on this site. The full source of that answer is on ftawy.com. The byline names no individual scholar. The rulings belong to the muftis whose answers are cited.

Two names appear on this site, and they are two different bodies. The Fatwa Scholarly Team is the author byline on the guides: blog posts, collections and season guides. El Fatwa's sharia committee verifies all the material on the site, guides and summaries alike.

How corrections work

If a page misstates its source, we fix the page and record the change in public. The record shows the date, the page, and what changed.

See Corrections for the log and for how to report a mistake.

The source line under every answer

Under each answer, the source card says where the text comes from. It reads "Summary from Ftawy's records", followed by "added here" and a date when the page has one. That date is when the answer was added to El Fatwa. It is not the date of the fatwa, and it is not a date shown by Ftawy. A second line under it, "Reviewed by El Fatwa's sharia committee.", says who checked the text.

Open "Where this answer came from" on the same page for the details: the source platform, the original fatwa number when known, the date it was added here, and a line saying the text is a summary from Ftawy's records, reviewed by El Fatwa's sharia committee. We show no review date, because none is recorded for each page.

The summary is from Ftawy's records. We did not write it, and we do not present it as ours.

All of the answers were prepared by a specialized scholarly, sharia and research team of students of fiqh and the sharia sciences who completed postgraduate studies at Umm al-Qura University and the Islamic University of Madinah, under the care and supervision of senior scholars and professors at the Islamic University.

The English text on Ftawy was translated by sharia students, on scholarships and from different communities, under the supervision of professors at the Islamic University of Madinah. El Fatwa did not translate the answers; their translations come from Ftawy's records.

Where our answers come from is set out in Sources.

This page explains our method. It carries no ruling · updated 25 October 2026