How elfatwa works

elfatwa does not issue rulings. It takes fatwas already published on Ftawy, then structures, summarizes, translates and links them. 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.
• Summarize. We shorten long answers into plain English that says what the source says.
• Translate. We carry an answer into another language without changing what it decides.
• 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 elfatwa decides what is permitted or forbidden.

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 published. Wording, conditions and negations are never rewritten on the way in.
2. The page renders that source answer. What you read is the source's own text or a summary of it, not our restatement of the ruling.
3. We add the frame, not the content. Title, language, related questions, the date of review, 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 the source answer in full. 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 the source answer for as long as that remains true. We would rather show you the source at length than a quick line nobody checked.

How review works today

Anything elfatwa writes is a draft until a person approves it.

Source text is different. It is not rewritten, so there is no editorial judgement to approve — it is the source, carried through.

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

How corrections work

If a summary misreads 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 line at the bottom of every answer

Every question page carries the same standing line:

Summarized from the full answer at Ftawy · reviewed {date}

It says two things on purpose. The answer is a summary, and no scholar wrote it here. We never claim otherwise.

Where our answers come from is set out in Sources.

This page explains our method. It carries no ruling · reviewed 3 September 2026