Building an Islamic website well means beginning with a sound intention, copying any Quran or hadith text only from a trusted source, leaving out tracking and the tricks that push people into decisions, keeping pictures free of living beings, saying honestly what you offer and what you do not, and making sure the site works for every reader on any phone. These are the standards we hold ourselves to, and we wrote them down before the first page of this website was made.
None of them is difficult in itself. The hard part is keeping to all of them at once, on every page, when it would often be quicker to cut a corner. Here is each standard in turn, with the reason we hold to it.
Start with intention
The collection of Imam al-Bukhari opens with the hadith on intentions, narrated by Umar ibn al-Khattab (Sahih al-Bukhari 1). A website is work like any other, so this is where ours begins too.
In practice, beginning with intention means being clear about why the site exists before anything is designed. It might be to teach, to serve a masjid’s community, to offer a useful product honestly, or to make a business known to the people it can help. When that purpose is clear and sound, many later decisions become easier, because each one can be measured against it.
It also means asking whether the work itself is permissible, and whether anything on the site would sit uneasily with what it is meant to stand for. A site for a halal business is still let down if it uses deceptive tricks to sell, and a site about Islam is let down if it treats its visitors as data to be harvested.
Sacred text, copied only from a checked source
Any Quran text on a website should be copied from an established source, such as Tanzil, and never typed from memory. It should be shown right to left, in a proper Uthmani font, so that every letter and mark appears as it should. If a page needs an ayah and no reliable source is to hand, the right course is to leave the ayah out and say so, and it is never acceptable to fill the gap with something approximate.
The same care applies to hadith and to texts of knowledge. A hadith should be copied from its collection with a clear reference, so that a reader can find it for themselves, and never written out from memory, however familiar it seems.
The spread of AI makes this harder. AI systems that write text can produce lines that look like Quran or hadith and are neither. A website that uses AI anywhere in its making needs a firm rule that sacred text never comes from it. The questions to ask before you trust a Quran app work just as well for a website.
No tracking and no dark patterns
Many websites follow their visitors with tracking code, building a record of what each person reads and where they go next. We leave tracking out entirely. If we ever decide that some measure of visits is needed, we will choose a method that sets no cookies, and nothing will be collected before a visitor has agreed, with refusing made as easy as agreeing.
Dark patterns are the design tricks that push people into choices they would not otherwise make. They include countdown timers, claims that only a few places are left, buttons that make refusing hard to find, and boxes that are ticked in advance so that a person agrees without noticing. We use none of them. People who visit an Islamic website deserve to be treated with honesty and respect, and a decision made under false pressure is not a fair decision.
A clear privacy policy belongs here too, along with terms of use and a page about security, each showing the date it was last updated. You can read ours on our privacy page.
Pictures without living beings
We leave pictures of living beings out of our work altogether, whether people, animals or faces, in photographs, drawings, icons or animations, and that includes figures made by AI.
Drawing living beings by hand is prohibited, as IslamQA, the site run by Shaykh Muhammad Salih al-Munajjid, sets out in its Arabic answer 39806 on drawing beings that have souls. Photographs and images on a screen are a matter on which the scholars of the Sunnah have differed. The Standing Committee, whose members included Shaykh Ibn Baz and Shaykh Salih al-Fawzan, held that photographs and video images are not allowed, as quoted in IslamQA’s answer 154788. Shaykh Ibn Uthaymin held that images which cannot be seen on their own, such as those stored on video tape, carry no ruling and do not fall under the prohibition, as cited from his al-Sharh al-Mumti’ in IslamQA’s answer 174965.
We give no ruling on that difference. Our own choice is to leave living beings out completely, so the question never arises in our work.
This takes nothing away from a site’s beauty. Landscapes, buildings, objects, light, texture and careful typography can carry a great deal of warmth and meaning. Leaving out living beings also steers a designer away from the stock photographs of smiling people that make so many websites look alike.
Honest words about what you offer
A website should never claim more than is true. That means no invented reviews, no made-up numbers of users or downloads, no logos of clients who are not clients, and no dates or results that cannot be shown. If a section has no real proof to put in it, the honest course is to leave the section out.
The same applies to what a product does. If an app is still in testing, the site should say so. If a feature sometimes gives an uncertain result, the site should never present it as exact. And wherever AI is involved in a product, the site should say so, so that people understand what they are using. Laws are moving in the same direction, and the European Union’s rules on AI include duties to be open with people when they are dealing with AI, but we would hold to this even without them.
Honest words should also be warm words. A site can describe its work with confidence and courtesy, and it never needs to shout, to exaggerate or to make anyone feel that they will miss out if they do not act at once.
Fast and readable on any phone
Many visitors to an Islamic website arrive on a phone, sometimes an older one, sometimes on a slow or costly connection. A site that is heavy, slow or hard to read shuts those visitors out, often without the site’s owner ever knowing.
We aim for every page to meet the WCAG 2.2 AA standard for accessibility, which covers things such as strong enough contrast between text and background, pages that work fully with a keyboard, a clearly visible focus outline, text that can be enlarged without breaking the layout, and descriptions for meaningful images so that screen readers can announce them. Arabic text needs particular care, with a suitable font, the right direction and enough size and spacing to read comfortably.
Speed comes from keeping pages light. That means pictures in modern formats, sized for the screen that shows them, with as little code as the page needs and no scripts loaded from other companies. Wherever a licence allows, we serve fonts and pictures from our own site, so that a visit to one of our pages is not also a visit to somebody else’s server.
How this website was built
We wrote each of these standards down before work on this website began, and we check every page against them before it goes live.
As we write, this website carries no analytics and sets no cookies, which is why it has no cookie banner. Its pictures show places and things, never people or animals. It has privacy, terms and security pages, each with a date, and its settings ask browsers to load only what the site intends. Every font on it is a file we serve ourselves, so no page loads anything from a font company’s server, and our privacy page says so.
Where the site describes the apps, software and research on our Studio page, it says what each one does today, what is still in testing and where AI is involved, and it leaves out anything we cannot show. The about page says more about who we are and why we work this way.
We have not published speed scores, because a number is only worth sharing once it has been measured on real phones, and that testing has not been done yet.