Terms of Service

You must be at least 16 years old to create an account or submit content. Users under 16 may only browse public content where legally allowed. If you are under 18, your parent or guardian should be aware of your use. You are responsible for keeping your account credentials secure and for all activity that takes place through your account.

You retain full ownership of the stories, reflections, comments, and profile content you post on AtharStories.

By submitting content, you grant AtharStories a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, display, reproduce, translate, moderate, and distribute that content — only as needed to operate, promote, and improve the platform.

This license includes producing derived versions that make your story more accessible: Arabic/English translation, automated audio narration, and short verbatim pull-quotes shown as highlights within the page and on discovery cards. We never alter the meaning of your text, and all such versions are deleted along with the story.

Cover photos: you may add a cover image only when submitting a story, and it cannot be changed after publication. You must own or hold a license for the image. Images are screened automatically before going live and may be rejected.

You may delete your stories at any time from your profile. Deletion removes the content from public view immediately. Limited copies may remain temporarily in backups, system logs, moderation records, or where required by law.

You represent that you have the legal right to everything you post, and that the content does not violate these Terms or any third-party rights.

On AtharStories, you may not:

• Post hate speech, incitement, or discrimination against any group based on race, religion, gender, orientation, or disability.
• Harass, threaten, or stalk individuals.
• Disclose another person’s private information without consent (doxing).
• Post sexually explicit content.
• Encourage self-harm or suicide.
• Promote illegal drugs, weapons sales, or gambling.
• Run scams, send spam, or distribute malware.
• Impersonate another person or organization.
• Infringe intellectual property or copyright.
• Manipulate views, likes, follows, ranking, or the discovery algorithm.
• Misrepresent your gender to access the Sisters-only circle, or your credentials to obtain a verification badge.
• Use direct messages to harass, pester, bulk-message, or circumvent another user’s block.
• Ask other users for money, donations, financial help, loans, gifts, payments, sponsorships, fundraising, or off-platform transactions.
• Scrape our content, reverse-engineer the service, overwhelm our servers, or bypass published rate limits.

You are responsible for the content you submit. AtharStories may review, reject, remove, restrict, or demote content that violates these Terms, the Community Guidelines, the law, or platform quality standards.

AtharStories may remove content or accounts that use stories, comments, profiles, or messages to solicit money, gifts, donations, loans, financial support, fundraising, sponsorships, or off-platform payments.

Content that violates Google Publisher Policies or could make ad serving unsafe may be removed or demonetized — to protect the platform as a whole.

If your content is removed or your account is suspended and you believe it was in error, you may request a review by emailing support@atharstories.com with "Appeal" in the subject.

We respect intellectual property rights. If you believe content on AtharStories infringes your copyright under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), send us a notice that includes:

• Description of the copyrighted work.
• The URL of the infringing content.
• A good-faith statement that you are the rights-holder or authorized agent.
• A statement that the information is accurate under penalty of perjury.
• Your electronic signature, full name, address, phone number, and email.

Send the notice to support@atharstories.com with "DMCA" in the subject. We will remove infringing content per the law. If you believe content was removed in error, you have the right to file a counter-notice.

AtharStories is not a religious authority, fatwa platform, therapy service, medical service, legal service, or emergency service. Content is shared by community members and reflects their personal experiences. For specialized needs, please consult qualified professionals.

This also applies to answers from verified scholars in Ask-the-Scholar and to reflections: they are the personal opinions of their authors, not formal rulings and not the platform’s position. A verification badge means we reviewed the holder’s credentials, not that we endorse what they say.

The platform offers private messages between users. Messages from people you do not follow land in a Requests inbox and wait for your acceptance; the sender is not shown a read receipt until you accept. You can decline any request, delete any conversation, or block any user at any time, and you can restrict who may message you in your privacy settings.

Direct messages are not end-to-end encrypted. Our team does not read them in the ordinary course, but we may review a message when one of its participants reports it or when legally required. The acceptable-use rules above apply to messages exactly as they apply to public content.

The Sisters-only circle is a discussion space for women, accessed by self-attesting your gender in account settings. We rely on your honesty: a false attestation to gain access is a material breach of these Terms and results in account closure. We do not verify gender with documents and cannot guarantee that every participant is a woman, so be mindful of what you share.

You may apply to have your account verified as a writer or as a scholar (with ijazah). Applications are reviewed automatically and then by a human. We may decline any application or withdraw a badge at any time without stating reasons, and we re-check credentials periodically. Submitting forged or misleading credentials counts as impersonation and is treated accordingly.

In Ask-the-Scholar you can put a question to a verified scholar and choose whether the answer is private to you or published for all readers. Scholars are under no obligation to answer, and answers are their personal opinion (see Section 6). Do not include sensitive identifying information in your question.

Prayer times are calculated automatically from coordinates you choose and a published calculation method, and may differ from your local mosque by a few minutes. Hijri dates are computed with the Umm al-Qura calendar and may differ by a day from your country’s official calendar depending on moon sighting. Both are informational only; defer to your local authority when in doubt, especially for the start of Ramadan and the Eids.

Alongside member stories, the platform publishes editorial stories prepared by our team under editorial author profiles, shown in the featured slots on the home and Discover pages. These are composed from real or representative faith experiences, may be drafted with AI tools, and are held to the same review and quality standards.

Automated tools are also used across the platform for Arabic/English translation, pull-quote extraction, audio narration, and first-pass content screening. Narration voices are synthetic, not a human reader. These outputs may contain errors; the author’s original text is authoritative.

The platform shows ads from Google AdSense and from direct advertisers via our self-serve advertising service. Ads are clearly labeled and never influence story ranking or discovery results.

If you are an advertiser:

• Every campaign is reviewed before and after going live. We reject ads that conflict with the platform’s values or the law, including: interest-based lending, gambling, alcohol, sexual content, tobacco, misleading products, and political campaigns.
• Payment is taken up-front via Stripe. A campaign starts after review approval, not after payment.
• If your campaign is rejected before it is shown, you receive a full refund within 10 business days. If it is removed mid-flight for a violation, only the unserved portion is refunded. No refunds are given for under-performance.
• You are responsible for the accuracy of your ad’s claims, for the rights to any images or marks in it, and for your landing page’s legal compliance.
• Impression and click figures we report are estimates measured by our systems; we do not guarantee any specific number of views or outcomes.

These Terms apply equally to the website, the installable web app, and the Android app published on Google Play. The app presents the same service; whatever applies to your account in one place applies everywhere. Google Play’s own store terms also apply to downloads from that store.

We provide AtharStories "as is" and "as available". We do not guarantee that the service will always be available, error-free, or meet your expectations. To the extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

To the extent permitted by law, neither we nor our partners will be liable for any indirect, incidental, consequential, special, or punitive damages arising from your use of the platform. Our aggregate liability will not exceed €100 or its local-currency equivalent.

These limits do not apply to liability that cannot be excluded or limited under applicable law, including statutory consumer rights.

You agree to indemnify and defend us, our employees, and our partners against any third-party claim arising from your use of the platform in a way that violates these Terms or the law, or from content you post that infringes another party’s rights.

You may terminate your account at any time from your account settings or by emailing the official inbox. We may terminate or suspend your access without notice for material breach of these Terms, for legal reasons, or for security reasons. The license, disclaimer, liability-limit, indemnification, and dispute-resolution provisions survive termination.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Netherlands, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute will be brought before the competent courts of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, unless your local applicable law gives you a non-waivable right to bring the dispute in your home country’s courts. Your statutory consumer rights remain in force and are not affected by these Terms.

Before starting legal proceedings, please contact us first at support@atharstories.com. We will try to respond within 30 days and resolve the issue informally where possible.

• If any provision is held unenforceable, the rest remain in force.
• You may not assign your rights under these Terms without our consent. We may assign our rights in connection with a reorganization, merger, or sale.
• We are not liable for any delay or failure caused by events outside our reasonable control (natural disasters, war, strikes, infrastructure outages, government action).
• These Terms together with the Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy, and Community Guidelines constitute the entire agreement between us.

We may update these Terms from time to time. We will notify you of material changes before they take effect with a prominent in-app notice (and sometimes by email). Continued use of the platform after an update means you accept the new version. If you disagree, you can close your account at no cost.

For any question about these Terms, email support@atharstories.com or visit the contact page.