Privacy
This site is run by DJALI LTD, a company registered in England and Wales (no. 13214792) trading as TheShia Group, and registered with the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). TheShia has no accounts, no advertising and no ad trackers, and the site's own pages set no cookies — prayer times, the calendar, the library and the tools ask nothing of you and store nothing about you on our servers. A few parts of the site do handle some data, and each is described plainly below: the AI Scholar keeps your questions against an anonymous ID and sends them to Anthropic to write the answer; our servers see your IP address briefly to stop abuse; Cloudflare, which hosts everything, sees every request as any web host does; and email you send us arrives on Google's business email service. Last updated 4 September 2026.
Prayer times are worked out on your device. If you use the location button, your position never leaves your device, and your chosen city and method are saved only in this browser. Two things are different: our free public API and the widgets other websites embed do run on our server code, where your IP address is checked (100 requests a minute per address) but not stored by us, any coordinates are rounded to about a kilometre before use, and Cloudflare keeps technical logs of those requests for about a week. We have no per-visitor log of the pages themselves.
We use Cloudflare Web Analytics, a cookieless service that counts page views without identifying visitors. Under UK data protection law you can ask what we hold about you, ask for it to be deleted or sent to you, object, or withdraw your consent: for the Scholar, use "Clear my history" on its page; for anything else, email info@djali.co.uk — because there are no accounts, for Scholar rows we will need the anonymous ID stored in your browser under theshia:scholar:anon. You can complain to the ICO at ico.org.uk. Children use this site too; nothing extra is collected from them, and the Taklif calculator keeps a child's details on the device only.
The AI Scholar (beta)
The AI Scholar at theshia.org/scholar is our experiment that answers questions from Ayatollah al-Sistani's published writings; it is not an official service of his office. Unlike the rest of this site, it cannot work without keeping some information. A question about religious practice reveals your religious belief, which the law treats as sensitive — by pressing ask you agree to us handling your question as set out here, and that agreement is what we rely on. This is all of it, in plain words.
What it keeps
- A random, anonymous ID. Our server generates it and it is kept in this browser and in one cookie set by our answer server (sistani-scholar.ali-cd5.workers.dev, not theshia.org), which lasts 30 days from your last use. It is not tied to a name, an email address or an account, because there are none. It exists so the tool knows which answer your feedback belongs to, and so your two questions a day can be counted.
- Your questions, and the answers produced for them, stored against that random ID with the date, the language you asked in and the answer mode, in a Cloudflare database on our own account. The full answer record is kept for 24 hours so the page can show it again; after that only the question row remains. Your feedback — right, wrong, should not have answered, not sure — and any comment you type are stored the same way, so please do not put personal details in the comment box.
- Your settings — the answer format you prefer, and a tester code if you have entered one — kept in this browser only. Your past questions are kept here too, so the Scholar page can show you a list of them; that list never leaves this device, and you can remove a single question or clear the whole list at any time.
- Your network address (IP), used only as a brake against bursts of automated abuse — not to count your daily questions, which are counted per browser. It is held as a short-lived counter that deletes itself within about two days, in a separate store, and it is never saved next to your questions.
Who else sees it
To write an answer, your question and the passages found for it are sent to Anthropic, the US company behind the Claude AI model the Scholar uses. They process it to produce the answer text and the optional translation aids. Your anonymous ID is not sent with it — it never leaves our servers. Under Anthropic's commercial terms what we send is kept for up to 30 days for safety checks and then deleted, and is not used to train its models. Anthropic's data-processing agreement includes the UK's approved transfer safeguards.
When you ask a question, Cloudflare Turnstile runs a quick check that you are a person and not an automated script. It runs in a frame from challenges.cloudflare.com and looks at signals from your browser; our server then sends the resulting token, together with your IP address, to Cloudflare to verify it.
Everything else stays with Cloudflare on TheShia's own account: your question is turned into a search vector by Cloudflare Workers AI, and the question log, counters and answer records live in Cloudflare's database services, which may store data in the United States as well as the UK under Cloudflare's UK-approved transfer terms. Nothing is sold, shared for advertising, or used to build a profile of you.
What is never collected
No account. No name, email address or phone number, unless you type one into a question or comment — please don't. No advertising trackers, and nothing that follows you to other websites.
Your history lives with this browser
Because there is no account, your history belongs to this browser and nothing else. You will not see it on another device or in a private window. If you clear your browser's cookies and site data, the link between you and it is broken permanently — we cannot restore it, and we cannot tell that it was ever yours.
Clearing it
You can clear your history from the Scholar page whenever you like — this is also how you withdraw your consent and exercise your right to deletion, with no email needed. If you want the judged rows deleted rather than unlinked, or a copy of your questions, email info@djali.co.uk with the anonymous ID from your browser.
What clearing does, exactly: the answers stored for you are deleted outright, and your anonymous ID is removed from the question log and from every judgement you sent. Two small counters that hold your daily question count are not touched — they expire on their own within a day or two and contain none of your question text — and the cookie on our answer server simply expires by itself.
One thing we would rather say plainly than let you assume: if you have already told us an answer was right or wrong, that judgement is kept. Checking the tool's accuracy is the entire purpose of this beta, and those replies are what it learns from. Clearing your history does not withdraw a judgement you already sent — but it is no longer linked to you.
How long it is kept
Answer records are kept for 24 hours. Questions you judged are kept indefinitely, because they are what the tool's accuracy is measured against — kept without your ID once you clear. Questions you never judged are deleted automatically after six months (183 days) by a nightly job. IP counters expire within about two days and the anonymous cookie after 30 days.
Counting clicks from our other apps
Some of our own apps link here. When you follow one of those links we add 1 to a counter, so we can see whether the link is useful. We do not create any record of you.
The four things a counter holds
- Which app sent you — for example, Haraka.
- Which page on this site you arrived at.
- The date, in UTC — the day only, never a time.
- A country, but only if it is one of nine we count by name (United Kingdom, Iran, Iraq, United States, Canada, Australia, Pakistan, India, United Arab Emirates). Every other country is stored as "XX", together with visits where no country was available. This happens as the counter is written, so a rarer country is never stored at all.
What is never recorded
No IP address, no identifier, no cookie, no session, no browser or device details, no referring page, and no time more precise than the day. There is no row for a single visit anywhere in this counting — only totals. The store has no column such a detail could go in, so this is a property of how it is built, not a promise we remember to keep.
How long the counts are kept
Daily counts are kept for thirteen months. After that they are combined into monthly totals and the daily rows stop existing, so the long-term trend remains while the finer detail does not.
The link you land on also carries utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign in its address. These are read by our cookieless site analytics so the same click can be counted a second, independent way — two measurements that disagree tell us something; one nobody can check does not.