About this archive
A research resource covering 1,859 recordings and about 1,302 hours of speech from the Mufti Abu Layth YouTube channel. The unit of the archive is the segment: one question and its answer, one lesson, one discussion. Every link opens a whole segment with what came before and after.
For over ten years Mufti Abu Layth al-Maliki has taken questions live: on prayer and fasting, marriage and family, belief, hadith and the news of the day. Every answer here opens at the moment he gives it.
Accuracy tiers
- machinetranscribed and segmented automatically. Good for finding the moment, not for quoting.
- correctedterminology, names, verse and hadith references checked and standardised.
- verifiedreviewed and approved by the channel. Quotable, with a stable citation.
A summary of a view expressed is published only after a second, independent review has checked it against the transcript: that he says it, in his own voice rather than quoting someone else, and that the summary says neither more nor less than he does. The sentence he says is shown beside the position with its moment in the recording, so anyone can check it in one tap; a position without such a sentence is not published. These checks are made by two separate reviews, not by the channel; a position the channel has signed off itself is marked verified. Judgements about named people and remarks about his own life are never published this way. Where a view is quoted in order to be discussed, it is recorded as quoted, never as held. Each statement is marked as a general teaching or an answer to a specific questioner. Dates are always shown and the most recent statement on a topic is linked from older ones.
Not a fatwa service
The answers here were given to specific people at specific times. This archive is for study and reference, not a substitute for asking a qualified scholar about your own situation. Nothing here is legal, medical or financial advice.
People in the recordings
The transcripts are the words spoken on a public YouTube broadcast, so they include the names or handles Mufti Abu Layth reads out when he thanks a super chat or takes a question; people who wrote in did so publicly. The archive adds nothing to that: its own questions, summaries and positions never name the questioner, and the live chat itself is not republished. Guest speech is labelled and excluded from the positions layer. Anyone who appears in a recording can ask for their name to be removed from the transcript. Takedown requests from people who appear in a recording are honoured.
Privacy
No tracking, no cookies set by this site, no accounts. Fonts, scripts and the search index are served from this site, so opening a page sends nothing to a third party. Pressing play loads the video from YouTube through youtube-nocookie.com; from that point YouTube's privacy policy applies. "Save for later", "continue where you left off", the theme and the text size are kept in your browser's local storage only. Corrections are stored without personal data.
Rights
The recordings are the property of the channel. Transcripts: All rights reserved pending the channel's decision.
How to cite
Every recording and segment page ends with a citation box: APA 7, Chicago author-date and BibTeX, plus the archive's own one-line form (Mufti Abu Layth Archive, segment ID, transcript version and tier, URL, date accessed). Segment IDs are stable and every change is logged. A segment's short id (yyyy-mm-dd-Snn) also resolves at /s/<short id>/.
Feeds and data
RSS and Atom feeds for all answers, per topic, per series and a weekly digest. The whole segment layer is downloadable as JSON, the connections as graph.json and GraphML.
How to check that this site is genuine
People who disagree with the channel sometimes copy websites, change words and pass the copy off as the original. Before relying on a quotation, check where you are reading it.
- The archive lives only at this address:
https://muftiabulayth.org/. Check the address bar letter by letter: look-alike addresses swap letters for similar ones or add words such as "official". - The official YouTube channel links to this address from its About section: https://www.youtube.com/@MuftiAbuLayth. A copy cannot change that link.
- Every quotation on a segment page links to the moment in the original YouTube video. Press it and listen: that is the final check, and no copy can fake it.
- Each published data file has a SHA-256 fingerprint in
data/manifest.json(its own fingerprint is inmanifest.json.sha256). Data releases deposited with the Internet Archive and Zenodo carry the same fingerprints, so a changed copy can be detected by anyone. - Corrections and takedown requests are only accepted through the form on this site. The archive never asks for money, passwords or personal details, and never contacts anyone first.
Seen a copy, a fake quotation or a page pretending to be this archive? Report it through the corrections form below; security problems can also be reported as described in /.well-known/security.txt.
Corrections and takedowns
Corrections to any transcript or tag are welcome and reviewed before publishing: every recording and segment page has a "Something wrong here?" form under the transcript. Takedown requests from people who appear in a recording are honoured, first and fast; use the form below for those and for suggesting a question.
Suggest a question, or ask to be removed from a recording
If you appear in a recording and want it taken down, or want to suggest a question for the channel to answer, write it here. Takedown requests are read first.
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No name, email address or account is asked for or stored, and the inbox does not store your IP address. For rate limiting it keeps an unreadable fingerprint of your connection for 48 hours, and our database provider's own logs record connections as every website's do. Only your note, its kind, the page and the moment in the recording are kept, for review.