Waqf Lender Agreement

Effective 2026-06-03 · Version 2.0 · revised 2026-06-03 — monthly subscription clause removed; §8 rewritten as alameleen alaiha cost recovery

1. The act before Allah

By signing this agreement, you lend Allah a goodly loan in the one form qardon.org's platform supports: a permanent waqf. The act is one of worship. qardon.org is not the recipient of the loan — qardon.org is the operator that makes the lending work. The reward (ajr) of the act is between you and Allah; qardon.org makes no claim about acceptance.

2. The parties

This agreement is between:

• You, the waqf lender, identified by your verified identity record at sign-up; and
• qardon.org, a technology platform owned by Fotoh, Inc., a for-profit company incorporated in the United States.

3. What is being authorized

You authorize qardon.org to initiate the following four classes of movements on the accounts linked to your member profile:

1. Deposits from your external bank accounts into your waqf bank account. (You may also initiate deposits yourself; this authorization simply lets the platform observe and recognize them.)
2. Withdrawals from your waqf bank account to the bank accounts of other qardon.org members who have been approved for a goodly loan, sent directly bank-to-bank, never passing through a qardon.org account.
3. Trades in your waqf investment account at the partner halal brokerage, executed according to qardon.org's halal investment model portfolio and the partner brokerage's Sharia-approved investment universe.
4. Inbound repayments and dividends to your waqf bank account and waqf investment account, originating from borrowers' repayments and from investment yield.

This authorization is durable. It continues until you revoke it under §7.

4. The accounts

When you sign up, two accounts are opened in your name:

• Your waqf bank account. Held at your own bank, titled in your own name, identified to qardon.org by a token from the bank-linking service. You may deposit freely, and you retain full access to this account at all times — it is your account, and qardon.org places no block, penalty or delay on your ability to take your money out of it. The permanence of the waqf is your covenant with Allah, not a restriction on the account. §6 states what retrieval means for the covenant and for your membership.
• Your waqf investment account. Held at a partner halal brokerage, titled in your own name, identified to qardon.org by an API token. You sign the brokerage's investment contract directly, separate from this agreement. The brokerage's Sharia review board governs which assets are halal-eligible in the investment universe. qardon.org sends trading instructions on your behalf.

Throughout, the assets are yours. qardon.org never takes custody.

5. What you commit, and the rules you choose

At deposit time, you tell qardon.org which rules govern the funds being committed:

• Permanence. Every waqf under this agreement is permanent. There is no term, no maturity and no time horizon to select. Permanence is the covenant you make with Allah, not a restriction on your account: you keep full access to your money at all times, and §6 states exactly what retrieval means and how promptly it is released.
• Purpose restrictions. Optional, within the rules the platform supports: a category limitation (for example, medical-need borrowers only; or education-need borrowers only), a geographic limitation, or another permitted limit.
• Beneficiary categories. Optional: which classes of qardon.org members your committed waqf is willing to support.

Once chosen, the purpose and beneficiary rules of a given commitment govern that commitment while it remains in the pool; you cannot retroactively rewrite them, though you can set different rules on future deposits. None of this restricts your access to your own money — see §6.

6. What committing waqf binds — and what it does not

The act of committing a portion of your wealth as a goodly loan to Allah binds you as a covenant with Allah from the moment you sign and the deposit is recognized. That covenant is a matter of conscience between you and Allah; it is not enforced by qardon.org against your account. Specifically:

• Committed principal stays in service under the rules it was committed under, indefinitely.
• You may not direct committed waqf to a person outside the qardon.org platform's recipient classes.

Your access to your own money. You may add to your waqf bank account at any time. The account is yours, held in your own name, and you keep full access to it at all times: you may retrieve your funds whenever you choose. The permanence of a waqf is a covenant between you and Allah. It is not a restriction we place on your account, and qardon.org applies no withdrawal block, no penalty, no waiting period and no exit friction of any kind.

What happens if you ask to retrieve committed waqf. We will first offer you what the community exists to provide — a goodly loan, or a Recovery claim — in case the need that prompted the request can be met without undoing your covenant. If you still wish to proceed, we will state once, plainly and without repetition, what proceeding means: this is money you covenanted to Allah; retrieving it ends that covenant, and it closes your qardon.org account and ends the platform's service to you. If you then confirm, your funds are released to you promptly and in full. No person at qardon.org may refuse, delay, reduce or condition that release. The consequence of retrieval is the end of the covenant and of your membership — never a hold on your money.

7. What you can revoke or change

While committed waqf is bound by §6, your forward-looking choices remain yours:

• Future contributions. You may stop making new contributions at any time, without notice.
• Bot-managed investing. You may opt out of qardon.org's bot-managed investing at any time. After opt-out, your waqf investment account remains in your name at the brokerage and you self-direct it under the brokerage's own terms.
• Rules on future deposits. You may change the purpose restriction or the beneficiary category for any deposits you make going forward. There is no time horizon to change — every waqf is permanent (§5).
• This agreement, as to future activity. You may revoke this agreement as to future activity at any time by written notice to qardon.org. Revocation does not unwind the rules of any waqf already committed under this agreement; those rules continue.

8. Compensation to qardon.org — alameleen alaiha

qardon.org is a technology platform within Fotoh, Inc. It must sustain itself to keep running. You agree that the platform recovers its actual operating costs from the proceeds of the work it does for you — not from your principal, and not as a per-member fee. This is the classical Islamic principle of alameleen alaiha (والعاملين عليها — those employed to administer the fund), grounded in Surah At-Tawbah 9:60 and extended by classical scholars (Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn Qudamah) to the administration of awqaf under the term ujrat al-nazir (the wage of the administrator).

The funding model's sources, none of which touches your committed principal:

1. No borrower fee of any kind. An approved borrower pays qardon.org nothing for his loan — no validation fee, no credit-check fee, no origination fee and no per-loan commission. He receives the full amount and repays the principal, and nothing else.
2. Cash-purchase discount spread on the marketplace. When qardon.org pays cash for an asset on the qardon.com marketplace to fulfill a member purchase, the dealer's pre-committed cash discount is treated as a contribution to the Recovery Fund — not as profit retained by qardon.org or Fotoh, Inc.
3. Operating-cost recovery from yield (alameleen alaiha). When yield is generated in the investing stream of your committed waqf, qardon.org deducts its actual documented operating costs from that yield before the surplus flows to the Recovery Fund. This is not a fixed percentage. It is pure cost recovery, audited monthly and published publicly. You authorize this deduction by signing this Agreement.

You acknowledge and agree that the operating-cost recovery in §8(3) is alameleen alaiha — legitimate compensation for the labor of administering the awqaf you have committed. It is not a commission on your yield. It is not a profit-share. It is what the work of administering the platform actually costs, transparently disclosed.

You acknowledge and agree that qardon.org may revise its operating-cost recovery upward only if actual costs rise (with notice to you as provided under §16 of the Terms of Service), and downward whenever costs fall. The published monthly transparency report is the canonical record of what was deducted.

None of these compensations touches your committed principal. Your principal stays in your name, in your waqf bank account, until the rules of your commitment say otherwise.

9. Renunciation: the principal is not qardon.org's

You expressly acknowledge and agree that the principal you commit as waqf is lent to Allah, not to qardon.org, not to Fotoh, Inc., not to any individual person. qardon.org administers the principal under your authorization; it does not own it. You renounce, on your behalf and on behalf of your heirs and assigns, any claim, demand, action, suit, or proceeding against qardon.org, Fotoh, Inc., or any related party seeking the return of committed waqf principal except through the rules of the commitment itself.

Your renunciation does not extend to: (a) ordinary operational disputes; (b) breach of this agreement by qardon.org; (c) fraud or willful misconduct; (d) any rights you cannot waive under applicable law.

10. Risk

You acknowledge the following risks, accept them, and confirm you have had the opportunity to review them carefully:

• Investment risk. The capital in your waqf investment account is at market risk. Halal-screened equities and other approved instruments rise and fall. The model portfolio may underperform. You may experience loss of investment value. A fall in market value is not a reduction of your waqf by any person, and it is not treated as one: like every other loss to a lender's corpus, it is recorded as a loss to be covered and covering it is the first call on the collective yield, ahead of every claim, every distribution and every fee. The same honest limit applies — that is an obligation against future yield, not a guarantee of when it will be met, and while it is outstanding we show it to you as outstanding.
• Borrower default risk. Some goodly-loan borrowers may not repay in full, and qardon.org's review process reduces that risk without eliminating it. Your waqf corpus is never forgiven, waived, written off, or converted into a gift — not by you, not by us, not by anyone. A borrower's loan is a qard: a free, interest-free loan between people, which the fund that holds it may release if the borrower becomes permanently unable to repay (death, or documented total incapacity). That release is an act of the fund alone. It is never asked of you, never charged to you, and never treated as a gift from your corpus. The released amount is recorded as a loss to be covered, and covering it is the first call on the collective yield — ahead of every claim, every distribution to lenders, and every fee. Where the yield of a period does not cover it in full, the shortfall stays on the record as an obligation owed to your corpus and is met from the yield of the periods that follow. Honest limit: this is an obligation against future yield, not a guarantee of when it will be met. If yield is small or absent, the obligation may remain outstanding for a long time, and we will show it to you as outstanding rather than close it. What we will not do is erase it, and what no one may do is reduce your corpus: it is lent to Allah, and it is Allah who repays it.
• Operational risk. Technical failures, vendor failures, or other operational events may disrupt the platform's services. We use commercially reasonable practices to minimize disruption; we do not guarantee absence of it.
• Regulatory risk. Laws and regulations change. We comply with what applies to us and disclose to you as needed.
• No insurance. Your waqf bank account is at your own bank and is subject to that bank's own deposit-insurance regime (in the United States, ordinarily Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation coverage up to applicable limits). Your waqf investment account is at the partner brokerage and is subject to that brokerage's own protection regimes (in the United States, ordinarily Securities Investor Protection Corporation coverage for the brokerage account, not for market loss). qardon.org itself does not provide deposit or investment insurance.

11. The Recovery Fund

The Recovery Fund is a community calamity-aid program funded primarily by qardon.org's share of investment yield. If you, your immediate family, or your committed waqf is affected by a covered calamity (as defined by qardon.org's Recovery Fund rules), you or your designated successors may submit a claim. The specialist panel reviews. A payout may be approved, depending on fund availability and review findings. The Recovery Fund is not insurance and not a guarantee. Payouts depend on fund availability and the panel's findings.

12. Information you give us must be accurate

You confirm that the identity, contact, financial, and waqf-rule information you have given us is true and accurate, and you agree to update it when it changes. Knowingly providing false information may result in suspension of your account and is treated as a material breach.

13. Privacy

How we handle your personal data is described in the Privacy Policy. Of special note for waqf lenders: you do not see the identities of the borrowers who receive your waqf as a goodly loan. You see only category totals and impact summaries. This is the absolute privacy rule protecting borrower dignity, enforced by the system.

14. Notices and signature

You sign this agreement electronically. The electronic signature service (DocuSign, or an equivalent vendor we use) records the signature, the timestamp, the IP address, and the identity verification result; that record is the legally binding evidence of your signature.

We send notices to the email address on your member profile. You agree that those notices are effective when sent. You agree to keep your email address current.

15. Governing law and disputes

This agreement is governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, United States. Disputes are resolved by binding individual arbitration as described in the Terms of Service §18.

16. Entire agreement, severability, assignment

This agreement, together with the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy, is the entire agreement between you and qardon.org about the subject matter and replaces any prior agreement. If any provision is held unenforceable, the rest stays in force. We may assign this agreement to any successor of qardon.org or Fotoh, Inc. that takes responsibility for our obligations; you may not assign without our consent (you may, however, designate successors for your waqf as the platform's rules permit).

17. Your signature

By signing below, you confirm that:

• You are at least eighteen years old and have legal capacity in your jurisdiction.
• You have read this agreement and the linked Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
• You understand that the act being authorized is the lending of a goodly loan to Allah, not transferred to qardon.org or to any person.
• You understand that committed waqf principal stays under its rules indefinitely.
• You understand that the Recovery Fund is not insurance.
• You authorize qardon.org to initiate the four classes of movements described in §3, on the accounts identified at sign-up, until you revoke this authorization as to future activity under §7.
• You renounce any claim against qardon.org, Fotoh, Inc., or any related party for the return of committed waqf principal except through the rules of the commitment, per §9.