Qalam Prize — Privacy Notice

Who we are

The Qalam Prize is run by Ihya Publications, a project of The CMA Welfare Trust ("CMA"). Ihya Publications is not a separate legal entity, so The CMA Welfare Trust is the data controller for everything you send us when you enter — it decides how your information is used and is legally responsible for looking after it.

The CMA Welfare Trust is a registered charity in England and Wales (1099574) and a company limited by guarantee in England (04730509), at 377 Wilmslow Road, Heald Green, Cheadle, SK8 3NP. It is registered with the UK Information Commissioner's Office as a data controller under reference Z8200764.

In practice, the people who read and administer your entry are the Ihya Publications team. For anything about the competition — including asking us to delete your entry — email salaam@ihyapublications.org and we will deal with it.

If you would rather go directly to the charity, or you want to make a formal data protection request, write to admin@cmatrust.org or to 377 Wilmslow Road, Heald Green, Cheadle, SK8 3NP.

This notice covers the Qalam Prize only. It sits alongside CMA's main privacy policy at https://cheadlemasjid.org/privacy-policy/, which covers the charity's wider work. Where this notice is more specific about competition entries, it is the one that applies to them.

What we collect

When you submit an entry, we collect:

• Your name
• Your email address
• Your age
• Your essay, as a PDF or Word document — including anything you have written inside it, and any author details your word processor saves into the file
• If you are under 16: the email address of your parent or guardian, and a confirmation that they consent to your entry
• Any other details the entry form asks for, such as your institution or which category you are entering

We also record the date and time you submitted, your browser type, and a scrambled one-way version of your IP address. We use these only to spot spam and abuse of the form — the scrambling means we cannot recover the original IP address from it.

Please do not include personal information about other people in your essay unless it is genuinely necessary, and never include anything confidential or sensitive about yourself that you would not want judges to read.

Why we use it, and our legal basis

Under UK GDPR we must have a lawful basis for using your information. Ours are:

• Your consent — you choose to enter, and you agree to your essay being read and judged by us and by our partner organisations. You can withdraw this at any time (see "Your rights" below), though we cannot un-read an entry that has already been judged.
• Our legitimate interests — running the competition fairly, keeping records of who entered, preventing duplicate or fraudulent entries, and protecting the form from abuse.
• Legal obligation — where we have to keep records or respond to a lawful request.

We do not use your information to train artificial intelligence models, we do not sell it, and we do not pass it to advertisers.

Who reads your entry

Your essay is read by the Ihya Publications team and by judges at our partner organisations. These partners are separate organisations, each responsible for handling your information properly. As things stand they are:

• FOSIS
• Islamic Finance Guru
• Roots Academy
• Ihsaan Medics
• CAGE International
• The Policy Minaret
• AMSSEM

This list can change between competition years. The current list is always shown on the Qalam Prize page, and we will update this notice when it changes.

All of our current judging partners are based in the United Kingdom.

We share your essay and the name you entered under. We do not give partners your email address, your age, or your guardian's contact details unless you have asked us to put you in touch with them.

Where your entry is stored

We use a small number of established service providers to run the competition. They process your information on our instructions and are not allowed to use it for their own purposes:

• Sanity — our content system, where your entry file and submission record are stored.
• Vercel — hosts this website and runs the code that receives your upload. It passes the file straight through and does not keep a copy.
• Resend — delivers the notification email that alerts our team to your entry, with your essay attached, and sends you your confirmation email.
• Kit — our mailing list provider, used only if you separately opt in to competition updates. Entering the competition does not add you to any mailing list.

Some of these providers store data outside the UK, including in the United States. Where they do, they are covered by safeguards recognised under UK data protection law, such as the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses.

While you are still filling the form in, your answers are also saved in your own web browser so that you do not lose them if you close the form or leave the page. That copy stays on your device — it is not sent to us until you press submit — and it is deleted once you submit, or automatically after seven days. Your uploaded file is never saved this way.

If you are entering from a shared or public computer, use the "Clear saved answers" button on the form when you have finished, so your details are not left behind for the next person.

Entrants under 16

The Qalam Prize is open to entrants aged 14 to 30. If you are under 16, the entry form will ask for a parent or guardian's email address, and we will only accept your entry with it.

We will email your parent or guardian to let them know you have entered and to tell them how to withdraw your entry if they wish. Either of you can ask us to delete the entry at any point before judging closes.

We write this notice in plain language so that younger entrants can understand it. If anything here is unclear, ask us — we would much rather explain it than have you agree to something you did not follow.

Winners and publicity

Winners and shortlisted entrants are announced publicly at the Ihya Conference and afterwards on this website and our social media. If you are selected, we will publish your name and the title of your essay.

We may also publish your essay itself, in full or in part, in print or online. We will contact you before we do this, and you can decline without losing your prize.

If you would rather be named differently, or not named at all, tell us at salaam@ihyapublications.org and we will respect that.

How long we keep it

We keep entries for 12 months after the conference at which the winners are announced. That covers the judging period, any queries or disputes about the result, and letting entrants know about the following year's competition.

After that we delete entries and the files that came with them. We keep winning entries and a basic record of results for longer, as part of the competition's history.

If you ask us to delete your entry sooner, we will — see below.

Keeping it secure

Uploads are checked before we accept them, transmitted over an encrypted connection, and stored by providers who encrypt data at rest. Access to submissions is limited to the people who need it to run the competition.

One thing you should know: files stored in our content system are held at a long, randomly generated web address. That address is not published or listed anywhere, but anyone who has the link could open the file without signing in. We share those links only with our team and judges.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you can ask us to:

• Give you a copy of the information we hold about you
• Correct anything that is wrong
• Delete your entry and the information that came with it
• Stop or limit how we use it
• Withdraw your consent, at any time

The quickest route is to email salaam@ihyapublications.org — that reaches the Ihya team, who hold the entries. You can also write to The CMA Welfare Trust at admin@cmatrust.org or 377 Wilmslow Road, Heald Green, Cheadle, SK8 3NP. Either way we will respond within one month, and there is no charge.

We may need to check who you are before acting on a request, so that nobody else can delete or download your entry. Withdrawing consent after judging has finished will not undo the result, but we will remove your entry from our records.

If you are unhappy with how your information has been handled, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113. We would appreciate the chance to put things right first.

Changes to this notice

If we change how we handle entries — for example if the judging partners change — we will update this page and change the date at the top. If the change is significant and affects entries we already hold, we will email entrants directly.