Awqaf New Zealand · Registered Charity CC46694 · Published research
Every substantive comment received, what was done about it, and — where we declined to act — why
Maintained continuously · last updated 22 September 2026
We asked for criticism. This is the record of what arrived and what we did with it.
A study published for examination should be able to show that the examination happened. A document that sits online for two years without visible revision has not been engaged with; one that carries a dated record of what was raised and what changed has. This page is the difference between an invitation and a gesture.
And it exists for the people who take the trouble to reply. If you send us a correction, you should be able to find it here — with your name on it if you want your name on it, and with an honest statement of whether we accepted it. Anyone who improves this work has a share in it.
Comments we decline to act on are listed too, with our reasoning. A log containing only adopted feedback would tell you nothing about our judgement, and it would quietly disrespect everyone whose point was not taken. Disagreement is recorded, not omitted.
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| Ref | Received | From | What was raised | Outcome | What we did |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 001 | Aug 2026 | A practitioner with forty years' experience in New Zealand Public Trust, and direct knowledge of New Zealand farm economics. Unnamed at present — we have not yet asked whether he wishes to be named. | Reviewed the capital schedule unprompted and without fee and identified six capital items the schedule had omitted entirely: vehicles and machinery, vehicle and tool sheds, fencing and gates, additional effluent capacity, services and consents, and a construction contingency. | Adopted in full | Every item accepted. The requirement was restated from NZD 3,600,000 to NZD 4,076,500, and the correction is published in §4.2 rather than quietly absorbed. He was right on every one of them. |
| 002 | 20 Aug 2026 | Critical evaluation commissioned by Awqaf New Zealand from a large language model, on instructions to be deliberately severe. Recorded because the source of a correction does not change whether it is correct. | Forty-plus findings. The substantive ones: "61–72% of the capital sits in land" is arithmetically wrong for the total requirement (49.7%); "approximately half the five-year distribution" is not reproducible from the document; "net cost" is used three times and never defined; the four inputs to the §1.2 derivation are not labelled clearly enough as assumptions; the language describing the US$10 unit reads like a retail product; §5.1 asserts a jurisprudential rule without authority for it. | Adopted | All six carried into Draft v3. The land figure now states both bases; the fraction was withdrawn; net cost is defined once and used consistently; the assumptions are labelled, including that two of them cannot be sourced; the unit language now frames a question rather than describing a product; and the "no mixing" proposition is submitted as a hypothesis, with four objections to temporary waqf added at full strength. |
| 003 | 20 Aug 2026 | Second critical evaluation, commissioned on the same instructions from a different large language model. | Overlapping findings on unsourced figures, plus two of its own: that temporary waqf rests on a minority position while the majority — Shāfiʿī, Ḥanbalī and classical Ḥanafī — require perpetuity; and that a guaranteed principal generating benefit approaches ribā. It also argued that a 300-ewe flock could not supply large Qurbani volumes. | Partly adopted | The minority-position point was adopted and is now stated plainly in §5.1 — we are not on the majority view and do not present ourselves as being on it. The ribā objection was not adopted: it applies to the lending variant, where principal is guaranteed, and not to the investment variant, where it is not — which is the distinction §5.1 exists to draw. The flock-volume objection rested on a misreading — the study never claimed the pilot supplies large volumes — but a clarifying paragraph was added anyway, because a capable reader reached that conclusion and others will. |
| 004 | 10 Sep 2026 | A scholar in Islamic economics and waqf, consulted directly on the draft survey instrument. Attribution pending — he has not yet been asked how he wishes to be recorded. | Qurbani givers survey (in preparation). Reviewed the eight questions and judged them clear, and appropriate both to the problems raised and to the objectives intended. On the borrowing of an existing framework he stated that there is no difficulty in adapting an established model to suit the project. | Adopted | Recorded as the first external review of the survey instrument. His view on adapting an established model is noted here because it addresses the objection most likely to be raised against the method — that borrowing the FAO framework is illegitimate rather than prudent. No change to the questions was required. |
| 005 | 11 Sep 2026 | The head of a research centre for charitable studies in Jeddah. Attribution pending — he has been asked how he wishes to be recorded. | Qurbani Utilisation Index (QUI-Awqaf NZ). Objected to the title. He argued that مؤشّر الاستفادة من الأضاحي — the utilisation index — is positive and a sound scientific title, whereas قياس «صفر هدر في الأضاحي» is negative and weak in its Arabic formulation; and that «صفر» asserts a quantity, while the index measures both the quantitative and the qualitative. | Adopted in full | Adopted within a day, in both languages. The index is now the title of the note — in English and in Arabic — and "Measuring Zero Qurbani Waste" has moved to the line above it, as the name of the programme the index serves rather than the name of the method. Page titles, sharing titles and the citation line were all changed with it. His argument that "zero" is a quantity claim while the index is not is what decided it; we had not seen the distinction ourselves. |
| 006 | 12 Sep 2026 | Awqaf New Zealand, against itself. Found internally, by checking our own published claims against our own research file. Logged on the same terms as any comment from outside, because a correction does not become less of a correction for having been found at home. | Qurbani Utilisation Index (QUI-Awqaf NZ). The note states that "there is no national or global Qurbani census." The global half of that holds. The national half does not. A small number of countries and institutions publish counts, and three of them were already sitting in our own research file: Bangladesh's Department of Livestock Services recorded 9.1 million animals sacrificed at Eid-ul-Azha in 2024 (reported in The Daily Star, 11 June 2025); Saudi Arabia's Adahi project publishes an annual capacity of 1.5 million sheep and 1.2 million head contracted in a single Hajj season; and Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı reported 747,052 proxy shares in 2024. A related and stronger claim in an unpublished draft article of ours — "there is no count of Qurbani animals in any country" — was simply false. | Adopted in full | The claim is narrowed rather than withdrawn, because narrowing it makes it both true and more useful. There is no global census. The national figures that do exist count different things by different methods — animals slaughtered, head contracted, proxy shares — over different populations, are not comparable with one another, and none of them measures utilisation, which is the whole subject of this note. That is a better sentence than the one it replaces, and it sharpens rather than weakens the case for the index. Version 2 of the note will carry the corrected wording; the draft article was corrected the same day it was found, and the superseded draft retained. We are recording this before anyone asked us to, because a claim we cannot evidence is the defect this log exists to catch. |
| 007 | 22 Sep 2026 | Raised in review by a large language model (ChatGPT), tested by Awqaf New Zealand, and settled against the primary source. The note was put to two models for criticism. One asserted that FAO had published 2026 guidance on measuring losses of meat, milk and eggs. A second model, asked to verify it, reported that no such publication existed. The second was wrong. The document exists, and reading it changed the note. | Qurbani Utilisation Index (QUI-Awqaf NZ), versions 1 and 2 — two errors and a boundary left loose. (i) The note presented a single rate whose denominator was the total realisable value of the animal, while describing the framework as adapted from an FAO method whose denominator is mass. A value-based rate falls when hide prices fall, with no change in what was recovered. (ii) The measure was called an index; the FAO Food Loss Index tracks change against a base year, and what this note defines is a rate. (iii) The note did not state which parts of the animal FAO counts as food. Guidelines on the measurement of harvest and post-harvest losses — Annex I: Meat, milk and eggs (FAO Statistical Development Series No. 21, 2026) is exact about it: edible offal and blood are food and their discard is a food loss; non-edible skins, bone and horn are not food and their discard is not. The hide is therefore outside SDG 12.3.1(a) by definition, and no alignment brings it in. | Adopted in full | Version 3 rebuilds the note on Annex I. One figure is replaced by three series, reported separately and never summed: food loss and subproduct recovery in mass, utilisation in value. Only the first is described as aligned with FAO. Index is corrected to rate. A tier-of-evidence framework is added, so that no percentage is published without its basis, its sample and its season. And the field survey design is no longer proposed here: Annex I already recommends a representative household sample for countries where households buy live animals to slaughter at home, noting that the volume "is particularly high during some religious festivals". That is the Qurbani, described in a statistical methodology without being named. Two further points are recorded honestly. The model that denied the document existed was answering a question narrowed by the prompt it was given, and the prompt was ours. And the framework is stronger for the correction: what Awqaf New Zealand contributes is now the part FAO has stated has no international standard, rather than a derivative of a method it never fitted. |
Entries 002 and 003 were obtained before the study was circulated for human review, on the reasoning that the specialists we are writing to will very likely put the document through the same tools, and we would rather know what they will find. They are logged on the same terms as any other comment.
smartwaqf@awqafnz.org
Most useful, in order:
What we cannot do is act on everything. Some comments will conflict with others; some will ask for work that belongs to a later stage; some we will simply think are wrong. In each case we will say so here, with the reason, under your name or not as you prefer.