Awqaf New Zealand · Registered Charity CC46694 · Feasibility Study — Qurbani Sheep-Dairy Pilot
Every substantive comment received, what was done about it, and — where we declined to act — why
Maintained continuously · last updated 20 August 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.
Nobody is named here without their agreement. When you write to us, tell us which you prefer:
If you do not say, we default to descriptive and ask you before publishing anything more. The same rule applies here as everywhere else on this site: we do not use anyone's name without permission.
| 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. |
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.