As-salaamu alaykum. Welcome to Ummah Library.

A members-only library of Islamic audio, books and lectures, shared peer-to-peer. New to torrents? This page is for you.

What BitTorrent is, in plain words

When you open a book or play a lecture from a normal website, one server sends it to you, and if that server goes down it is gone. BitTorrent is different: the people who already have the file share it with you directly, and while you download, parts flow to you from several of those people at once. Then, while it is on your device, your device helps the next person get it too. Everyone contributes a little, so a file held by hundreds of people does not have to live on one expensive server.

That is why it fits a library of the Ummah beautifully: lectures recorded years ago stay alive, because people like you keep sharing them. Sharing here is called seeding, and it is the quiet good deed that keeps the library breathing.

Getting started in three steps

Get a torrent app on your device. It is just a normal app, like a podcast player. See the recommendations below.
Make your account here with your UmmahPass sign in. One account works across the whole UMG network.
Open any item's page, download its small torrent file, and open it. Your torrent app takes over and fetches the real content, piece by piece, from the people sharing it.

Android phone or tablet

We recommend LibreTorrent (free, no ads, open source). If you prefer installing from the open-source app store, the same app is on F-Droid.

There is no official qBittorrent app for Android: qBittorrent is a desktop program, and the "qBittorrent remote" apps only control a computer running it elsewhere. On an Android device, LibreTorrent is the qBittorrent-class client.

Desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux)

qBittorrent: free, open source, no ads, the standard the whole world uses.

iPhone / iPad

Apple removes torrent apps from its store, which is a store policy, not a licence problem. The honest workaround is the desktop app, or adding a torrent on a desktop and letting your Apple device play the finished file from iCloud or SMB. We would rather say that plainly than send you a sketchy app.

The etiquette (adab) of our library

Give back a little. Keep the app running after a download finishes, even briefly, so you are sharing while you take. Seeding is the good deed that keeps everything alive.
Rights matter. Everything here is free-to-share by licence or shared with permission. If you hold the rights to something listed in error, our copyright page explains exactly how to ask for its removal.
Respect the members. This is a private library. Do not re-share members' files where the sharing would harm the people who trusted the library.

Small words, decoded

.torrent file - a small "recipe" that tells a torrent app what to fetch. It is not the content itself.
Seeder - a person whose device holds the complete file and shares it. Every seed makes downloads faster for everyone.
Peer - someone fetching the same file as you; peers trade pieces between themselves too.
Magnet link - a shortcut that points a torrent app at the same recipe without a file. Many torrent pages use one.
Ratio - how much you have shared divided by how much you took. Our community ladder rewards people who give back.

One honest note: mobile networks sometimes block torrent traffic, and some office or campus wifi does too. If nothing seems to connect at first, home wifi is where it will work; that is the feature of the time and place, not a fault in the library.