Majalisnoor: a Quran school off WhatsApp and Discord

Arabic & RTL Education & training

Majalisnoor is the remote Quran-learning programme run by Ihyae foundation — memorisation, recitation, simplified interpretation, contemplation and Quranic calligraphy, with parallel courses alongside, all taught remotely.

A school running on three tools, none of which was a school

The programme worked and students paid for it. What it did not have was anywhere to happen.

Teaching was split between two apps. The thumun and its exegesis went out as audio files in a WhatsApp thread; the live session happened in a Discord room. Discord is good software and the wrong software for this — a student who forgets a password or changes a phone number is locked out of their own classroom, and the person who ends up fixing that is the teacher.

Everything around the teaching was manual. Students arrived through paid campaigns and were then organised by hand: enrolments recorded, classrooms filled, rooms opened, one at a time and again at every intake. The website in front of all of it was a WordPress site that did not convert.

The site

A new graphic identity, carried through into the theme.
WordPress with the Divi builder, responsive across phone, tablet and desktop.
A homepage built around what converts: about, features, testimonials and enrolment.
Over 60 custom PHP, JavaScript and CSS snippets to take WordPress past what Divi ships with.
LiteSpeed page caching.

The member area

Account details, enrolled courses and live-session rooms in one place — one login, held by the student, rather than an account on someone else's chat platform.
Registration and automatic classroom partitioning, so an intake fills its own classrooms instead of being sorted by hand.
A Google Meet room per live session, launched from the platform, running more than 15 concurrent classrooms.

The Quran reader

The Mushaf split into 480 thumuns — 60 sections divided by eight — with page images, recitations and word-by-word meanings aligned to each.
Assembled into a single-page reader students use alongside their course, so the audio that used to arrive as a WhatsApp file sits with the page it belongs to.

The operations behind it

Make.com scenarios connecting the platform to the tools the staff already worked in.
New enrolments synced automatically into Google Contacts.
Subscriptions and renewals archived into spreadsheets for reconciliation.
WhatsApp follow-up sequences triggered by enrolment and renewal events, replacing a manual process that did not scale past a few hundred students.

Bringing students in

A social media presence built for the programme rather than inherited from the foundation.
A new campaign film — script, voice and edit — cut from around a dozen testimonial interviews recorded with students.

What it produced

More than 300 paying students across more than 15 virtual classrooms, within six months of launch — and no manual classroom administration left anywhere in the process.

The site has been replaced since 2023; what is described here is the version I delivered.