Faith-tech & Scholarship

Workflow: One App on Web, iPhone, and Android

Before: Most teams would build and maintain three separate apps to reach web, iPhone, and Android. For one person that is not sustainable — but the app still had to feel right on every device.

Outcome: One build, used everywhere people already are. The beta has reached 1,000+ people across web, iPhone, and Android — no separate apps to maintain.

System: Qurannotate is built once and runs on the web, iPhone, and Android, with each version tuned to feel right on that device. People get the same capable app wherever they are. Paid monthly and yearly plans work across all three.

Workflow: Study Together Live, Even With No Internet

Before: Studying the Quran is something people do together — study circles, teachers and students, research groups. At the same time, people on weak or patchy connections cannot risk losing their notes when the signal drops.

Outcome: People study together with no fuss, and every note is safe no matter the connection. Anyone on a slow or spotty signal can work without worrying about losing their place.

System: Up to 30 people can write on the same Quran at once and see each other's cursors live, with no clashes when two people edit the same spot. If the internet drops, the app keeps working — your changes save on your device and sync the moment you are back online. Nothing is lost.

Workflow: AI Study Helper You Can Actually Trust

Before: Students and scholars need fast, reliable answers about Quranic Arabic, tafsir, and grammar. General AI tools make things up and can't point to real sources, so they can't be trusted for serious work.

Outcome: Get scholar-grade answers in seconds instead of hours of looking things up by hand. Because every answer shows its source, you can check it and trust it.

System: Ask about a word, its grammar, its tafsir, or where a topic shows up elsewhere, and get an answer drawn from a large library of trusted Islamic scholarship. Every answer comes with the exact source it's based on — and it won't answer without one. So unlike general AI, it doesn't make things up.

Workflow: Easy to Use, Easy to Find

Before: An app used by Arabic and English speakers around the world has to be easy to use, easy to understand, and easy to find. Most niche apps get none of these right.

Outcome: Arabic speakers get an app that reads the right way round. Everyone gets a product that's easy to use and well explained. The search articles keep pulling in new visitors over time.

System: The website has a help centre with 16 articles covering every main feature, full right-to-left Arabic support so it reads naturally, and accessibility checks that block any release that breaks them. 17 articles bring in new visitors from search. A desktop version is in the works but not out yet.

Workflow: Private AI, Running In-House

Before: Renting AI from a big cloud provider would mean unpredictable bills, handing sensitive religious text to a third party, and speed limits that make overnight runs impractical.

Outcome: New commentary keeps reaching tafsirtool.com, fast enough to cover the whole library, at the cost of a graphics card instead of a never-ending rental bill.

System: The AI runs entirely on one machine in-house, working on eight passages at once. It splits the text cleanly so no verse is ever cut in half, translates it, and tidies the result — all without sending anything outside. 15 classical scholars are already covered in the live product.

Workflow: Every Translation, Checked Automatically

Before: Translating fast is useless if mistakes slip through. People could never review every line by hand fast enough, and bad output would quietly pile up.

Outcome: Every line is checked, so only translations that pass reach scholars and readers on tafsirtool.com.

System: After each translation, a separate AI reviews it against the original Arabic, records a clear pass or fail, and sends anything weak back to be redone. Nothing reaches readers until it passes.

Workflow: Turning Old Scans Into Clean Text

Before: The source texts are old scans with messy layouts and mixed scripts. Ordinary text-reading tools choke on them and pass mistakes straight through.

Outcome: The translation step always starts from clean, sound text instead of raw scan errors.

System: The scans are read and turned into clean, structured Arabic text. First, a 425-line check went through the documents and logged roughly 105 problems — odd headers, broken page breaks, text running the wrong way — so they could be fixed before any translation started.

Workflow: Runs Overnight Without a Babysitter

Before: Long jobs on a single machine can get stuck repeating themselves, wander off track, or crash the hardware — and any of those can ruin a night's work unnoticed.

Outcome: Big overnight jobs finish on their own — the system handles the usual failures itself instead of needing someone to watch for them.

System: Every job is wrapped in safety checks. It spots when the AI starts repeating itself and retries, rejects answers that are the wrong length, and a watchdog restarts the machine on its own if it freezes or runs out of memory. Progress is saved as it goes, so a restart picks up where it left off.

Workflow: A Writing Tool Built for Islamic Scholarship

Before: Writers needed to do things no normal text editor allows: add Arabic honorifics and transliteration marks, drop in citations tied to a shared reference list, and place Arabic passages correctly inside English sentences.

Outcome: Writers do everything in one place, the right way the first time — no pasting from Word, no fiddly manual formatting, no second editor for Arabic. What comes out is clean, well-structured content the site can use straight away.

System: A writing tool made for Islamic academic work, with 11 features no standard editor offers: citations checked against a shared reference list as you type, honorific and transliteration marks, Arabic passages that sit correctly inside English text, and Qur'an or Hadith passages added by searching for them.

Workflow: Publishing, Donations and Search in One System

Before: The think-tank publishes six different kinds of work and needed one system that walks each one through a set approval path, takes Gift Aid donations, makes print-ready PDFs, and runs a search that understands Islamic academic terms.

Outcome: Every kind of publication follows the same clear path, with the right people approving the right steps and citations checked automatically — no ad-hoc sign-offs, no confusion over who does what, no PDFs made by hand. Donations and search are part of the system itself, not bolted-on add-ons.

System: One system that handles six kinds of publication. Every piece moves through a set path — draft, in review, needs revision, approved — with each of the 5 staff roles able to do only its part, a final check before anything goes live, and citations verified along the way. It also takes one-off and recurring donations with UK Gift Aid through Stripe, produces print-ready PDFs that handle Arabic and footnotes, and runs a search tuned with 175 Islamic-academic terms.

Workflow: Moving Years of Work Across Safely

Before: Years of papers, author bios, and records sat in the old site in a messy, disconnected state. Moving them risked losing data, breaking old web links, and wiping out search rankings built up over years.

Outcome: Everything came across intact — nothing lost, nothing orphaned, and old links still work instead of breaking. The search rankings built up over years were kept from day one of the switch.

System: Moved 46 research papers and 147 author profiles out of the old site, cleaned them up, and brought them into the new one with authors, papers, and references properly linked together. Every old web address was set to point to its new home, so nothing breaks and search rankings carry over.

Workflow: A Polished Look That Matches the Design Exactly

Before: A think-tank publishing across many academic subjects needed a polished, readable look that matched the approved design exactly — beautiful Arabic and English type, and its own colour for each subject — with no drift between the design and the live site.

Outcome: The live site looks exactly like the approved design — no drift, no off colours, no styling that fights the system. Designers and developers work from one shared source that flows straight into the site.

System: The live site matches the approved design pixel for pixel. Latin text is set in Proxima Nova and Arabic in Amiri, with a full range of heading and body sizes. Each academic subject gets its own accent colour. (Note: the accent colours aren't final with the client yet.)

Workflow: Locked Down and Built to Stay Up

Before: A site holding scholarly work, member accounts, and donation details can't go live with a serious security hole or a shaky setup. The code it started from had a critical flaw that let attackers take over accounts, plus weak bot protection and no safety net for outages.

Outcome: The site goes live with no known critical holes and several layers of protection — bots and abuse blocked up front, everything kept apart so a problem in one place can't spread, and automatic backups and monitoring that catch trouble before anyone notices.

System: Closed a critical hole that let attackers take over accounts without a password (rated CVSS 9.1), and added layers to keep bots and break-in attempts out. The setup runs in isolated containers with off-site backups, round-the-clock uptime monitoring, and a process that ships updates safely and the same way every time.