alhalaqa.org

Halaqa

Where a cohort studies together.

Recorded lectures become a study companion for every student. The cohort works through hard questions before they reach the teacher. And every lecture is held as an أَمَانَة in our own private cloud.

Prepared for schools, coordinators, cohort leaders, instructors and students school owners and directors school coordinators cohort leaders instructors and scholars students · November 2026

What you will see

The problem every seminary cohort knows
What Halaqa does with one recording, in one hour
Three short demos: the lecture page, Rafiq AI, and the phone
The cohort: notebook, Halaqa calls, and Ask your instructor
Running a school: roles, console, activity and cost
Amanah: where the data lives and who can see it
Plans and how to start

The problem every cohort knows

A two-hour recording goes online. Students rewatch it hunting for a definition they half remember.
Terms like تَصَوُّر and تَصْدِيق fly past without a glossary.
Questions scatter across WhatsApp and are lost by the next week.
The teacher answers the same question five times.
The school cannot see who is keeping up and who is drifting away.
Recordings sit on consumer drives and public tools, outside the school's control.

"I listened to the whole lecture again just to find the line about qiyas."
a Year 1 student, Logic course

One recording in. A study companion out.

Upload the lecture. Within the hour the cohort has:

📜

Synced transcriptScrolls with the video, with speaker separation.

🧭

Chapters and study guideJump to any point. Key takeaways first.

Arabic terms, explainedScript, transliteration, plain-English meaning, first mention.

🃏

Flashcards and quizWritten from the lecture, fed into daily review.

🕸

Mind map and FAQThe shape of two hours at a glance; every node jumps the video.

🎧

Audio recapTwo hosts; Arabic read by a native Arabic voice.

🔎

Search across the termLectures, texts, resources and your own notes.

Rafiq AIAnswers only from your cohort's material, and cites the minute or page.

📚

Classical textsScanned Arabic OCR'd and translated, side by side.

From recording to study companion

UploadVideo, audio, PDF, scan, or a link. Straight from the browser or the phone.

TranscribeSpeaker-separated transcript, checkpointed every 10 minutes.

EnrichChapters, guide, terms, flashcards, quiz, FAQ, mind map, audio recap.

IndexHybrid search, scoped to the school and the cohort.

NotifyBranded email and phone push with the takeaways and deep links.

Scanned Arabic texts go through OCR and page-by-page translation, shown side by side.

Handwritten notes are recognised and cleaned up; drawings stay editable.

Halaqa call recordings get the same treatment, as meeting summaries.

Demo 1 · A lecture page Logic, lecture 2, live site

alhalaqa.org/dar-al-rayyan/tsp/2026-28/courses/logic/lectures/…

Chapters jump the video · Study guide · Transcript · Terms · FAQ · Flashcards · Quiz · Mind map · Audio recap

Every tab, from one recording

Study guideTranscriptTermsFAQFlashcardsQuizMind mapAudio recap

Demo 2 · Rafiq AI رَفِيق companion, never a teacher

alhalaqa.org/…/ask

Answers only from the cohort's lectures, texts, resources and the student's own notes
Cites every claim: lecture @ minute, or text, page. Click to jump.
Says it is not an instructor when asked
Private chats that persist; follow-up suggestions; Save to Notebook
Scope to one lecture, one text, or the whole cohort

Rafiq AI: what it does, and where it lives

Capabilities

Grounded answers from the cohort's transcripts, course texts, curated resources and the student's own notebooks, with a citation on every claim
Hybrid retrieval: keyword, meaning and a semantic reranker across the whole term, in English and Arabic
Writes the study material: summaries, chapters, glossary terms, flashcards, quizzes, FAQ, mind maps, and the two-host audio recap script
Reads Arabic: OCR of scanned مَتْن and شَرْح, page-by-page translation, handwriting clean-up
Plans and summarises: drafts the Halaqa call agenda, summarises call recordings with questions raised and follow-ups
Knows its limits: says "I do not know" when it is not in the material; never a human instructor; usage metered per plan

Where you meet it

Ask Rafiqthe chat page: scope to the cohort, a course, a lecture or a text; past chats, follow-ups, export

Inside every lecture"Ask Rafiq AI" beside the tabs, with the lecture as context

Inside every text"Ask Rafiq about this text", scoped to the book

Your notebookquiz me on these notes; save any chat as a notebook page

Halaqa calls"Draft with Rafiq AI" study plan; post-call summary

Home pagelast-lecture highlights and "Ask Rafiq" chips in What's new

Search and glossarythe same index and term definitions Rafiq reads from

Phone and tabletRafiq tab in the bottom bar; chat sized to the keyboard

Rafiq runs on Azure OpenAI models inside our tenant. Prompts, lectures and answers are never used to train a model. Every question is logged to the cohort's activity and attributed to its cost.

Say: "Rafiq is not a chatbot bolted on the side. The same engine that answers questions is the one that wrote the study guide, the glossary and the flashcards, and it sits inside every page where a student might get stuck."

How grounding works (if asked): each question is embedded, the search index returns the best-matching chunks filtered to this school, this cohort, and notebooks the student may see; the model is instructed to answer only from those chunks and cite them as [Lecture @ time] or [Text, p.]. Sources appear beneath every answer; clicking one opens the lecture at that second or the text at that page.

Models: GPT-5.5 for answers, guides and translation; a fast model for follow-up suggestions and handwriting clean-up; text-embedding-3-large for retrieval; gpt-4o-transcribe with diarization for lectures; Azure Speech for the recap voices; Document Intelligence for Arabic OCR. All in the private Azure tenant.

Limits: Free 300k tokens a month, Individual 2M, Circle 3M, staff unlimited. Credits top up at $5 per million.

Instructors: Rafiq can misread a passage; the citation is the safeguard. It will not give fatwa and tells the student to ask the instructor for rulings.

Classical texts, side by side

Matn al-Sullam · Arabic, with English translation · 10 pages

Arabic text with side by side translation

Scanned Arabic مَتْن and شَرْح: OCR'd page by page, then translated
Read English, side by side, or Arabic; find in text across both
A reading guide: what the text is, how it is structured, how to read it
Terms from the text join the glossary with page numbers
"Ask Rafiq about this text" scoped to the book
Published translations linked in Resources for verification

Glossary and daily review

Glossary · 732 terms · Review

Every Arabic term from every lecture and text, in one place
Filter by subject, course, letter; search in Arabic or English; hear the pronunciation
Mark difficult · learning · known
Difficult terms become cards in Daily review (spaced repetition, like Anki)
A goal, a streak, and a 7-day bar on the home page

Your own notebook, in your own words

Photographed paper notes recognised — Photograph paper notes → recognised, cleaned, summarised, self-test questions

Sketch pad on iPad — Write or draw on a tablet: pressure, highlighter, eraser, palm rejection, multi-page

Notebook page with Ask Rafiq — Import Notion, Zoom, Evernote, Word, PDF · Ask Rafiq about these notes · share with the cohort, or keep private

Halaqa calls حَلْقَة · student-run live study

Halaqa calls · study plan drafted by Rafiq

A scheduled Halaqa call with its study plan

Vote on the topics that need a call
Schedule: calendar invites, RSVP, reminders on the phone
Plan: Rafiq drafts a time-boxed agenda from the voted topics and the cohort's own lectures; the host edits
Meet in the browser: voice, video, screen share, shared whiteboard, shared playback of any lecture, raise hand, chat
Afterwards: attendance, recording, and a summary to the cohort with topics, deferred questions and follow-ups

Ask your instructor: the cohort first

1 · Raise a topic"Why is the middle term dropped in the conclusion?"

2 · Classmates vote"I'm stuck on this too"

3 · Research notesWhat I tried · I worked it out · I can explain this

4 · Halaqa callTake the most-voted topics to a call

5 · Write to the instructorUnlocks only after the cohort has genuinely tried

Ask your instructor · topic with votes, notes and the checklist

For the instructor: quiet by design

Console › Questions · the instructor's inbox

Questions arrive by email and phone push, pinned to the lecture and minute
An inbox with the open count; one answer notifies everyone who was stuck
Private questions stay between the asker and staff
Review and approve uploaded content; see the cohort's activity
No admin work: instructors cannot invite, approve or change roles
Full plan at no cost: audio recaps, mind maps, Rafiq without limits

A home page built for the week

Home · What's new · Daily review · Next classes · Questions

Branded notification email — Every new lecture, text, call invitation and call summary: branded email and phone notification, with the takeaways and deep links

Demo 3 · One app on every device

Installs from the site on iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows, Mac, ChromeOS. No store account. Updates itself.
Bottom tab bar on phones; sidebar on tablets and desktops
Notifications for new lectures, Halaqa calls, answers
Share photos and PDFs from any app into the Notebook
Optional offline reading; text size, Arabic size, sepia and dark themes
Apple Pencil, S Pen, Surface Pen in the sketch pad
Native Google Play and App Store shells are built and awaiting listing

Five roles, one console

Role	Who	Can	Cannot
Student	Every member	Study everything in the cohort; own notebook, chats, review, questions; My study view	See other cohorts; see private notes of others
Instructor	The scholar teaching the cohort	Answer questions; review and approve content; see activity and members	Invite, approve, suspend, change roles
Cohort Leader	A trusted student per cohort	Approve members and uploads; invite; courses, schedule, live-class link; usage	Touch other cohorts; school settings
School Coordinator	The school's administrator	All cohorts; programs, cohorts, terms, curriculum; branding and listing; plan; everything a leader can	Other schools
Site Owner	Halaqa	Approve new schools; plans and limits; cross-school audit and cost	—

Every permission is an explicit allow-list per action, enforced on the server and mirrored in the console. Memberships are per cohort; coordinators hold a whole-school membership.

The school console

Console › Overview · Members · Content · Activity · Usage & cost · Courses · Cohorts · Programs · School

Pending approvals · Content to approve · Active students · Rafiq questions · All cohorts in one table · Branding, listing and plan

Running a cohort as its leader

Members — Invite by email as student or leader; approve requests; share the invite code; suspend

Courses — Schedule, instructor and live-class link per course; add or remove courses; see lecture counts

Content: uploads from students stay hidden until approved; one click to approve, reassign to the right course, or re-process
Activity: who watched what, quizzes taken, Rafiq questions, notes, per student
Upload any media from the browser; the lecture number and date are read from the filename

See the cohort, and what it costs

Per-student activity — Active days, time watching, content opened, Rafiq questions, quizzes, uploads, allocated cost

Usage and cost — Infrastructure and AI spend by day, service, cohort and student, from the cloud bill, refreshed every 6 hours

Every page view, play, search and admin action is written to a two-year audit trail. Nothing is sold, shared or used for advertising.

أَمَانَة Amanah: the lectures are a trust

Our private Azure tenant · United States

School A

Cohort 2025-27

Cohort 2026-28

School B

Cohort 2026-27

Independent students

A cohort of one, each

Storage · Database · Search · Speech · Document AI · Language models · Calls and email all inside the tenant

Each school is a separate tenant; the cohort is the unit of privacy. Every read is filtered by school and cohort on the server. Nothing crosses cohorts, even inside one school.
Private notebooks and chats never reach another student's search or Rafiq answers.
Language models run inside the same tenant: your lectures are never used to train a model and never sent to a consumer AI service.
Uploads go straight from the browser to our storage; sign-in via Google, Microsoft or email link; a two-year audit trail of every action.
Recordings are uploaded by the cohort for its own study and shared only within it. Uploaders confirm they have the right to share.

Say slowly. "We consider what the scholars deliver an amanah. The architecture starts from that."

Facts to quote: private Azure tenant, East US region. Multi-tenant database partitioned by school; every query carries the school and cohort; the search index carries school, cohort, owner and visibility. Models are Azure-hosted (Azure OpenAI, Speech, Document Intelligence) under the tenant's data-handling terms: prompts and outputs are not used to train models.

If asked "can Halaqa staff see our lectures?" The Site Owner role exists for platform operation and school approval; access is logged. We can put this in a written data agreement for the school.

If asked about deletion: content, notebooks and memberships can be deleted by the school's roles; the audit log is kept two years.

How Halaqa is different

	Group chat + drive	Generic LMS	Public AI chatbot	Halaqa
Understands the lecture	✗ files only	✗ files only	✗ not your lecture	✓ transcript, terms, guide, cards, map, audio
Answers grounded in your material	✗	✗	✗ the internet, may invent	✓ only the cohort's material, with citations
Arabic handled properly	✗	✗	partial	✓ OCR, side-by-side, glossary, native voices
Questions reach the teacher	lost in the scroll	a forum	never	✓ cohort funnel, then one prepared question
Live study together	a link	a link	✗	✓ voted topics, AI plan, in-browser room, summary
Where the data lives	consumer cloud	vendor cloud	vendor, may train	✓ our private US tenant, cohort-isolated, no training
Built for	anything	schools in general	everyone	✓ traditional Islamic studies in English

The first cohort, eight weeks in

0lectures studyable

0hours of recording

0classical texts, 1,000+ pages

0glossary terms

0students in the cohort

0minutes to process a lecture

Dar al-Rayyan · Traditional Studies Program · cohort 2026–28 · three courses this term: Introduction to the Islamic Sciences, Logic (Sharh al-Sullam), Sharh al-Muqaddimat

Plans for students

Free

Every lecture and text your cohort uploads
Transcripts, study guides, glossary, flashcards, quizzes
Notebook, Halaqa calls, Ask your instructor
Rafiq AI: 300k tokens a month

Individual

$12/month

or $120 a year (two months free)

Everything in Free
Rafiq AI: 2M tokens a month
Audio recaps
Mind maps
Spaced-repetition review

Study circle

$8/seat/month

classmates chip in

When the cohort's seats are funded, everyone in it gets:
Shared notes and discussion threads
Shared flashcard decks
Rafiq AI: 3M tokens a month

AI credits: $5 per million tokens, never expire. Instructors and cohort leaders always get the full plan at no cost. Billing is handled by a merchant of record; the app never sees card details.

Monthly plans for schools

Cohort

$199/month

one cohort, up to 30 students

Every student on the full plan: Rafiq 2M tokens, audio recaps, mind maps, review, shared notes and threads
Console: members, content, activity, usage and cost
Your page at alhalaqa.org/your-school
Up to 40 hours of new recordings a month

School

$499/month

up to 5 cohorts, 150 students

Everything in Cohort, for every cohort
Programs, terms and curriculum seeding
Custom colours and logo; listed in the directory
Instructor accounts for every scholar
Priority support, same-day

Seminary

$999/month

unlimited cohorts

Everything in School
Written data agreement and audit exports
Dedicated onboarding and migration of past recordings
Quarterly engagement report per cohort
Roadmap input and early features

Pay monthly, cancel any time. Annual: two months free. Extra students at $6 a month each. No per-student billing for you to manage: the school pays, every student is covered.

Positioning: the Cohort plan is under $7 per student per month, less than a single textbook per term, and it covers every student without the school collecting money from anyone.

Proposed pricing. These school tiers are new and are not yet configured in billing. Treat them as the opening offer and confirm before a signed quote. Student plans (previous slide) are the existing configured ones.

Cost basis for your own judgement: the fixed platform runs at roughly $150 a month today for the first school; AI usage adds a few dollars per cohort; transcription is about $0.50 per lecture hour; audio recaps a few cents per lecture. Margin is comfortable at these tiers.

Discounts: founding schools (first five) could get the School tier at the Cohort price for the first year; non-profits 20%.

What to ask for: a pilot with one cohort for one term on the Cohort plan, starting with the recordings they already have.

Live in a week, not a semester

Day 1

Your school pageWe create the school, the program, the first cohort, its terms and courses from a short form you fill in.

Day 2

PeopleCoordinators and instructors receive their invitations. You name a cohort leader.

Day 3

RecordingsUpload the lectures you already have. Each is studyable within the hour; students are notified.

Day 4

StudentsShare the invite code; students sign in with Google, Microsoft or email and join instantly.

Week 2

First Halaqa callThe cohort votes on topics and meets. Questions start reaching the teacher through the funnel.

Nothing to install on your side. Your existing recording habit (Zoom, a phone, a camera) does not change.

Your school not on Halaqa yet? Study on your own.

alhalaqa.org/study

One click creates a private study space of one
Upload the classes you attend, lectures you follow online, or the texts you are reading
Transcripts, guides, glossary, flashcards, review, notebook and Rafiq, from your own material
Nothing you add is visible to anyone else
Then bring your school: alhalaqa.org/schools/new

Halaqa

Where a cohort studies together.

Next step: a one-cohort pilot for one term, starting with the recordings you already have. Next step: name your cohort, share the invite code, upload the first three recordings. Next step: accept the instructor invitation; questions will reach you by email, pinned to the minute. Next step: sign in at alhalaqa.org, find your school, and install the app on your phone.

alhalaqa.org
support@alhalaqa.org
Halaqa is an independent student initiative, not affiliated with or endorsed by any school, program or instructor.

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