A project of Baqiyah
Minbar
The imam preaches in Arabic, as he always has. The congregation reads it in their own language, live, seconds behind, by scanning a QR code at the door.
The wall
Half the room cannot follow Friday.
A Friday congregation can hold Arabic, Somali, Turkish, Bosnian, Persian, Swedish and English speakers in one room, with the khutbah in Arabic and many of the young people born locally understanding almost none of it. They come anyway. They stand for forty minutes and take nothing home.
The usual answers are all bad. Preach in the local language and you lose the Arabic. Preach twice and you lose the congregation. Hand out a printed summary and you are a week behind.
Nothing about the khutbah should have to change. Only who can follow it.
How it works
A poster on the wall, and a phone in your hand.
- The imam speaks normally. No script to submit in advance, no pausing for a translator, no change to how the khutbah is given.
- The congregation scans a QR code at the door. No app to install, no account to create, no login. A web page opens and the translation arrives on it, seconds behind the imam.
- Fourteen languages, at once. Swedish, English, Somali, Turkish, German, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Estonian, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch. Everyone in the room reads in their own.
- Every khutbah is kept. Archived with its translations and searchable afterwards, by theme and by the verses it cited. What was said on a Friday two years ago is still there.
- Imams get a studio. Khutbah Studio is a free preparation tool: somewhere to build the sermon, with the references to hand, before Friday arrives.
For mosques
Free for every mosque, always.
There is no plan, no tier and no per-mosque price, and there will not be one. A mosque registers itself, gets its own imam key, its own QR poster and its own listener link, and is separate from every other mosque on the system. Nobody has to talk to us to start.
That includes the mosques that could pay and the ones that never could. We would rather be small and free than large and charging.
Minbar's own site is currently in Swedish. The service itself is not.
Why it is here
This is the argument, not the product.
Minbar is what Baqiyah exists to do, in its clearest form: a wall between a Muslim and their deen that is not about belief at all, taken down and left down, for free, permanently. A grandmother following the khutbah in her own language for the first time is a better argument for any of this than a hosting bill could ever be.