Tools made in the spirit of the study circle

The name

A riwāq (رِواق) is a portico — a covered colonnade of arches running along a courtyard. In the great teaching mosques, and at al-Azhar in Cairo most famously, the word came to mean the quarters where students lived and studied together, often grouped by the lands they had come from.

We chose the name because it describes what we hope to build: a sheltered, orderly place at the edge of the courtyard, where a student can sit down with their books and find what they need.

Our aim

Students of Arabic and the Islamic sciences spend years with the same few tasks: looking words up, learning the vocabulary of their set texts, and — increasingly — writing Arabic on a keyboard. Riwaq is a growing collection of tools for exactly those tasks, each one designed to do a single thing clearly and well.