Mohamed Barkhad has spent his career around technology — six and a half years at Cisco Systems, and now nearly six years at Google as a cloud architect. But the work he’s most proud of doesn’t appear on his resume. It’s an app called Retain Quran, which has reached more than 1.3 million downloads in 120 countries, with multi-language support across twelve languages.
This week on the Muslim Philanthropy Podcast, AMCF Co-Founder and Chief Development Officer Muhi Khwaja sat down with Mohamed — co-founder and chairman of Retain Quran Foundation — to talk about how the project started, what makes it different, and why he believes now is the moment to build the foundation that will carry the next generation.
From Abu Dhabi to Canton
Mohamed was born in Abu Dhabi, where his mother worked as a nurse and his father was a journalist who had completed his master’s at Baghdad University. The family moved to Canada when Mohamed was seven, looking for stability and citizenship for him and his three siblings. Twenty-one years in Canada, a bachelor’s in computer networking from Carleton University, six and a half years at Cisco, and nearly six years at Google later, Mohamed and his wife landed in Canton, Michigan — a community Mohamed described on the podcast as “second to none” among the places he’s lived.
He spoke openly about the years before that — going through public school, the challenges of holding onto identity when surrounded by friends taking different paths, and the foundation his parents built through education, through books, through the spelling bees they used to hold between siblings. That foundation, he said, is what brought him back to his deen as a young adult, and what now shapes how he thinks about parenting.
A doctor, an app, and a gap in the market
The idea for Retain Quran came from Mohamed’s wife — now a medical doctor in emergency medicine, then a med student. She was using the spaced repetition app Anki for her board exams, and had memorized more than half the Quran. One day she asked: what if we brought spaced repetition and active recall to Quran retention?
Mohamed started talking to people who had memorized the Quran — including his father-in-law — and heard the same thing again and again. Memorizing a page is the easy part. Retaining it is the hard part. His mother-in-law, he said, spends twelve to fourteen hours a day reviewing what she’s memorized. Most parents and students don’t have that kind of time. If technology could make even a couple of focused hours as effective as twelve, it would change how the Quran is preserved across a generation.
That was the founding insight.
What makes Retain Quran different
Most Quran apps focus on one slice of the journey — reading, memorization, habit-building. Retain Quran is being built as an end-to-end system: meet users wherever they are in their journey, give them the tools to succeed at that stage, and help them progress.
When the team launched, they hit 100,000 installs in the first month. Today, the app has more than 1.3 million downloads across 120 countries, with the top user bases in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Egypt, and Somalia, and growing traction across Northern Africa and Southeast Asia. Multi-language support spans twelve languages.
Recent additions include AI-powered recitation feedback, AI-generated flashcards, and a hasanat leaderboard — the team noticed that 60–70% of users are casual readers rather than memorizers, and built features to keep that group engaged with their reading. The mushaf options inside the app are deliberately broad, too: classic Madani, color-coded tajweed, Indo-Pak script, and 13-, 15-, and 16-line layouts, with Warsh recitation planned next.
The app is free to download, free to use, with no paywall — because Mohamed and his team believe access to the technology shouldn’t depend on what country you live in or what you can afford.
The team behind the app
When Muhi asked what advice Mohamed would give to someone trying to build something similar, his answer was direct: don’t try to do it alone. The biggest mistake he made early on was trying to do everything himself — content, marketing, product. The team he eventually built around the project is what changed the trajectory: Google AI engineers, a PhD data scientist with over twenty years of automatic speech recognition (ASR) model experience, a user acquisition specialist who has scaled apps to 50 million downloads, and a content creator who grew their Facebook following from 100 to 170,000 in under a year.
“You can’t be good at everything,” Mohamed said. The right team, working in their respective lanes, makes the difference.
What the fundraising will support
Retain Quran Foundation is raising $300,000 to scale toward a goal of 10 million users by the end of next Ramadan. The funds will support three areas: improving the AI recitation feedback model with anonymized user data so it can give more accurate guidance, scaling into specific markets in Asia and Northern Africa with local influencer partnerships, and building an AI-driven layer that connects the existing tools into a personalized journey for each user.
There is a long-term sustainability plan in place — in-app donation flows, optimized conversion paths, and culturally calibrated giving in target markets — but the foundation work needs to happen first.
The connection to AMCF, Mohamed shared, came through a family with a donor-advised fund who wanted to support the project. That kind of intentional, faith-aligned giving is exactly what AMCF’s DAFs are designed to enable.
The deeper motivation
Toward the end of the conversation, Mohamed shared the hadith that drives him on this project. The Prophet (peace be upon him) said that three things follow a person to their grave — their family, their wealth, and their deeds. Two of them return. Only their deeds remain.
Sadaqah jariyah — ongoing charity — is one of those deeds. Plant a tree, and the reward continues as long as the tree benefits people. Dig a well, and it lasts as long as the well does. But beneficial knowledge, Mohamed said, can last for generations. A person who memorizes the Quran teaches it to the next generation, who teaches it to the next.
That multi-generational impact is what this project is trying to enable. And that, he said, is why now — while the foundation is being built — is the moment to support.
How to listen and how to give
You can listen to the full conversation on the Muslim Philanthropy Podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts. To support Retain Quran Foundation through your donor-advised fund at AMCF, visit the Fund Your DAF portal or reach out to our team directly.
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