The teacher
Hamza taught this before he built anything.
You are being asked to read out loud, badly, in front of a stranger. It is fair to want to know who the stranger is first.
The record
Four cities, four communities, the same thing needed in each.
He taught Qur'an and led taraweeh before he ever wrote a line of code. That is not a line for a website — it is the order the two things happened in, and it is why this arm of the house is taught by a person rather than shipped as an app.
He has taught at Islah LA in Los Angeles, Midtown Mosque in Memphis, Masjid As-Sabur in Las Vegas, and Atlanta Masjid in Atlanta. His roots are in Los Angeles; he is currently based in Morocco, and the classes run on American clocks.
Standing in front of a congregation teaches you something no course does: you can tell within thirty seconds whether people are with you or being talked at. An adult who cannot read is usually being talked at, politely, for years — which is exactly why they stop asking.
The fifty dollars a month was set on the advice of his own imam. It is deliberately below what this is worth, and the difference is taken as ajr rather than counted as income. Why it is priced that way is written out on the program page rather than left for you to guess at.
Scope, stated up front
What this program is not.
Most of the disappointment in religious education comes from a class being sold as one thing and delivered as another. So here is the boundary before you pay anything, rather than in month three.
It is not full-muṣḥaf ḥifẓ
Memorising Juz ʿAmma is part of what this program does. Memorising the whole muṣḥaf is not — that wants a ḥifẓ circle with daily revision, and a good one is usually in a building near you rather than on a screen.
It is not an ijāzah track
This does not lead to a licence or a chain of transmission. It leads to you reading Juz ʿAmma correctly. That is a different, smaller, and for most adults far more urgent thing.
It is not Arabic as a language
You will learn to read the script and pronounce it properly. You will not come out speaking Arabic or parsing grammar — that is a separate study, and pretending otherwise would waste your year.
And if you are past a stage, you will be moved past it
If the placement call shows you already read fluently, you will not be sat through the letters — you will be placed against tajwīd or memorisation instead. And if what you actually need is something this program genuinely does not teach, you will be told that plainly and pointed to teachers who are not us.
A student paying every month for a class they have outgrown is not a business win; it is somebody being quietly taken.
How he teaches
Four things that do not change, whoever is in the room.
- 01
The mouth before the chart
Time goes on where a letter is made, not on memorising a table of letters. A student who knows where the ḍād lives can find it again; a student who memorised a chart has to start over every time.
- 02
Out loud, every session, by name
You will read aloud every week. This is the entire reason the class is small and the entire reason it is live. Reading silently to yourself is how people spend three years not improving.
- 03
Corrected immediately, never mocked
You get stopped on the spot, told exactly what your tongue did, and asked to do it again. Nobody is laughed at, nobody is compared to anyone else, and nobody's age is ever a joke.
- 04
Told the truth about your progress
If you are not practising, you will be told kindly and directly. If you are moving faster than the cohort, you will be told that too, and moved.
What people who know him say
This is where an imam's words go.
The program page says Hamza is recommended by imams who know his teaching, and that is true. What is not yet true is that any of them have been asked to put their name to it in public — so this space is empty rather than filled with something we wrote ourselves.
It stays empty until the words in it are theirs.
A quote here, from someone whose judgement you already trust, is worth more than everything else on this page put together. It will appear when it has been given, with a name and a masjid attached, or it will not appear at all.
Ten minutes on a call, and you will know.
You read, he listens, and you get told honestly where you are and how far the walk is. There is no charge for that and nothing follows it unless you want it to.
If you want to be taught by him directly rather than in a cohort, there are three private seats at $320 a month. Same teacher, same syllabus — what it buys is an hour nobody else can have.