Mohamed Moussa had reached a breaking point.
As a software engineer at Facebook, he watched a firestorm ignite within the company when a politician from India's ruling party posted inflammatory anti-Muslim rhetoric, calling for violence against Muslims and the destruction of mosques.
Facebook users reported the posts for violating the platform's policies, but the company did not take them down.
Moussa came to believe that Facebook was prioritizing its business interests in its largest market over its own safety policies.
When public pressure finally forced the company to reverse course, the internal explanations Facebook offered to employees felt dishonest to him.
"That's enough for me," he decided. "I'm not going to continue working for this company."
He quit.
His decision meant leaving behind a lucrative salary and the prestige of working at one of the world's most powerful companies.
But it also meant he could turn his full attention to a project he had been quietly building for years.
That project was Tarteel, a Qur'an app that would eventually reach millions across the world.
And it all began with a problem most Muslims know well: a forgotten verse and a clumsy Arabic keyboard.
* * *
The problem was simple: a digital annoyance disrupting his spiritual practice.
Born in Canada of Egyptian heritage, Moussa grew up with a deep connection to the Qur'an.
As an engineering student at the University of Waterloo, known for its rigorous internship program, Mohamed had already built a reputation for self-driven learning.
While his degree wasn't in software, he spent his nights and weekends teaching himself to code, building side projects, and climbing the ranks of the tech world through a series of increasingly prestigious internships.
That builder's impulse, to identify a frustration and engineer a solution, soon targeted his daily spiritual practice.
An ayah would come to mind during a lecture or while he walked to class, a fragment of a verse he wanted to explore. But trying to type the Arabic words on a keyboard proved clumsy and slow. While he struggled to find Arabic letters on his keyboard, the ayah would slip from his memory.
"I would remember a few words from an ayah, but I struggled with typing them out to find it," he recalls.
As a builder at heart, he saw a straightforward engineering problem.
“I thought, ‘I should just be able to recite those few words, and something should find it for me,’” he says.
So, he built it.
He created a simple desktop application for himself, a private tool to scratch his own itch.
It worked.
He showed it to a few friends, and they reacted immediately and unanimously: How can I get this?
He realized the problem wasn't just his. The community shared this frustration.
But distributing raw code was impractical. He needed to make the solution accessible.
So, while still a student, he taught himself Android development and built the first mobile version of the app.
He initially named it Iqra, which later became Tarteel, and for years, it remained a passion project, a quiet, open-source endeavor he worked on in his spare time.
* * *
His departure from Facebook provided the final push.
The passion project could no longer remain on the sidelines; it had to become his main focus.
Moussa moved back home to Canada and committed to Tarteel full-time.
The team's ambition had grown far beyond a simple search tool. They envisioned a true AI-powered Qur'an companion, one that could not just find verses but listen to a user's recitation and gently correct their mistakes.
This represented a monumental leap in complexity, a challenge that required serious research and development.
But world-class AI doesn't come cheap.
The volunteer, open-source model that had served Tarteel for years couldn't support the immense cost of training sophisticated machine learning models.
"Our progress was really, really limited and slow," Moussa says.
To realize their vision, they needed resources.
After exploring their options, the team made a critical decision: they established a for-profit company. This offered the most effective path to fund their mission and get the technology into the hands of millions.
The cost of that conviction ran steep.
"The salary that I was making when I left Facebook five years ago is still higher than my compensation today," Moussa says.
An intense personal sacrifice matched the financial compromise. The work became all-consuming.
"This is not really a 9-to-5 job," he says.
He recalls a week before this past Ramadan: "It was Thursday, and I had already worked 100 hours."
* * *
That relentless effort unlocked something profound.
While some critics worried Tarteel might replace Qur'anic teachers, Moussa saw the app as a powerful supplement that filled a critical gap in a student's journey.
A sheikh may offer an hour a week, but mastering the Qur'an requires daily practice.
"Nobody is available for you 24/7," he says. "Technology actually can be."
The app creates its most transformative impact in the moments it deepens a user's relationship with their faith.
Moussa tells the story of a friend who has now memorized sixteen ajzaa using Tarteel as his constant companion for revision and practice.
The app's reach extends beyond personal study and into the heart of communal worship.
He speaks of another friend who, for the first time, began to connect with the taraweeh prayers during Ramadan.
For years, the man's mind had wandered as he listened to Arabic he didn't fully understand.
With Tarteel, he could hold his phone while the app followed the imam's recitation word-for-word, displaying the English translation in real time.
"The impact that had on him as a spiritual experience was profound," Moussa says. "He was showing up to the masjid in a way that he had never shown up before."
This focus on solving real, spiritual needs has resonated globally.
Users have now downloaded the app over thirteen million times, with large communities forming in countries like the United States, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.
The depth of that engagement can stagger; the team once discovered a user who had recited for an average of four hours a day for nearly a year.
For Moussa, these breakthroughs happen because Tarteel transcends being just a faith-based app; it operates as an engineering powerhouse.
That early passion for problem-solving now serves as the foundation for a world-class technology company.
"Most of the problems I've worked on at Tarteel are more sophisticated than any of the problems I worked on when I was at Facebook," he says.
He speaks with pride about his team's novel advancements, like a new way of rendering the Qur’an that enables dynamic Tajweed coloring and a system that stores user activity on the device itself.
* * *
This drive to serve his community now shapes his vision for the future.
For Moussa, technology offers a way to reclaim a lost legacy. He speaks of reigniting the spirit of the Islamic Golden Age, a time when faith and science intertwined, when the drive to know prayer times spurred innovation in astronomy.
He sees AI as the next frontier in that legacy, but he approaches it with the critical eye of someone who's witnessed tech's moral compromises.
He believes Muslims must first demystify these new tools before using them.
AI, he explains, functions not as an independent intelligence but as a predictive technology.
"It's like a very, very advanced autocomplete," he says.
It predicts the next most likely word based on the vast amount of data researchers trained it on.
This distinction, he warns, creates the real ethical danger.
"Islam builds itself upon the truth. It doesn't build itself upon what's most likely," Moussa says.
Asking an AI for a religious opinion poses a profound risk because it bases its answer on probability, not veracity. That same pragmatic clarity informs his advice for Muslim entrepreneurs.
He cautions them against using faith as a crutch.
"People won't use your product because you're Muslim," he says. "You need to solve a problem. You need to find product-market fit. The faith-based angle has nothing to do with building a great product."
Ultimately, his journey, from his stand at Facebook to the challenges of founding a startup, returns to a single guiding principle.
He hopes to share this core lesson with a new generation of Muslim professionals wrestling with their own ambitions and doubts.
"Do things with the right intentions, and the baraka will come," Moussa says. "You're responsible for the intention and for the action. You're not responsible for the outcome."