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Intention

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Nueces Education Fall 2024⁠

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For the purpose of pleasing Allah ﷺ and building sadaqah jariyah.

Vision

Produce Nueces homegrown huffadh and build a larger community focus on the Quran.

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Mission

Background

Alhamdulillah, last semester we were able to have a student led hifz program. And while this initiative started off strong in terms of number of students attending and benefit gained, over time, retention rate & commitment among both students and teachers dropped. Additionally, transitioning into the next semester has also meant finding new lead teachers, as previous ones are either no longer students at UT or have had changes in priority.

These highlight two issues with our current setup of this program:

A casual learning environment caused by student-teacher relationships primarily being that of friend-friend.

A lack of structure which brings uncertainty for the continuation of the program in successive years.

Plan

I hope to fix these problems by establishing a Darul Uloom Academy (DUA) branch here at Nueces. In doing so, this would fix the outlined problems.

Roughly, I plan to take this course of action:

Gather community feedback on if such a program is desired by students.

This includes asking about class formats, whether people would prefer in-person or online classes.

Talk to DUA Board about establishing a branch.

Work with DUA to hire teachers for Nueces & to set up tuition payments.

Work with teachers to start program.

Provide support for both DUA board and teachers as needed as the semester continues.

I hope to finish step (1) before school starts, and If it demonstrates a want for this in our community, I hope to establish classes by the end of September.

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Value to Community

Students & young professionals: There are currently no local options for a hifz program targeted at this audience.

Introducing this at our masjid (which already maintains this audience) will give people access to qualified teachers and a structured learning environment for their memorization of the Quran.

Additionally, personal relationships with the teachers can grow into something beautiful, becoming a mentor-mentee model from which students have someone other than imams and scholars to study the character of the Prophet ﷺ from. This comes with the DUA focus on akhlaq and adab.

Other masajids: Currently, Nueces sits isolated from the other mosques, save for perhaps ICGA.

A secondary benefit of partnering with DUA (though certainly not trivial), which already has branches in ICBC, GIC, and NAMCC, is that we can begin to build our relationships other masajids.

Firstly, this could help remove some of the stigma that Nueces has regarding its primary audience (i.e., college students).

With this, we can begin to have greater collaboration with other mosques (in the form of events, mentorship, assistance, etc.), expanding the unification of our community.

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Concerns

What does the relationship between DUA and a mosque look like? Is the mosque just a hosting site? Or is there a higher level of integration?

What will happen to existing Quran programs (e.g., Hafidh Almostafa’s class)? Is it simply a change in audience?

Is DUA just focused on producing huffadh? Or rather building a greater community focus on Quran?

Would the change in environment cause a change in interest/audience? How should we keep the Nueces brand and “vibe”? Make a compromise between the essence of Nueces as well as the ilm that qualified teachers would have.

Too much structure/rigor? Costs

Could feed back into Ramadan

Minimum number of students at each branch

Interest form

Talk to imam

Imam:

Would teachers even come logistically?

Part of the charm is that students teach students. How to retain nueces brand?

Dynamic between EC and DUA

Would this be on top of

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