“
I desire that you recite for me poetry, for surely,
these days are the days of grief and sorrow,
which have passed over us, Ahlul Bayt.
”
The Journey
1997
The Beginning
Shabbir & Abbas Tejani, now better know as The Tejani Brothers, started a website at the
ages of 10 and 11 on Geocitites.com posting write-ups from their mother's
small book, which was getting old and torn.
1997
2003
Nawhas.com Launched
Their passion developed further, and they began adding more and more reciters onto
the site, some due to requests by the nawhakwans themselves and some out of choice.
“From our experience and also being nawhakhwans ourselves, we know that there are many, many reciters who have a deep passion to recite but are unable to do so due to the unavailability of kalaams. To encourage other reciters, we, therefore, embarked upon putting the kalaams on our website by listening and writing the kalaams from the audios of other nawhakhwans.” — Tejani Brothers
2003
2017
Work Begins on Rebuilding Nawhas.com
A young software engineer and frequent user of Nawhas.com, Syed Zain Mehdi reached out
from California to Shabbir & Abbas Tejani with an offer to voluntarily rebuild the
Nawhas.com site for the modern web. Work begins on the new site. Soon after,
Asif Ali from the U.K. joins the team, similarly eager to use his skills
to contribute back to a site he's used for years.
2017
2020
A New Start
After hundreds of hours of work sprinkled in between their primary responsiblities,
Syed Zain Mehdi and Asif Ali complete their combined efforts to rebuild and
modernize the site. The new version of Nawhas.com launched in March, 2020.
2020
Credits
Shabbir & Abbas Tejani
Creators of Nawhas.com
- Created & maintained Nawhas.com for over 17 years
- Wrote write-ups for over 1400 nawhas
Syed Zain Mehdi
Software Engineer
- Project lead for the new Nawhas.com
- Redesigned and rebuilt the site
- Maintainer of the open source codebase
Asif Ali
Software Engineer
- Devoted hundreds of hours of engineering work on the new Nawhas.com
- Maintainer of the open source codebase
Contribute
We're hard at work on the next stages on Nawhas.com.
In the coming months, we plan to launch a major feature that will enable the site to remain active and up to date for years to come. Anyone will be able to contribute to the site! You'll be able to add and correct write-ups for nawhas, and even adding missing reciters, albums, and nawhas!
Know how to code? Check out our open source codebase on Github. Feel free to open a PR with any contributions – we'll actively review and merge any contributions!