Students in 170+ countries: what we've learned

The Loh o Qalam Team · May 12, 2026 · 5 min read

Somewhere around our first thousand students, we stopped being able to name every timezone our cohorts ran in. Today, students join live classes from more than 170 countries — which sounds impressive until you realize it means scheduling a class that works for someone in Karachi and someone in Toronto in the same week.

That constraint has shaped almost every scheduling decision we make. It's why most courses run multiple weekly batches instead of one fixed slot, and why "what timezone are you in" is one of the first questions an advisor asks.

What surprised us

We expected demand from Pakistan and the Gulf. We didn't expect how many students would be second- and third-generation diaspora — people who grew up speaking English or French at home and wanted a live, credentialed way back into Qur'ānic Arabic or seerah study.

What hasn't changed

The cohort cap. Whether a class is in Lahore or Los Angeles, it still tops out at 30 students, because the thing students from every one of those 170 countries ask for is the same: a mentor who actually knows they're there.