Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth.

How to read the map

Every pin on NoorMap glows. The brightness and color of the glow tell you what kind of place it is and how thoroughly it has been verified — so a glance at the map tells you where to look first.

• The Haramain & Masjid al-Aqsa

  Three pins burn brightest of all: Masjid al-Ḥaram in Makkah, al-Masjid an-Nabawī in Madinah, and Masjid al-Aqsa in al-Quds. The civilizational landmarks of our umma. They sit at the top of the visual hierarchy by right.
• Islamic landmarks

  Places where noteworthy events in Islamic history took place — the Cave of Ḥirāʾ, the wells of Madinah, Karbala, Andalusia's standing minarets, the early masjids of Eyup and Damascus. A softer, aged gold so they sit just below the Haramain in the visual hierarchy. We're seeding this layer; users can submit additions and we'll review them.
• Mosques

  Houses of God in amber. Audited entries — those that have gone through an Iḥsān Standards review — get an additional bright halo on top of the base glow. Unaudited entries still glow (presence matters), just one tier dimmer. The visible incentive is real: mosques that opt into an audit literally shine brighter on the map.
• Islamic schools

  Yellow — adjacent to the mosque amber but distinct, because a school is its own institution. Audited schools get the same audit-bloom ring as audited mosques. Curriculum review is part of the Iḥsān Standards rubric, so an audit here is a real signal.
• Muslim non-profits & community orgs

  Sky blue, set apart from the prayer-space amber so non-profits read as their own tier in the directory. 990 audit + governance review apply here; audited orgs glow brighter for the same reason.
• Muslim cemeteries

  Muted slate — quiet pins that don't compete for attention. Listed where we have them so you can find a Muslim cemetery for janazah or to visit your parents.
• Islamic landmarks (kind tier)

  Aged-gold dots for ziyarah destinations and historic Islamic sites that aren't covered as regular mosques. Distinct from the SACRED-tier Haramain glow above; this is the everyday-landmark version surfaced in the filter UI.
• Halal restaurants

  Warm coral — food, distinct from the surrounding tiers. Two cert tiers: third-party-certified by HFSAA or HMS (verified) or Reported (Zabihah / Google said halal but no certificate seen). Toggle the inline filter to show only certified.
• Halal markets & butchers

  A deeper terracotta — related to restaurants but darker, because grocery and butcher counters are where the supply chain meets the kitchen. Same cert tiers apply.
• Modest fashion & clothing

  Violet. Smaller glow on the base map; audit-bloom applies when published.
• Islamic bookstores

  Orange. The places that keep the books we read aloud to children and the books we annotate in margins. Small glow, audit-bloom on review.
• Muslim-owned businesses (catch-all)

  Off-white — the neutral hue for Muslim-owned services that don't fit a more specific tier. Audited businesses get the same extra halo as audited mosques; the audit is what raises the floor.

The point of the tiers isn’t to rank places against each other — it’s to show what’s known. An unaudited mosque isn’t a worse mosque; it just hasn’t been verified yet. The extra glow that audited entries get is a sign-post for users who want third-party-verified entries first, and an invitation for organizations to opt in to the audit framework if they want to shine brighter.

Iḥsān Standards

NoorMap is one surface of a larger project. The ledger of mosques, non-profits, and businesses you see here is owned by Iḥsān Standards — a separate site whose job is to audit Muslim institutions and businesses against a published rubric drawn from the Prophetic ﷺ definition of iḥsān:

“To worship Allah as though you see Him; for though you do not see Him, He sees you.”— Ḥadīth of Jibrīl

Applied to organizational conduct: iḥsān means doing the work as though Allah is watching — because He is. Operating at the best standard. Setting a model for the rest of the world, not chasing the worst. Mosques whose governance is transparent and whose finances are honest; businesses whose suppliers aren’t funding occupation; schools whose curriculum prepares children for both this life and the next.

When an institution clears an Iḥsān Standards audit, two things happen: their listing on the broader Iḥsān directory shows the audit, and their pin on NoorMap glows brighter. That’s the point. We want to make doing the work well visible. The bright pin isn’t branding — it’s the receipt.

Mosque admins, business owners, school leadership: you can claim your listing on Iḥsān Standards directly — same site, same login. Once claimed you can update your information, opt into an audit, and (for mosques) publish your iqamah times so they appear on the map.

US first, then everywhere

NoorMap is launching with the United States as the first buildout. Not because the US is the center of the Muslim world — it isn’t — but because we want to get the data discipline, the audit framework, the deduplication, and the source-priority rules right at a scale we can supervise before we expand. About 6,000 US mosques are on the map today, plus several thousand certified halal restaurants, a few hundred Muslim-owned businesses, and the seed Islamic landmarks. We have some international entries already (Australia, the UK, Pakistan, Indonesia, parts of the Gulf) but those are unsupervised — we’ll formalize them region by region.

If you live somewhere we haven’t covered well and you know of a directory we should ingest, an audit body whose standards we should recognize, or specific mosques we should add — the “Suggest a place” button on the map takes both individual entries and full directory dumps.

Privacy — what makes us different

We don’t track you. No Google Analytics, no Meta Pixel, no Segment, no Mixpanel, no anything. The map serves tiles from sources we control and from OpenStreetMap-aligned providers (Protomaps, OpenFreeMap) who don’t profile users. Geolocation is opt-in and the coordinate gets snapped to ~110m before it ever leaves your device.

This matters. Apps that the Muslim community has trusted — Muslim Pro and the Muslim Salat app among them — have been caught selling user location data to data brokers who then sold it onward to US military contractors. Prayer-time apps used by tens of millions of Muslims worldwide handed granular movement data — when you went to the mosque, who you visited after, where you slept — to the same intelligence apparatus that has spent the last two decades drone-striking the Muslim world.

That should not be the standard. Our floor is: no third-party tracking, no data combination across the network of apps, no data sale, no surveillance-vendor partnership, no government data request honored without the legal floor (subpoena + counsel review + disclosure to the user). Sessions are HTTP-only cookies with no analytics fingerprint; no third-party analytics scripts run on any page; cross-app identity uses pairwise pseudonymous subjects so NoorMap, Iḥsān, and Wasla each see a different ID for the same user.

If we ever change any of that, the change has to be public, in writing, and predates the change taking effect by 90 days. That’s the deal.