A History lesson of how Nur City came to be and What you can do in the community.

So if you have been following Muslim Manga from time to time, you may have come across the words “Nur.City”. So what is this Nur City exactly?

In short, Nur City is the name of Muslim Manga’s community. It seemed vital to have a platform where our fans and community members could interact with one another, allowing us to grow together, personally, and creatively. Nur.City is the evolution of that community vision that has come about through the years.

Some history

Around the summer of 2015, Muslim Manga started productivity-focused community for volunteers on a platform called slack. To help with team-building, as well as giving creative boosts to our helpers, we also had a “random” channel, where people can chat about non productive things, or really anything they wanted to chat about. This area was especially active, and I then realized that there was a void in terms of an outlet for our larger community, who may not be interested so much to volunteer. It was clear to me that in the day and age of so many messaging and social networking apps, the mobile experience was vital. As a college student who was not so familiar with programming, I had to find a way to create or emulate an messaging app experience for the Muslim Manga audience.

Soon afterwards, I came across what was at that time a new forum software called Flarum. If you are not familiar with what a forum is, it is a type of site that caters to discussion based communities. Muslim Manga has also had forum sections in the past, but, in general, forums tend to have a dated look and had not been that friendly for mobile users. Flarum looked and felt to a certain extent like an app, but it ran on a browser. I quickly claimed the website www.nur.city and installed the magical forum software and started promoting the site as Muslim Manga’s community.

When I was designing this community, I had a game in mind. I wanted to gamify our community . The first step on that idea was to create a citizen application process. New members had to apply for citizenship to join our city. I then created different city elements as categories for discussion. There was a help center that was called “hospital”, and a “bank” that had discussions for resources our citizens could use.

Eventually as the community grew, it became a little more challenging to manage the forum website that I had made. There was more than I wanted to do through the community and the limited resources on the website platform were becoming indeed very limiting to what our community potential was.

So in our latest step for our community, which was formed about 1 and half years prior to the writing of this post, we switched to use a platform called Discord. This platform has allowed us to connect better with and really engage with younger generations. We have special Muslim Manga emojis that our members use, and we have a lot of community challenges and events that the members are both involved in the management and participation of those.

What to do in Nur City?

Similar to physical cities, as well as certain games, Nur City also has a lot of places you can go to.

Once you get through immigration in the city hall, after applying to be a Nurizen (Nur City citizen), you will first see the intro garden, where you can introduce yourself to the community, and then you will also see the beautiful plaza. The plaza is the most bustling place in Nur City. Nurizens from around the globe gather there, and different hours of the day and just have fun hanging out together.

There is also Nur City Media (NCM) the Culture Center, and the Omotenashi Mansion that are accessible to you once you become a citizen.

• Nur City Media (NCM) is a place to get the latest updates from Muslim Manga and other noteworthy pieces of information.
• The Culture center is for getting updates from the latest Muslim Manga series, such as Muslim Manga Club, WaSalam, and Journey of a Muslim.
• Ometenashi Masnion is a place where Nurizens gather and play games, such as role playing, drawing shiritori, and complete the manga, to name a few.

You get access to these, just starting out. Of course if you want to explore and get access to more parts of the city, you can do that too. Depending on what you do, you can get access to the Poji Tower, Majime Tower, and the University of Nur City (UNC).

• Poji Tower is a special tower for our patrons to chill at. It is filled with cool rewards channels and other secret patreon only areas. To get access, you will need to become a patron of Muslim Manga

• Majime Tower is a an area for productivity. The productivity part of Muslim Manga evolved into the Majime tower of Nur City. Majime means serious in Japanese, and this is the area for people who are serious about their community contributions. To get access to this part, you will need to apply on MuslimManga.org/apply

• And then we have the University of Nur City (UNC). To get access to UNC, you will need to submit your college application essay. After you have been accepted into the university, you will gain access to different departments of UNC, particularly, the Japanese department, and the many many clubs we have at the university.

Among the clubs available at the University of Nur City, a few of the popular ones include MIC (Manga Illustration Club), Memers, a club for sharing memes, and NurLingGo, a club for discussing linguistic things, including the building of the Nur City Dictionary. The dictionary contains words created and used in the city, as well as examples sentences to help new citizens acclimate into the city as soon as possible.

How to become a Nurizen

I am sure you have already realized, but Nur City is a really fun and happening place. To get started, sign up for discord, and then head over to www.nur.city and click on apply for citizenship link to get started. This will take you to our discord server. Once you are in the server, you still need to do one more step in order to become a citizen. You will need to submit a sketch / doodle of yourself in what you imagine Nur City to be, or you need to write a haiku poem on the same topic.