IQRA TV's first transmissions went out from Rome in October 1998, an unlikely launch city for a channel built to serve Arab and Muslim audiences, but a practical one given the satellite infrastructure available at the time. The signal reached viewers through the Arabsat system almost immediately, and the channel steadily added carriage on additional satellites, Nilesat and Hotbird among them, extending its footprint across the Middle East, North Africa and into Europe within its first years on the air.
Growth after that followed the geography of Muslim migration as much as the geography of satellite footprints. By 2012 the channel had expanded its over the top digital distribution into North America, South America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, following diaspora communities that had grown up far from the channel's original Arabic speaking core audience. English language programming, added in 2011, was built specifically to serve second and third generation viewers in those communities who understood Arabic imperfectly or not at all, addressing what the channel's own materials describe as common Western misconceptions about Islamic teaching.
Today IQRA TV remains active and broadcasting, still owned through Saleh Abdullah Kamel's Arab Media Corporation, still built around the same moderate, family-oriented mission it launched with in 1998. Independent media studies research has continued to treat it as a benchmark case for how satellite technology let a single religious broadcaster build a genuinely transnational Muslim audience in a way earlier print and local radio ministries never could.