The conversation has happened so many times now that I have stopped being surprised by it. Different rooms, different cities, different institutions—masajid I have served in directly, organizations I have consulted with formally and informally over more than a decade—and yet the shape of the discussion is always the same. How do we increase attendance? How do we sustain the budget? How do we improve programming quality? How do we reach more people on social media? Reasonable questions. Necessary questions. I have asked them myself.

And yet something is always missing from these conversations. Not because it was removed, but because it was never placed on the agenda in the first place.

Nobody asks whether the people who attend feel connected to one another. Nobody asks what happened to the family that stopped coming—not whether they can be recovered as a data point on a quarterly report, but whether anyone noticed they left as people. There is strategy for growth and budgeting for financial sustainability, but no equal emphasis on the stability of relationships, on whether the people inside the building are being formed into a body or merely counted as a crowd.

The first time I noticed this absence, it unsettled me. By the tenth time, I realized the absence was not unusual. It was the norm. Across leadership structures, across regions—the disappearance of connectedness as a priority had become so complete that it no longer registered as a loss. That normalization is what this essay is about.

Before the Fortress

Before September 11th, the American masjid was not a better institution. It was a different one.

The orientation was relational rather than transactional. People came because it was their masjid—not because it was the best one within a thirty-minute drive. The imam was not a performer evaluated by production value. The congregation was not an audience rating a product. What mattered was not whether the khutba (sermon) was polished but whether the person next to you knew your name.

This was not ideal. The relational orientation was real, but it was bounded. People attended masajid based on ethnic familiarity—the Desi masjid, the Arab masjid, the Blackamerican masjid—and that sorting meant the loyalty was often to a cultural enclave as much as to a spiritual home. The uncles who built the masjid saw it as an extension of their family, and in many cases it literally was: their relatives on the board, their language in the khutba, their customs setting the social tone. If you fit, you belonged. If you did not, you found the masjid where you did. That is already a form of selection—choosing based on comfort rather than commitment, proximity to the familiar rather than formation in the sacred. It was not consumerism in the way we would later come to practice it, but the seed of sorting was already planted in the soil.

But the people, for all those limitations, were developing. Slowly, imperfectly, but moving forward. New institutions were beginning to emerge—Islamic schools, social organizations, professional networks—the early stages of a broader ecosystem that might have eventually distributed the communal weight the way other faith traditions in America had learned to do.

At the same time, a deeper shift was underway that few people named. The congregation was westernizing. I saw it in my own generation—children who prayed at the masjid on weekends but absorbed a fundamentally different operating system the other five days. The immigrant generation still carried collectivistic instincts—interdependence, mutual obligation, loyalty to the group over the self—but their children were being formed in American schools, American social expectations, American individualism. The older generation related to the masjid the way they related to their household: it was theirs to build, to maintain, to sacrifice for without calculation. My generation related to it the way we related to everything else—as a place we could leave. The orientation was thinning. Not disappearing, but thinning—and no one was naming it because the prayer lines were still full.

This matters because it determines how the trauma would land.

When the World Contracted

September 11th was not merely an event the American Muslim community witnessed. It was a collective trauma that reshaped how we related to ourselves and to the broader society.

The masjid—already the central institution—became the fortress. The one place that felt safe. The one institution under communal control. And into that fortress, we compressed everything: prayer space, school, social hall, relief agency, counseling center, youth program, cultural gathering, coffee hour. The masjid became the one-stop-shop for every communal need. I have served in buildings carrying all of those functions simultaneously. The weight is real.

This stalled the development that was already underway. Jewish communities in America built distributed ecosystems over generations—JCCs, independent day schools, philanthropic federations, cultural organizations—where the synagogue was one institution among many. Christian communities built churches alongside YMCAs, parish schools, independent ministries, and community centers. No single building had to carry everything. These traditions also had advantages we did not—generations of established wealth, access to mainstream philanthropic infrastructure, and decades of institutional learning. The comparison is not perfectly symmetrical. But the structural principle holds: when communal life is distributed across many institutions, no single one collapses under the weight.

The American Muslim community never got the chance to build that. The trauma froze us mid-development. The independent schools, social spaces, and philanthropic structures that might have emerged naturally were absorbed into the masjid or simply never materialized. The mosque was never designed to carry what we loaded onto it.

The contraction was understandable. Traumatized people seek shelter in what they know. But understandable responses, when they become permanent postures, produce consequences no one intended. The fact that the contraction made sense in 2001 does not mean it should have remained the operating model for the next quarter century.

And the trauma landed on a people whose collectivistic resilience was already weakening. A congregation with deeper intergenerational bonds might have contracted temporarily and then re-expanded—metabolized the shock and returned to the slow work of building. But a people already mid-transition, already losing the relational instincts that absorb collective grief, were uniquely vulnerable. The contraction held. The fortress remained.

What We Chose Without Choosing

The masjid did not have to operate like a service provider. The compression of every communal function into a single building created enormous pressure, but pressure does not dictate response—it reveals disposition. We could have absorbed the additional roles while maintaining a relational core. We could have paused to ask: what kind of institution do we want to become, and what kind of people will it form over the next twenty years?

But we did not ask. We merely responded to the times.

I want to be fair here. The boards that made these decisions were not operating in a vacuum of obvious alternatives. In 2003, a masjid board under siege—navigating government scrutiny, media hostility, frightened congregants, and a building that suddenly had to be everything—did not have the luxury of a twenty-year strategic retreat. They did what they could with what they had. The failure was not malice. It was the absence of deliberation under conditions that made deliberation feel like a luxury no one could afford.

The transactional operating model—attendance as the measure of success, aesthetics as a priority, programming evaluated as product—was not inevitable. It was the most available model, adopted without deliberation about its long-term consequences. When a single building is trying to be a school, a relief agency, a social club, a counseling office, and a house of worship simultaneously, the only metrics that function across all of those roles are numerical: attendance, revenue, event turnout, social media reach. The relational questions—do people feel known? Is suhba (spiritual companionship) forming? Are families being held through difficulty?—do not scale across that kind of overload. They require focused attention. And focused attention is precisely what the overstretched masjid could no longer afford.

I want to be precise about what I am critiquing. Professionalism—running an institution with competence, transparency, strategic planning, and excellence—is not the problem. Professionalism is good. It is necessary. It brought visibility, credibility, and operational capacity that the pre-September 11th model lacked. What I am naming is something different: consumerism. The moment when the metrics of professionalism replace the purpose of the institution. When the building runs well but the people inside it are not being formed. When the operation is excellent and the organism is dying. That is the line the American masjid crossed without noticing—not because it pursued excellence, but because excellence became the goal rather than the means.

Boards learned to measure what could be counted. What could not be counted—connectedness, spiritual formation, the slow work of building people into a body—quietly disappeared from the conversation. Not because anyone decided it was unimportant. Because the operating logic no longer had room for it. The agenda filled itself with what was measurable, and what was immeasurable became invisible.

This is how a people can be full of well-intentioned leaders, making individually reasonable decisions, and still produce an institution that forms its members in ways no one intended. The product was not designed. It emerged—from reactive decisions stacked on top of one another, none of them examined, all of them compounding.

The Covenant We Lost

I know the congregant who drives past three masajid to attend the one with the most polished khutba, the most engaging youth program, the most aesthetically pleasing Ramadan production. I have been that congregant. And the uncomfortable truth is that this person is not inherently disloyal. They are behaving exactly as the model trained them to behave.

The system selected for this. Boards that measured success by attendance incentivized programming that attracted attendance. Programming that attracted attendance was programming that competed—with other masajid, with other weekend options, with the comfort of staying home. The congregant learned to evaluate, compare, and choose. They became consumers.

But there is a difference between rational behavior and faithful behavior. The consumer optimizes. The faithful commit. A consumer relationship with the masjid produces someone who evaluates every interaction by what they received. A covenantal relationship—the kind the Prophet ﷺ described when he said the believers are like a single building whose parts reinforce one another1—produces someone who asks what they owe. The shift from covenant to consumption happened so gradually that most people never noticed it. I did not notice it in myself for years.

The westernization that was already underway before September 11th accelerated this. A collectivistic people give out of obligation to the body: this is my masjid and I sustain it because it is mine. An individualistic people give based on evaluation: this masjid must earn my donation by meeting my expectations. The cultural shift and the operational shift reinforced each other. By the time either was visible, both were entrenched.

As I wrote in Cultivating Community: The Juice Is Worth the Squeeze, we are now conditioned to think of the masjid in capitalist terms—where success and failure are determined by aesthetics or attendance rather than formation or impact. That produces a parasitic dynamic: institutions competing for atomized participants who establish no loyal membership anywhere because they were never offered anything worth being loyal to.

The Soil That Disappeared

When the congregant relates to the masjid as a consumer, they do not remain long enough for suhba to take root. Suhba requires sustained presence with the same people over time—the friction, the patience, the slow accumulation of trust that only comes from choosing not to leave when it gets hard. A consumer does not stay. A consumer optimizes. And when the congregation is populated by optimizers, the soil in which loyalty, trust, and genuine companionship grow is simply not there.

The loss is not abstract. I have watched it. Suhba, when it is present, produces people who know each other beyond their public roles—who carry each other’s burdens without being asked, who hold each other accountable because the relationship has earned that right. Its absence produces masajid that are crowded on Friday and vacant on Wednesday. Buildings that can fill a banquet hall for a fundraiser but cannot find fifteen people for a janaza (funeral) prayer on a weekday afternoon.

The Prophetic model of suhba was not fellowship; it was formation—a climate of nearness where habits of mercy were rehearsed until they became native. As I explored in When Companionship Became a Community, the architecture the Prophet ﷺ built in Madinah was not a program. It was a covenant—mu’akha (brotherhood) that organized sacrifice, vulnerability, and presence into a way of life. What the transactional masjid dissolved was not merely social connection. It was the formational infrastructure through which character is transmitted from one soul to another.

The conditions that push clergy toward itinerant work—the phenomenon I described in Dawah Mercenaries, OnlyImams, and the Structural Genocide of the American Muslim Community—are produced by this same environment. When congregants are consumers, the imam becomes a product. And when the imam is evaluated as a product, the rational move is to serve the broadest market rather than the deepest congregation. The supply-side crisis of religious leadership is inseparable from the demand-side crisis of congregant formation. They are the same wound, viewed from different angles.

Not Broken—Formed

Millennials and Generation Z did not choose the transactional model. They were formed inside it.

They arrived at masajid that were already operating as one-stop-shop service providers. They learned to relate to the institution the way they relate to every other institution in their lives—by evaluating the product. The masjid taught them this. The broader culture reinforced it. By the time they were old enough to give, to serve, to lead, the transactional orientation was not a choice they had made. It was the only way they had ever known.

The economic reality is real. This generation carries less concentrated wealth, different financial structures, and debt burdens their parents did not face. But the deeper issue is not financial. It is relational, cultural, and spiritual. They have less money and less attachment and less collectivistic instinct and less practice in the kind of sacrificial membership that built the institutions they inherited. They were never taught that belonging requires investment beyond attendance, that sustaining a masjid is an act of worship even when the masjid frustrates you. They were taught, by the very institutions that now lament their disengagement, that the masjid is a product to be consumed.

This is not a character flaw in a generation. It is a formation failure that belongs to the generation before them. The formers bear the responsibility, not the formed.

A Crisis That Compounds

What the previous sections describe is not a sequence that already happened. It is a cycle that is still turning.

The transactional operating model trains congregants to consume. Consumers do not build suhba. Without suhba, the next generation is formed without models of sacrificial membership. That generation—less attached, less practiced in commitment, shaped entirely inside the market logic—eventually inherits governance of the very institutions that formed them. They become the boards, the committee chairs, the decision-makers. And they govern with the only logic they were taught: attendance, aesthetics, economic viability. The cycle begins again. One turn deeper.

Each rotation produces a generation less equipped to break it. The institutions grow more transactional because the people leading them have never experienced an alternative. The congregants grow more detached because the institutions have never offered them anything else. And the clergy—caught between the two—either adapt to the market or leave it. Some communities have resisted this trajectory. They are the proof that alternatives exist, and their example deserves its own examination. But the prevailing pattern is clear, and it is accelerating.

This is not a crisis that stabilizes. It compounds. And it will persist until we find alternatives to the operating logic that is producing it.

The thread running through every layer of this problem is the same: reaction without deliberation. We absorbed Western individualism without interrogating it. We contracted after September 11th without strategic reflection. We adopted transactional operations without considering what they would produce a generation later. Each generation inherited the previous generation’s reactive decisions and made their own reactive decisions on top of them. Breaking the cycle requires something we have not practiced in twenty-five years: the discipline to pause before responding, and to ask what any given response will cost before committing to it.

What I Can See From Here

I write this from inside the role—as someone who has served in masajid, watched this cycle from the inside, and participated in its logic. I am not outside the system diagnosing it. I am inside the system confessing what it looks like from where I stand.

And from where I stand, the lever is visible. It is not in the imam’s hands.

The structural conditions of masjid employment—board authority, financial dependence, expectations that rise without matching resources—mean that clergy cannot repair this from their position. That is not despair. That is where the power sits. The imam can see the crisis with painful clarity. But seeing and having the authority to act are different things, and the gap between them is where much of the burnout, disillusionment, and exodus of religious leadership begins.

The imperative falls to the congregation itself.

On the individual level, every person must recognize the mandate of the time. The forces of atomization and fragmentation that characterize this era are not unique to Muslims, but the obligation to resist them is specifically ours. Allah tells us to hold firmly to His rope and not be divided.2 Building genuine belonging has always demanded sacrifice. The fact that our current structures have made it harder does not release us from the work. It makes the work more urgent.

What does that look like in practice? It looks like choosing a masjid and staying—through the bad khutbas, through the board decisions that frustrate you, through the seasons when nothing about the place feels nourishing. It looks like learning the name of the person who always sits in the same row and never speaks to anyone. It looks like attending the janaza of someone you barely knew, because that is what a body does when one of its members dies. Commitment, vulnerability, initiative—these are the counter-rhythms that must replace the consumer reflex. They are not dramatic. They are daily. And they are the only soil in which suhba grows.

But individual commitment alone will not change the operating logic. Something else must happen—something I have learned the hard way from inside the role.

The people closest to the congregation’s interior life—religious leaders, pastoral counselors, educators, the volunteers who sit with families in crisis and notice which young people are drifting—these people see things that governance does not see. I have sat across from a board presentation celebrating record Ramadan attendance in the same month that three families quietly and permanently left the masjid. The numbers and the reality were telling two different stories. No one in the boardroom knew. The people on the ground knew. They always know.

I am not saying clergy must run the institution. I am saying that the people who see the human cost of governance decisions must be in the room when those decisions are made—not as employees receiving directives, but as voices whose knowledge is irreplaceable. When governance operates in isolation from the people closest to the congregation’s pulse, it makes decisions that look sound on paper and produce damage that only surfaces years later.

And whatever we build going forward, it must be measured against the tradition’s own priorities—not borrowed wholesale from corporate models and assumed to be spiritually neutral. Are we forming people, or are we filling rooms? Allah described the believers as brothers and commanded us to reconcile and to be mindful so that mercy may descend.3 That is the measure. If the metrics we use to evaluate our masajid cannot account for mercy, for formation, for whether people are actually being drawn closer to Allah and to each other, then those metrics are the wrong instruments—and the outcomes they produce will reflect their origin. The damage of misaligned priorities does not announce itself. It compounds quietly, across years, until the building looks robust and the body inside it has gone cold.

On the communal level, some people must pursue institutional power. Board positions. Governance roles. Strategic authority. The operating logic will not change from outside the boardroom.

But this pursuit carries weight. A board seat is not a volunteer title. It is an amanah (trust) whose decisions shape the formation of a congregation across generations. As I wrote in Making Excuses vs. Accountability, the further an injustice’s impact extends, the greater the accountability required. Passiveness toward the consequences of governance decisions—making excuses, maintaining good opinions without demanding change—enables the very cycle this essay describes. The congregation that watches its institutions adopt operating models that hollow out connectedness and says nothing is complicit in what those models produce.

And the history of masjid governance carries a warning that must be heard before the pursuit begins. It is full of people who sought those positions out of righteous frustration and then, once inside, reproduced the very dynamics they set out to dismantle. I have watched it happen. Power reshapes the person who holds it. The individual who fights to get on the board to change things must fight equally hard not to become what they replaced. Tawadu’ (humility) is required before the role, during the role, and after the role. The perspective and sincerity that motivated the pursuit must survive the authority the pursuit delivers.

Both movements are necessary. Neither is sufficient alone. The person who commits to the congregation but never engages its governance leaves the institution in the hands of the same logic. The person who pursues governance but loses their humility becomes the next iteration of the problem.

I do not have a program for this. I proposed solutions three years ago, and the structural conditions have not changed. What I have now is something the earlier essay could not carry: the honest weight of a problem that is deeper than programs. We must do this work—the slow, sacred, unglamorous labor of rebuilding connectedness as a priority, of diversifying our institutional ecosystem, of forming the next generation in something other than consumption. And those of us inside the clergy role will do what we have always done: witness, counsel, pray, and trust that Allah places barakah (blessing) in the hands of those who arrive with sincerity, even when they cannot see the way through.

Ultimately, with Allah is all success.

This letter is written to a mentee of mine, a young Muslim creative who was paralyzed by his own work. If it finds you in a similar place, it belongs to you too.

I know what you were really saying.

Not that the files crashed—though they did. Not that work had piled up—though it had. What you were saying, underneath all of it, was something more subtle and more painful: that someone else should be doing this. That whoever narrates this thing, whoever puts their voice to it, it probably shouldn’t be you.

Habib (beloved), I know that feeling. Not because I’ve sat with others who’ve carried it—though I have. But because I’ve carried it myself.

I have been sitting with the idea of a podcast for nearly a decade.

Not casually, either. Not the way you half-consider something and let it drift. This has been a recurring thought—something I keep returning to, put down, and find waiting for me again. And every time I return to it, the same questions come with it.

Why should I be speaking? There are scholars I’ve sat with, teachers who shaped me, whose knowledge of this tradition runs deeper than mine will likely ever reach. Whatever I have to offer, they have it better and more completely.

What unique thing would my voice bring? The Muslim content space is not short of voices. I would scroll through what already existed and struggle to find the gap I was supposed to fill.

Those questions don’t have clean answers. And underneath them, always, is the one that resists argument most: whether the motives beneath all of this are what I tell myself they are. The doubt knows that question has no floor. It doesn’t raise it; it helps purify your intentions. It raises it to keep you still.

What finally moved me wasn’t resolution. It was a particular kind of exhaustion—with myself, with my own avoidance. I spent too long watching other people’s creative work from a distance, carrying opinions about it, without producing anything of my own. At some point, the gap between what I claimed to believe and how I was actually living became too uncomfortable to ignore. So I started. The doubt is still present. The comparisons to my teachers are still there. I am still pushing anyway.

I think you know exactly what I’m talking about.

The file crash didn’t cause the paralysis—it gave it somewhere to hide. You said it yourself: you already had doubts about those clips before anything disappeared. It’s easier to blame corrupt files than the real thing, and the real thing, I think, was already written before the files ever crashed.

This is what the doubt does. It’s waswasa (satanic whispering). It doesn’t come for careless work—it has no interest in things that don’t matter to you. It shows up precisely where your sincerity does, in the work you actually want to be good at, and plants itself right between you and the making of it. The more the work means to you, the more exposed you feel attempting it.

And then you said the thing I haven’t stopped sitting with since.

“I was thinking what might be better is actually having you or someone else narrate.”

I hear the humility in that. I do. But what you were proposing wasn’t stepping back—it was stepping out. Not finding someone more capable to carry the work further, but removing yourself from your own creation altogether. Those are very different things, and I love you too much to let that pass without saying so.

The desire to be heard—to have your work matter, to be recognized—is not something that disqualifies you. It is human. What our tradition asks is not that we arrive at the work with a perfectly clean heart, but that we keep returning our intentions to Allah through the work, imperfect as they are. Ikhlas (sincerity) is not a threshold you clear before you begin. It is a practice you sustain from the beginning, through the making, and into whatever comes after.

Think about who built what you and I have inherited. Imam Al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111) spent a lifetime teaching and writing about sincerity while openly acknowledging its elusiveness—that intention without sincerity is ostentation, and sincerity without ongoing realization is worthless.1 He did not arrive at those words from a place of settled purity. He wrote his way toward them. They did not wait for certainty before putting words down.

The question worth sitting with isn’t whether my intentions are clean enough to justify this. That question has no satisfying answer, and it was never meant to. It is this: am I willing to keep offering this to Allah, mixed motives and all, and trust Him to receive and purify what I cannot?

This, I think, is where tawakkul (trust in Allah) does its deepest work. Not trusting that you are ready. Not trusting that your heart is pure. Trusting that Allah can work with what you actually are.

Did Allah place this in your hands? Not whether you are skilled, nor whether your intentions are spotless—whether this work arrived in your life as a gift from somewhere other than yourself. If it truly did, and perhaps assessing that is found in shura (consultation), then the question of worthiness has already been answered by the One who gave it. This is tawfiq (divine enablement). Allah does not extend a gift without extending alongside it the capacity to carry it—whether that capacity already lives in you, or whether the carrying itself is how it will be formed. The gift always precedes the readiness. No offense, but what has positioned you for this is not something extraordinary in you. It is simply that Allah, in His wisdom, chose to give it to you.

That’s why what you proposed wasn’t humility—it only wore humility’s clothing. True tawadu (humility) shows up. It hands the imperfect thing over and steps back. What you were describing never arrives—it keeps revising, keeps deferring, keeps insisting someone better should carry this, and quietly calls that modesty. To withdraw from your own tawfiq is, at its root, a failure to trust that Allah knew what He was doing when He gave this to you. And I say that not to correct you from above—I say it because I have made the same mistake, more times than I can count.

The question worth asking isn’t, “Do I have what it takes?” It is, “Do I trust the One who placed this in my hands?”

That question is what moved me off the sideline and into the room with you to record the first episode.

Habib, I did not choose you for this project because I felt sorry for you. I did not choose you because no one else was available, or because I needed someone to fill a role. I chose you because I trust your creative eye. I have seen how you see things—the instincts you bring, the way you frame and feel a moment, the beautiful care for the community you embody—and I believe in what you carry. That is not encouragement offered to keep you moving. It is what I actually think.

The voice that belongs on this work is yours—hesitant, still forming, carrying motives you haven’t fully sorted—because Allah gave this work to you, not to someone else. Pick up the camera. Edit the clips. Send them over.

Not because you feel ready. Not because the doubt has cleared or the questions have resolved. But because the gift was given, and tawakkul is what it looks like when you act as though you believe that.

Keep checking your intention, returning your focus to Allah. That returning is not a sign that you haven’t arrived. It is the practice itself. It does not end for any of us.

This is your work. Stay in it.

Ultimately, with Allah is all success.

Ramadan is almost over. And I am not sure whether to grieve that or exhale.

My body no longer knows what time it is. Thirty days of broken sleep—late nights stretched toward suhoor (the pre-dawn meal), alarms pulling me back before I was ready—have left me in a kind of fog I cannot quite think my way out of. I am tired in a way that is neither spiritual nor metaphorical. It is just physical. The kind of tired that does not carry meaning, that does not dignify itself as sacrifice. Just physical exhaustion.

Part of me is glad the month is over. Not relieved—glad. And the moment I noticed that gladness, something in me recoiled a bit. It felt wrong. It felt like the kind of thing you are not supposed to say out loud, certainly not at the end of the holiest month of the year. But it was there. It is still there.

And yet—underneath that, or alongside it, I am not sure which—something else is sitting there. A tenderness toward this month that I was not expecting. Because something was given, even inside the fog. Even inside the shortfall. Most of it I am keeping to myself. But I know it arrived.

So I am holding both things at once: a body that is ready to rest, and a heart that knows what it received.

The Man Who Named the Worst Thing

There is a companion of the Prophet ﷺ I keep returning to this week. His name was Hanzalah ibn Rabi’ah al-Usaydi (may Allah be pleased with him). Most people do not know who he was. But his story is one of the most honest things in the entire tradition, and I have been living with it for days.

Hanzalah was not a peripheral figure. He was among the kuttab al-wahy—the scribes of the revelation itself.1 When verses of the Quran descended upon the Prophet ﷺ, Hanzalah was among the men trusted to write them down. His hands held the words of Allah as they arrived. His proximity to the Prophet was not occasional. It was daily.

And one day, he ran to AbuBakr al-Siddiq (may Allah be pleased with him) in a state of spiritual panic.

He said: “Hanzalah has become a munafiq (hypocrite).”

Not—I am worried I might be. Not—I feel far from Allah lately. He said: Hanzalah has become one. He had already written the verdict against himself. And what I notice, reading this story now at the end of this Ramadan, is that he did not say “I.” He said “Hanzalah.” As if he were reporting on someone he was watching from a distance. As if the gap between who he was in the Prophet’s presence and who he became in ordinary life felt so wide that he could not hold both inside the word “I” at the same time.

Abu Bakr did not rush to reassure him. He listened. And then he said: “By Allah—I experience the same thing.”

Two of the greatest human beings who ever lived. Standing together, not pretending. Not managing their spiritual states for each other. Just honest. And then—this is the part I keep sitting with—they did not stay where they were. Together, they walked to the Prophet ﷺ. The movement itself was something. Hanzalah’s instinct, even in his worst moment, was toward the source of light. Not away from it.

A Time for This, and a Time for That

Hanzalah explained his distress to the Prophet ﷺ: when I am with you, the akhirah (hereafter) feels visible. My heart is alive, present, moved. But when I return to my wife, my children, the ordinary rhythms of life—it fades. All of it fades. And I am afraid of what that means about me.

The Prophet ﷺ’s response was profound, yet simple: “By the One in Whose Hand is my soul—if you remained as you are when you are with me, the angels would shake your hands on your roads and in your beds. But Hanzalah—there is a time for this, and a time for that.”2

He said it three times.

I have been sitting with those words for days now. He ﷺ names something true about the human heart: it was never designed to live permanently at the peak. The aliveness at the summit is real. The fact that it cannot be maintained from the valley is not a failure of iman (faith). It is the nature of the human heart.

What the Prophet ﷺ does not say is as important as what he does. He does not say, "You are broke.” He does not say, "Stay where you are.” He says, "There is a time for this. And a time for that.” Which means both times are real. Both times belong to a life of sincere worship.

The rhythm is the design—not the deviation from it.

I did not know, when this Ramadan began, that I would end it here.

What Hanzalah Showed Me

I keep returning to Hanzalah not for the Prophet ﷺ’s answer, but for what Hanzalah did before the Prophet ﷺ ever spoke.

Hanzalah said the true thing out loud. He did not manage it, soften it, or wait until he had something more composed to offer. He walked into the room and said the worst version of what he feared about himself. I want to carry that past this month. Not the curated version of myself—not the version that knows how to talk about struggle without actually being in it. The one who says: here is what is actually happening in me. Even when—especially when—what is happening in me is not yet a lesson.

He ran to someone who said, “I feel it too.” Abu Bakr did not fix his problem. He accompanied it. He named his own experience and let Hanzalah feel less alone in it. That small act—I feel it too—costs almost nothing and carries more than most people know. This is the kind of suhba (spiritual companionship) I need to prioritize in my life. People who are courageous enough to respond honestly, rather than reassuringly. If this Ramadan taught me anything, it is this specific kind of honest companionship I actually want to build for others, too. Rijal: Men’s Formation Community is an attempt to do that systematically.

And when companionship was not enough, Hanzalah kept moving. He did not stop at Abu Bakr and call it quits. He walked toward the source of light. He had access to the Prophet ﷺ and he used it. I do not have that. But I have the Quran, the tradition, the scholars who carried what the Prophet ﷺ left. That is where the movement leads. Not toward feeling more—toward seeking more. Even on days when the light feels very far away, and the walk feels mechanical, and the heart is quiet.

I wrote once that “a sign of a live heart, filled with Iman, is that obeying Allah conjures an emotional response—but that emotional response is not the goal, rather pious actions.” I knew what I meant when I wrote it. This Ramadan, I had to reckon with whether I actually believed it. Feelings are not what I am supposed to be worshipping. Allah is. And the distance between knowing that and living it turns out to be longer than I thought.

I’m sure there will be mornings after this Ramadan when Fajr (the dawn prayer) feels impossible. When the Quran sits on the shelf and I know it and feel the weight of knowing it. When the person I was on the twenty-fifth night feels like someone else entirely. And I will have to get up anyway. Not heroically. Just faithfully. The Prophet ﷺ prayed until his feet swelled. When Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) asked why, given that Allah had already forgiven all his sins, he said: “Should I not be a grateful servant?”3 That was not a feeling he was waiting for. It was a posture he chose, again and again, regardless of what his body or his heart were carrying that day.

Tawakkul (complete reliance on Allah) is not the absence of action. It is the presence of trust inside the action. You tie the camel—you do the thing that is yours to do—and then you open your hands, because what happens next has never been in them. That is not passivity dressed up as faith. That is faith doing what faith actually does.

But I want to be honest about where I am standing right now, at the end of this month. I still owe myself a real accounting—a post-Ramadan debrief where I sit down and look clearly at what I protected and what I let slip, where I was faithful and where I was not. I have not done that yet. And before I even begin: I missed more than I accomplished. The ledger is not in my favor. More days fell short than I want to admit.

I cannot do that work tonight. Tonight I need to rest. I need to let my body find its way back to itself—to sleep without an alarm, to wake without obligation, to let the month settle before I try to assess it. And somewhere inside all of that—underneath the exhaustion and the honest shortfall—I need to be grateful. Quietly, specifically grateful. The gifts did not arrive despite the difficulty. They came through it.

There is a time for this. And a time for that.

I am learning to trust that both of them belong to Allah.

The muhasabah (self-accounting) will come. But, rest first.

Ultimately, with Allah is all success.

This is the third part of an unintentional and unplanned Ramadan reflection. Read the first part here and the second part here.

This is my favorite verse in the Quran. I don’t say that casually—I have lived inside this verse. It has been a mantra for me, something I have told myself so many times that I know it the way I know my name. In moments when the ground beneath me was giving way, and I had nothing else, I had this. It saved my life once.

I brought it with me into this Ramadan the same way I always bring it—with longing, with trust, with the expectation that it would do what it has always done. But I am further into the month now. The first weeks did their work—the arrival without excitement, the stripping, the question of where the barakah (blessing) was hiding while I waited for it to appear in forms I had already decided it should take. I am past that. I am not resolved. I am not performing anymore either. I am in a quieter place, the kind of quiet that only comes after you have stopped pretending the noise was worship. I am just here, holding a verse I love, waiting for it to do what it has always done.

But underneath that trust was an assumption I had never examined. I kept expecting the provision to arrive in forms I could recognize—spiritual intensity, inner clarity, the closeness to Allah that Ramadan has brought me in other years. When it did not come in those forms, I named the absence. I sat with the discomfort of a holy month that felt more like it was taking from me than giving.

A Simple Suggestion

It came from my brother Mohamad Habehh, after a post-Tarawih program that had nothing to do with mentorship and nothing to do with men. We had just finished—people were filing out—and Mohamad gave me Salams, then suggested I start a mentorship program for Muslim men. He said it simply, without an agenda. I could hear the care for the community in his voice.

I have heard this before. People have told me some version of this for years. I have wanted to build it for years. When I was at ADAMS, I actually started one—came in ambitious, announced it, began putting the pieces together. But I had not planned sufficiently. The sessions remained consistent, and the young men showed up—eventually growing to a weekly twenty to thirty people, MashaAllah—but what I had envisioned as a structured mentorship program quietly evolved into something closer to a support group. It was doing good work. I do not want to diminish that. But it was doing the bare minimum I knew it could, and I did not have the architecture to push it further. Eventually, I stopped calling it a program in my own mind. I told myself the timing was not right. I am not sure I believed that even then.

When Mohamad said it, the fear did not feel new. It appeared the way it always does when someone names what I have been avoiding—familiar, already in the room before I notice it. The internal voice that says: You do not have the technical skills to build this. You do not know how to design a website. You do not know how to structure a curriculum at scale without a team. You already tried once, and it turned out to be less than what you planned. I have heard this voice so many times that I stopped recognizing it as fear. It sounds like realism to me. Like a sober assessment of my limitations. Like wisdom.

But underneath the practical assessment—and I have only recently become honest enough to see this—is something else. It is not just that I lack the technical skills. It is that I know what it feels like to commit to something and not be able to deliver. I had already lived that once at ADAMS. I watched a vision I believed in settle into something I could not push further because I did not have the means to push it. If I committed again—publicly, formally, with men counting on me to build something real—and I could not deliver again, I did not know how I would carry that. When I said I needed a team, when I called it collaboration, some of that was true. And some of it was the fear of standing before a commitment I could not fulfill. I dressed the avoidance up as wisdom, and it was convincing enough that I believed it myself.

This Ramadan—away from the masjid, away from the role I had carried for years, with more space than I am used to and less structure to fill it—Mohamad's words sat with me differently. I do not know why. They were the same words other people had said before. But something in me did not close the way it usually does. I did not say yes. I did not say no either. I just let them sit.

Eleven in the Morning to Eleven at Night

The next morning, I woke up from a nap with Mohamad's suggestion still lingering in my head. I did not sit down to build a program. I just picked up my phone to explore an idea. That is all. A sketch on a napkin. I had been using AI in the most basic ways—a search engine with better sentences. But that morning, I put the idea of a mentorship program into it the way you might think out loud to someone, not expecting it to go anywhere. Just curious. Just wondering if the thing I had been imagining for years had any shape to it beyond the shape in my head.

It did. And the shape came fast—sharper and clearer than I expected. The sketch showed me it was possible. That was the first crack. Not courage. Not some decision to finally act. Recognition. This is possible. It has been possible.

What followed was not something I planned. The exploration on my phone became an outline on my laptop. The outline became a curriculum—session by session, topic by topic, drawn from every conversation I have had over the years with young men who needed something I could only offer them informally. It had been waiting. The curriculum demanded a home. So, I started building it onto my consulting website—SuhbaConsulting.com—working out the pages, making it navigable, translating what lived in my mind into something another person could actually walk through. Not because I had planned to. Because the thing kept opening, and I followed it.

I only stopped for salah (prayer) and iftar (the fast-breaking evening meal) with my family. Eleven in the morning to eleven at night. I was not watching the clock, pacing myself, or deciding to keep going. I was just inside it. At some point in the evening, the house got quiet—the dishes from iftar were done, the kids went to bed—and I was sitting up in bed, the glow of the laptop the only light in the room, and I had not noticed any of it happening.

When I looked up, Rijal: Men’s Formation Community existed. The curriculum was complete. The website was built. It had taken a single Ramadan day.

I sat there, and the feeling was not triumph. It was more subtle than that. Disbelief first. Then a grief I was not prepared for—the kind that comes when you realize how many years you spent standing outside a door that was never locked. I will not dwell on that. The verse is not about what I missed. It is about what arrived. AI did not generate the vision. It gave me the structural and technical means to build what I already carried.

From Where You Never Expected

I am in Ramadan. The holiest month of the year. A month I entered without excitement but with longing. A month I spent asking where the barakah was, peeling away layers of performance, sitting with the hard question of what I had actually brought to the table. And the thing that cracked something open in me was not a verse I wept over in the last third of the night. It was not a moment in sujud (prostration) where I felt Allah's closeness wash over me. It was twelve hours at a laptop, building a program and a website.

I am aware of how that sounds.

I have asked myself the question more than once: Am I spiritualizing a productive day? Is this tawakkul (trust in Allah), or is it just the satisfaction of getting something done, dressed up in religious language because the calendar says Ramadan?

I have sat with that question. I think it deserves to be sat with.

The barakah that comes through tahajjud (late night prayer) and tears in prostration and the Quran softening the heart at three in the morning—that is real. That is provision too. I have tasted it in other years, and I know people who tasted it this Ramadan, and I do not want to diminish it or talk past it. That is a door many people walk through, and it is a real door, and Allah is on the other side of it. Perhaps for me, this Ramadan, provision also came through something I did not expect. Not instead of the traditional forms. Not as a replacement. Alongside them. And that distinction matters more than anything else in this paragraph.

Because the verse says min haythu la yahtasib—from where he never expected. I have been reciting those words my entire life, and I always read them as provision arriving from outside: an unexpected rescue, a door opening from the other side, help appearing from a direction I could not have predicted. That is how it has come before. That is how it saved my life.

But this Ramadan, the verse is teaching me something I missed. Sometimes “from where you never expected” means from inside yourself. From gifts He placed in you that you refused to use. From a calling you carried for years and kept at arm’s length because the execution scared you more than the idea ever did.

There’s a distinction I keep turning over, because it matters. “I had it in me all along” is a self-help conclusion. It places the credit with me, turns the story into one of unlocked potential, and makes it about finally believing in myself. That is not what happened. What happened is that Allah had placed it in me all along—the pastoral instinct, the study at Umm al-Qura, the years of training under numerous mentors, the counseling in Boston, the mentorship at ADAMS, and the thousands of hours sitting across from men who needed something I could feel but could not yet build. None of that was self-generated. It was all rizq (provision) from Him, deposited over decades into a man who kept treating his own deficiencies as the final word rather than as gaps He was already, quietly, filling. The beta program at ADAMS was not a failure. It was preparation I did not recognize as preparation. Every man who sat across from me needing something I did not yet have a structure to give him—that, too, was preparation.

I have taught the hadith (prophetic tradition) of the man and his camel dozens of times. A man came to the Prophet ﷺ and asked, “Should I tie my camel and trust in Allah, or should I leave it untied and trust in Allah?” The Prophet ﷺ replied, “Tie your camel, then trust in Allah.”1 I have quoted it in khutbahs (sermons). I have used it in counseling sessions. I have explained it to young men who were sitting right in front of me, needing exactly what it teaches.

I understood it. I had always understood it. But this Ramadan, it was no longer something I was teaching. It was something I was living.

Under any other circumstances, I would have been afraid. I know that about myself. If someone had told me to sit down and build a mentorship program, I would have shut down the way I always shut down. But that is not what happened. The opening came so gently that I did not recognize it as an opening. A sketch on a phone. A question I did not expect an answer to. And before I knew it, I was already inside it—building, following, trusting—not because I had decided to be brave, but because Allah had made the path so subtle that the fear never had time to arrive. The framework took shape in a single day. Now I have enough to keep filling it out over time.

Rijal exists now. It is real, and I am excited about it in a way I have not let myself be excited about something in a long time. It will be work. It will demand more of me than a single Ramadan day. But the hope—and I hold this hope carefully, because I have learned what it costs to hold it carelessly—is that men will sit in this program and be formed by it. That, over time, it builds the kind of transformative suhba (companionship) that my mentors and teachers gave me when they did not wait for perfect conditions before pouring into me.

I do not know where it goes from here. But I know who placed it here. And I know that the verse I have been reciting my entire life—the one I carried into this Ramadan expecting it to answer me the way it always has—answered me from where I never expected.

Ultimately, with Allah is all success.

This is the second part of a Ramadan reflection. Read the first part here.

Day eight. I woke up this morning and the thought was already there before my feet hit the floor: where is the barakah?

I am exhausted. And not in a way I am used to. This year, the smallest things leave me utterly drained—a short errand before Maghrib (sunset prayer), a few tasks around the house, the simplest responsibilities that should not cost this much effort. I have started saving my Quran reading for after Isha (night prayer), when I am fresher, because during the day I cannot give it what it deserves. This is new for me. I do not remember Ramadan feeling this heavy before.

Last night, after iftar (the fast-breaking evening meal), I caught myself scrolling through my phone for over an hour. Not reading anything. Not learning anything. Not serving anyone. Just lost in the algorithm, swiping from one video to the next, letting the screen fill the space where something more intentional should have been. The worst part was that I barely noticed until it was over—until I looked up and realized an hour of a Ramadan night had passed through my fingers and I had nothing to show for it. Not a single dua (supplication). Not a single page of Quran. Just the dull glow of a screen and the faint shame that follows.

And Ramadan, I keep reminding myself, does not happen in a silo. Life did not pause because the month began. The same problems I carried into Ramadan are still here—work still presses, bills still sit in the inbox, a difficult conversation I have been avoiding did not resolve itself just because I started fasting. I am carrying all of it, and now I am carrying it on an empty stomach.

I expected by now to feel something shifting. Some sign that the month was working on me, that the sacrifice of hunger and thirst and broken sleep was producing something I could point to and say: there—that is what this is for. Instead, I just do not have the energy to do anything. And beyond the exhaustion, there is something else I did not expect: I do not feel the specialness. The festivity. That particular Ramadan feeling I have always associated with the month—the communal warmth, the anticipation, the sense that something sacred is happening and I am inside of it. This year, it is not there. And I think part of it is that my Ramadan is differentit I am at home with my family, not at the masjid (mosque) the way I have been in years past. The rhythm is different. The energy is different. And without that external atmosphere, I am left with just myself and my fast—and the silence between us is louder than I anticipated.

So the question sits with me. It has been sitting with me for days, if I am honest, but this morning it finally surfaced clearly enough to name: where is the barakah I was promised?

I have been thinking about what it actually means when I say barakah.

My whole life I have heard it. Ramadan is the month of barakah (blessing). The rewards are multiplied. The gates of Jannah (Paradise) are open. The shayateen (devils) are chained. Somewhere in the final stretch there is a night worth more than a thousand months. I grew up hearing these things repeated every year, and I absorbed them the way I absorb anything I hear often enough—without ever stopping to ask what they actually require of me.

I think I built an assumption I never examined: that barakah is atmospheric. That it descends on the month the way weather descends on a city—I did not have to do anything to make it rain, I just had to be outside when it happened. I assumed that if I showed up to Ramadan—if I fasted, prayed, attended tarawih (night prayers), read some Quran—the barakah would do its work on me. That the month itself would carry me.

We talk about Ramadan like a spiritual charger. Plug yourself in, hold on, and the barakah will do the rest. Your iman (faith) is low? Ramadan will fix it. Your heart feels distant from Allah? Ramadan will soften it. You have been neglecting your worship for eleven months? Ramadan will make up the difference.

But what if that is not how it works?

The gates are open—but I still have to walk through them. The shayateen are chained—but my nafs (ego, the self that inclines toward its own desires) is not. And that is the part no one warns you about. When the external enemy is removed, the internal one gets louder. The nafs does not need Shaytan (the Devil) to operate. It knows my patterns. It has been studying me my entire life. It whispers in my own voice, which is why I so rarely recognize it as something separate from myself.

Part of me wants to extend grace to the version of myself who scrolled for an hour or drifted through tarawih without presence. And part of me knows that grace without honesty is just permission. I was tired, and that is true. But tired is not the same as powerless. I had an hour of a Ramadan night and I handed it to an algorithm—not because I had no choice, but because the intentional thing felt harder than the mindless thing. That is worth sitting with, not explaining away.

There is a hadith that keeps pulling me back this week. The Prophet ﷺ said: “Whoever does not give up false speech and acting upon it, Allah has no need of his giving up his food and drink.”1

I have heard this hadith every Ramadan for as long as I can remember. It was usually delivered as a warning—behave yourself while you fast; do not lie, do not backbite, do not let your tongue undo what your stomach is trying to build. But sitting with it this week, in this particular state of fatigue and questioning, it reads as something else entirely. It reads as a diagnosis. Allah is not saying He does not want my fast. He is saying the fast was never about the hunger. The hunger is a tool. And if the tool is not being used to build something—if I am enduring the physical deprivation without letting it reach anything deeper—then it is just suffering without a harvest. Allah has no need of that. Not because He is rejecting me, but because He designed the fast to do something far more than make me hungry, and I have been stopping at the surface.

This is where the barakah question begins to answer itself.

Barakah is not a feeling. It is not a vibe the month generates. It is the fruit of what I pour into the vessel. The restraint of the tongue when it wants to complain. The lowering of the eyes when they want to consume. The softening of the heart when it wants to harden against someone who hurt me. These are not passive experiences. They are offerings—and barakah grows in proportion to what is actually offered.

An empty fast—one where the body is hungry but the tongue is still careless, the eyes are still scrolling, the heart is still cluttered with the same grievances and anxieties it carried in—produces empty barakah. Not because Allah withheld it, but because there was nothing for it to grow in. You cannot plant seeds in concrete and blame the rain for not coming.

Imam Al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111), in his Ihya ‘Ulum al-Din, describes three levels of fasting: the fasting of the common people, which is abstaining from food and drink; the fasting of the select, which is guarding every limb from sin; and the fasting of the elite of the elite, which is the fasting of the heart from everything that is not Allah.2 I used to read that and think it was aspirational—a framework for saints, not for someone like me. But I am starting to wonder if what Imam Al-Ghazali is describing is not a hierarchy of achievement but a hierarchy of depth. The first level is where you begin. The second is where the fast starts to reach your limbs. The third is where it reaches your interior—the hidden places I perform from, the self-image I protect, the version of myself I curate even in worship.

Shaykh Abdul-Qadir al-Jilani (d. 561/1166) takes it even further. He describes what he calls the fast of truth—preventing the heart from worshiping anything other than the Essence of Allah, “performed by rendering the eye of the heart blind to all that exists, even in the secret realms outside of this world, except the love of Allah.”3

That phrase—rendering the eye of the heart blind—has stayed with me. Because the things cluttering my Ramadan are not only the obvious distractions. They are the subtle ones too: the self-image I bring to worship, the expectation of how transformation is supposed to feel, the curated version of devotion I have been performing even when no one is watching.

I keep thinking about that—the performance I carry into my ibadah (worship). In years past, at the masjid, there was always an audience. Not one I was consciously playing to, but one that was there. The congregation saw me pray. The community saw me serve. There were people to greet after tarawih, people who knew I was there, people whose presence made it easier to show up and feel like I was doing Ramadan well. This year, at home, no one sees me except my family. There is no congregation to perform for, no public version of my worship to maintain. And what that absence is exposing is unsettling: how much of what I thought was devotion may have been sustained by being seen. How much easier it was to feel spiritual when the environment carried me. This year, with the audience removed, I am finding out where the real work is—and it is in the places no one else was ever looking.

The rewards are multiplied. But what is being multiplied if the offering itself is hollow?

I think I have been waiting for Ramadan to transform me. And the silence I am feeling—this absence where the barakah should be—is not a sign that Allah has withheld something. It is Ramadan asking me, quietly and without judgment, what I have actually brought to it.

The month is not over.

And maybe everything up to this point—the fatigue, the emptiness, the restless questioning that woke me up on day eight—has been the fast doing exactly what it was designed to do. Stripping away my assumptions. Dismantling the performance. Leaving me with nothing but the real question: what is actually between Allah and me right now?

The depletion is not failure. It may be the most honest I have been all month.

But I want to sit in that honesty for a moment before I rush to make it beautiful. Because the truth is uncomfortable. Surrendering to Ramadan—actually surrendering, not just enduring—means admitting something I have been avoiding: I have been showing up to this month on my own terms. My schedule of worship. My expectations of what transformation should feel like. My metrics for whether it is working. Surrender means releasing all of that—every self-imposed benchmark, every curated image of the devoted worshiper—and standing before Allah with the only thing I actually have: the truth of where I am.

That is a frightening place to pray from. It is also, I am learning, the only place where anything real begins.

And the nights ahead are not ordinary nights. Among them is Laylat al-Qadr (the Night of Decree)—a single night the Quran describes as better than a thousand months.4

A thousand months. That is not a reward designed for the strong. That is a mercy designed for the one who arrives at the last stretch with nothing left to offer but themselves. The one whose barakah did not come on schedule, whose Ramadan did not follow the arc they imagined, who is standing at the threshold of these final nights and wondering if it is too late.

It is not too late. That is the whole point.

Laylat al-Qadr is Allah’s answer to every person who reaches the end of the month still searching. The barakah I was looking for was never going to arrive on my timetable. It was always waiting here—in a single night, offered to the one still humble enough to be looking.

Maybe that is what real barakah has been all along. Not the spiritual high I was expecting. Not the feeling of closeness I thought would arrive on cue. But the slow, quiet breaking open that forced me to stop pretending and start seeking. The fast beneath the fast—the one that reaches past the stomach and into the places I have been avoiding to look at, though Allah never has.

I do not need to recover what I think I have lost. I need to bring whatever I have left—honestly, without performance, without the curated version of myself—and trust that Allah meets that.

Allah does not need my hunger. But He is offering me, through that hunger, a door I almost missed because I was too busy waiting for the month to carry me through it.

I do not know what is on the other side of that door. But I know who put it there. And with Him (i.e., God) is all success.

Generally, the more serious something is, the less excited I feel. It is not because I do not care. I actually think it’s because I care too much. When something carries consequence, I grow watchful. I become cautious with hope, as if hope itself can make the fall sharper.

In that vigilance, there is often a coping mechanism. I am preparing myself to be disappointed before disappointment has even arrived. I brace early, not because I don’t trust in Allah, but because I have learned what it feels like to want something deeply and still not know how it will unfold. I learned to keep my emotions at a safer distance, as if a guarded heart is less likely to break.

Ramadan just started, and I do not feel the rush that people speak about. Despite my feelings, MashaAllah, this year I have done more physical preparation than ever before. It’s like I’m trying to ready my body ahead of time so it can open a door my heart has been hesitant to enter. I hope I can derive some spiritual benefit.

But this is a serious time, particularly for me, as someone in a period of transition. Six months ago, I was blessed to start a new position after resigning from the ADAMS Center. I am still processing what it means to have stepped away from full-time imam duties. That kind of departure does not finish when the letter is sent or the role is formally concluded. The body may leave a schedule; the heart leaves more slowly. I don’t think I realized how much of my identity was braided into service until that braid was loosened and I felt, unexpectedly, the air on my skin.

When a role changes, the world does not always understand the internal cost. From the outside, it can look like relief, like freedom, like a clean turning of the page. Even if it actually is, inside, it can feel more like learning to stand differently. We can be grateful and unsettled at the same time. For me, my schedule has opened up, but part of me still reaches for the old urgency. The heart does not move in straight lines, and transition is rarely tidy.

Now, as someone trying to grow in a new position and deeply concerned with emotional and spiritual growth, the arrival of Ramadan feels like an invitation and a question. If the last seasons of my life trained me to be steady through responsibility, what happens when responsibility is not the main structure holding the days together? If my faith has often been expressed through the care of others, what does it look like when Allah asks me to be cared for by the month itself?

I have been reflecting on what it means to enter Ramadan with a different mindset. Not as a month to prove myself. Not as a month to perform spiritual intensity on command. Something closer to retreat. A resetting. A pause that is not laziness but attentiveness. A chance to reflect without immediately converting reflection into productivity. A month that becomes, quietly, a launchpad for the next part of life’s journey—not because I have answers, but because I pray to be placed back in Allah’s hands with less resistance.

If there is a hope hidden in all this seriousness, it is that Ramadan might allow me to be spiritually vulnerable without panic. That it might teach me, again, what it means to trust Allah without demanding emotional certainty first. That it might become a space where my heart can take root—sincere, deep, and, by His mercy, more connected than before.

Spiritual Bankruptcy In A Secular Atmosphere

If we are honest, a guarded heart does not form in isolation. It forms in an atmosphere. Many of us are living in a world trained to trust only what can be measured, tested, and explained. This is not only a way of thinking. It becomes a way of feeling. It teaches us which emotions are respectable and which are embarrassing. It teaches us which kinds of spiritual language are safe in public and which kinds of longing we should keep private.

In such a world, spirituality is often reduced to two narrow possibilities. Either it becomes the fantastical—the kind of story that can entertain us or impress others—or it becomes the debunkable, the kind of experience we rush to explain away so we do not look naïve. The quiet middle ground disappears: the ordinary interior life where reverence grows slowly, where worship settles into the bones.

Over time, we do not always lose religion. Sometimes we lose dhawq (taste). We keep the vocabulary, but we become poor in inward nourishment. We can speak about Allah with fluency, but struggle to sit in His presence without reaching for something else. We become crowded inside. It is not always sin. Sometimes it is spiritual bankruptcy: information without intimacy, knowledge without tenderness, correctness without sweetness.

And in the West, there is an added distance many of us feel, even when we can’t name it. We are far from many of the traditional sources of Islamic spirituality. Islam is still young in America. The roots are growing, but the inherited atmosphere that forms hearts over centuries is not always readily available to us. We can find scholars and seminaries—lectures and books. What is harder to find is that dhawq itself: spiritually rooted scholarship that imbues the heart with illumination through genuine slow tarbiya (spiritual cultivation). Additionally, the subtle byproduct of that cultivation: community—where remembrance is normal, where virtue is not a performance, where love is experienced.

This does not mean Allah is far. But it can mean that we do not always know how to live near. And because we are far from living wells, we often do not know what we do not know. We can become spiritually ignorant in the most subtle way: not ignorant of facts, but ignorant of what the heart is meant to feel, what the soul is meant to recognize, what a spiritually formed life even looks like when it is healthy. We mistake dryness for normal. We mistake numbness for maturity. We confuse being informed with being formed. And in that condition, we cannot even imagine our spiritual potential, because we have not seen its shape lived in front of us often enough to believe it is possible for us.

Then we overcompensate. We become busy. We become sharp. We become anxious about being correct, because correctness feels like the one thing we can control in a world that keeps shifting under our feet. And somewhere in that tightening, we become emotionally cold and numb. We reduce religion to information—facts and data—while remaining deprived of deep spiritual knowledge that illuminates the heart. The soul grows tired, and we call it a lack of motivation when it may actually be a lack of inward replenishment.

Still, the longing remains. We long for transcendence. We long for meaning and embodiment. We want a religion that not only tells us what is true, but also helps us taste it. We want to feel the Sunnah (the prophetic tradition) landing somewhere deeper than the mind. Yet we remain crowded by the world—guarded, disciplined, overstimulated—longing without language, and often without a safe way to admit the longing.

Love, Beauty, and the Tradition I Want to Live Inside

What I find myself yearning for is not more information. I do not mean that knowledge is unimportant. I mean that knowledge, on its own, does not always warm what has grown cold. It can sharpen us. It can organize us. It can even protect us. But it does not necessarily soften us. And I am realizing, with increasing clarity, what I want in this season of life is tenderness and peacefulness. Not weakness or stillness. Tenderness as life. Tenderness as receptivity. Tenderness as a heart that can actually be moved.

For a long time, much of my spiritual energy was spent on what is correct: sound belief, right practice, and careful boundaries. There is mercy in that. Correctness matters. It guards the path. But there is also a way to live inside correctness while remaining untouched by it, as if religion is something we carry in the mind and perform with the body, while the heart stays safely behind glass. I do not want that kind of religion anymore. I want Islam to be something that brings life into my inner world and beauty into my character. I want to approach the tradition through ihsan (spiritual excellence), not as an abstract ideal, but as a lived possibility.

If I am looking for what ihsan looks like lived, the tradition points to love. Our tradition speaks about love without embarrassment. Love is not treated as decoration. It is treated as a measure. The Quran teaches us that we will not attain piety until we give from what we love.2 That is the kind of line that exposes us, gently but completely. Because we can give what we do not care about and still remain unchanged. We can donate what costs us nothing and still keep our hearts attached to comfort. But to give from what we love means love is being redirected. It means the heart is being taught a new gravity.

And the tradition does not let love remain abstract. The Prophet ﷺ informed us, “None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.”3 That is not a sentimental statement. It is a diagnosis of the heart. It means faith is not only what we affirm. Faith is also what expands us. It makes the self less cramped. It makes generosity feel natural rather than forced. And that is what I am asking Ramadan for: not only to correct me, but to redirect me.

This is also why I keep returning to the Prophet ﷺ. Not only as a model to study, but as someone to love. I want him to become beloved in my heart, not merely respected in the mind. When people truly love someone, they overflow. They mention them without strain. They brighten when they think of them. They become better in their presence, even if that presence is through memory and longing. I want that kind of relationship with the Prophet ﷺ, where remembrance is not duty alone, but warmth. Where his character not only informs me, but also reforms me.

Maybe that is why the longing to see the Prophet ﷺ in a dream feels so tender. Not because dreams are the goal. Not because we need spectacle to prove anything. But because the soul, at times, aches for intimacy. It aches for nearness. It aches for a sign that love can become real again, not as an idea, but as an experience that softens and steadies us.

And it is not only the Prophet ﷺ. I want the righteous to become beloved. I want the awliya (friends of Allah) to feel less like distant names and more like companions whose remembrance elevates us without crushing us. There is a kind of spiritual companionship that forms us slowly, even if we never met those people in the worldly sense. Love makes that companionship possible. It turns inspiration into aspiration, and aspiration into patience.

Because love, in the end, is not something we can manufacture on command. It is something we ask Allah for, and then strive for with sincerity. We return to the practices that open the heart—adab (decorum), dhikr (remembrance), and fikr (contemplation)—and we accept that the heart opens in its own time. My teachers have reminded me that the longing itself is a sign of sincerity—not what materializes, not our assumptions about ourselves. That is where patience becomes more than endurance. Patience becomes trust. It becomes the belief that Allah can bring life back into places we have learned to keep guarded.

I am not arriving at Ramadan with excitement. But I am arriving with longing. Longing for a religion that I can live inside. A tradition that not only tells me what is true, but helps me feel what is true. A way of being Muslim where love is not a rare visitor, and beauty is not an afterthought.

I pray Ramadan becomes the space where this seeking can deepen—where the heart softens not on command, but by mercy.

Ultimately, with Allah is all success.

Saudi Arabia, 2007

Before I left for Saudi Arabia to study in 2007, my paternal grandmother looked at me and said, “Don’t go over there and become a terrorist.”

I can still hear the half-joking firmness in it. She was not trying to perform a political diagnosis. She was a grandmother watching her grandson step into a world she did not understand, during years when fear had its own atmosphere, when suspicion clung to ordinary conversations even inside families.

I tried to answer her honestly, but also without humiliating her for being afraid. I told her, “That’s actually why I’m going to study, Gramma. I want to understand Islam for myself and not be beholden to someone else’s interpretation.” Although I admittedly did not have a deep passion for studying Islam—it was something my mother (Allah bless her) raised me to know I would do—I did care about the Deen (way of life). Furthermore, I wanted to broaden my understanding enough to carry back into the lives we were actually living.

Those words sounded noble even to me. They were noble, in their own way. Still, if I sit with it long enough, I can admit something tender and unsettling underneath: I was not only seeking knowledge. I was trying to be safe—from being misled, and from misleading myself.

In those early years, my religious community had its own refrain: a paranoia over heterodoxy (both theological and jurisprudential), juxtaposed with a belief that religious scholars did not exist in America.

That combination does something to us. It turns seeking into bracing. Religion begins to feel like a room we enter with our shoulders tight, listening for the hidden agenda, checking every sentence for risk. Guidance stops feeling like nourishment and starts feeling like defense, and we learn to treat certainty like the only ethically responsible posture.

It also relocates legitimacy. If there are “no scholars here,” and danger is everywhere, then the safest Islam must live somewhere else—not only geographically, but psychologically. “There” becomes cleaner. “There” becomes untainted by the compromises of our lives. We do not only want to learn; we want the feeling of being protected from error.

For many Black Americans, that fear is not abstract. We carry a long memory of being fed narratives as if they were salvation—propaganda dressed as moral concern, ideology sold as truth, theology used to manage people rather than free them. So when we finally reach for Islam, many of us reach for it with a particular hunger: not just for spirituality, but for Truth—with a capital T—something that cannot be bent by someone else’s agenda.

There is dignity in that hunger. There is also danger in it, because hunger makes us impatient with nuance. It can make us mistake what is loud for what is real. It can make us treat the nearest strong voice as if it is the same thing as clarity, and clarity as if it is the same thing as safety.

If we sit with that long enough, a quieter question begins to form under the whole story—not only in the story of leaving, but in the story of how we were formed. What kind of religious life gets built when fear becomes the organizing principle? What happens to the heart when the main project is “don’t get tricked,” rather than “become sincere”?

A Cautious Inheritance

When religion is carried primarily as defense, it shapes what we emphasize. Many of us did not lack devotion; we lacked spaciousness. The air was full of boundaries, warnings, corrective instincts. Outward practice was emphasized because it could be measured. Correct belief was emphasized because it could be defended. The inner life—tazkiya (purification), the slow education of the ego, the hidden diseases of the heart—was present, but often as vocabulary more than as a sustained discipline.

This is not an indictment. It is an observation about what fear tends to produce. Fear makes us reach for what is controllable. Fear makes us cling to what can be proven. And checklists can soothe the nervous system, even when they cannot tell us what we most need to know: whether we have become softer, more careful with people’s dignity, less impressed with ourselves, more willing to repent without being seen.

That is why some of us became fluent in critique. We learned to spot drift and excess, and there is real benefit in that. But critique by itself does not purify a heart. It sharpens suspicion, and suspicion can become its own comfort. It can feel like righteousness while protecting the ego from more exposing work: humility that is not noticed, gentleness that is not celebrated, sincerity that is not legible to anyone except Allah.

Tasawwuf (the ascetic-mystical stream in Islam)1 entered many of our lives under that shadow. We were not primarily taught to see it as the interior pursuit of Ihsan (spiritual excellence). We were taught to see it as a slippery slope—something that can lead away from Truth and into emotional opinions and feelings, a religious tone where sweetness could begin to substitute for soundness. The fear was not that people would become “soft.” The fear was that softness could become a method for excusing drift.

Underneath that suspicion was a legitimate concern. Spiritual experience can be intoxicating. Communities can normalize claims and practices that do not belong to the religion simply because they are wrapped in beautiful language. Many of us had seen religious sentimentality. We did not want to live that way ourselves, and we did not want to pass along something unsound by dressing it up as spirituality.

But because we did not always have a robust interior program for tazkiya, our opposition to sentimentality sometimes hardened into opposition to interiority itself. Fear became method. Method became identity. And over time, another layer revealed itself: some of our suspicion was not only about protecting Islam. It was also about protecting our orientation. If religion could remain divided into clean categories—Truth over here, deviation over there—then we could avoid facing how complicated our own souls are. Knowledge does not automatically heal the ego, and correct beliefs do not automatically produce a purified heart; admitting that is harder than denouncing someone else’s mistake.

The uncomfortable mercy in this is that it takes away our easiest escape hatch. It becomes harder to blame “the other camp” when we start to notice the heart’s more universal instinct: trying to secure itself—sometimes through zeal, sometimes through belonging, sometimes through the reputation of being careful.

IbnTaymiyya and Kitab al-Tasawwuf

This is where encountering IbnTaymiyya’s Kitab al-Tasawwuf (The Book of Tasawwuf) began to rearrange things in me.

Many of us encounter IbnTaymiyya (d. 728/1328) as a symbol before we encounter him as a thinker. We inherit him as a paragon of religious scholarship. Often referred to as “Shaykh Al-Islam” (an honorific title for outstanding scholars of the Islamic sciences in the classical era),2 his name can close debates, serving as a shorthand for unbiased objectivity. In that inheritance, he can feel like pure firmness. What surprised me, when I actually sat with his discussions—particularly around spiritual people, the Sufis and the Fuqara (spiritually impoverished)—was how carefully he separates boundaries from contempt.3

He does hold lines. He does not blur theological claims to be “inclusive.” He does not treat spirituality as an excuse to loosen jurisprudence. The fear of extravagance that ran through his Hanbali instincts—the fear that religion could become ornate in a way that drifts—does show up in him. But it shows up with discernment, not with blanket dismissal. He critiques what deserves critique without turning critique into a personality.

What I did not expect was how specific he becomes about the Sufis themselves. He does not write as though “the Sufis” are a single moral unit. He describes three broad categories: those of realities (Sufiyyat al-Haqa’iq), those of provisions (Sufiyyat al-Arzaq), and those of form (Sufiyyat al-Rasm).4 The point is not to flatten people into boxes; it is to refuse the shortcut our egos love, where a label becomes a verdict and a style becomes a guarantee.

Sitting with that distinction can be disorienting in a good way. It means we cannot dismiss an entire tradition because we fear its abuses, nor can we romanticize a spiritual community just because it feels warm. It also means we cannot rely on appearances. Form can be learned quickly. Transformation cannot. People can carry the vocabulary of refinement while remaining untouched by the work of refinement, and others can look ordinary while quietly wrestling toward sincerity.

If we allow that honesty to settle, the argument starts dissolving into a better question. It stops being “tasawwuf: yes or no?” and becomes: what is the direction of our hearts, and what are we doing with the structures that claim to help us?

This is where the tradition’s language begins to feel less like jargon and more like relief: the difference between the path and the structure.

Tariq and Tariqah in a Fragmented Modernity

Before we name anything specifically, it helps to say this plainly: what follows is not an argument about Sufi Turuq (plural of Tariqah) in particular. It is about something we see in organized religious life in general. Wherever people gather around the sacred—where devotion becomes community, and community becomes structure—the same temptation appears: the means meant to help us walk can quietly start to feel like the destination.

That is part of why the tradition’s language around Tariq and Tariqah feels relieving. It lets us separate the journey from the container without pretending the container is meaningless.

Tariq is the path itself—the movement of the soul toward Allah through prayer, repentance, restraint, honesty, and the slow education of desire. It is not a badge. It is not a room. It is the work that remains even when no one is watching and nothing about our religiosity is impressive.

Tariqah is an order, a structure that formed historically around that path. For those who stand inside these lineages, baraka (blessing) in the silsila (chain of transmission) is not merely sentimental language; it is part of why the structure matters. Alongside that metaphysical reality, there is also a practical function that should not be secularized or dismissed: rhythm, companionship, accountability—ordinary supports that can keep a seeker steady enough to keep walking.

The problem is not the existence of a Tariqah. The problem is when we ask it to do what it was never meant to do.

A structure can help us walk; it cannot walk for us. An affiliation can offer support; it cannot guarantee sincerity. A lineage can carry blessing; it cannot substitute for purification.

And here is where our era forces an added honesty. We do not only live with a different set of ideas than earlier generations; we live with a different set of conditions. People move. Families are scattered. Time is broken into pieces that rarely feel like enough. Most of us are carrying modern burdens that do not pause simply because we found a community we love. Even the most sincere structure cannot reproduce the old village continuity, because the material conditions that made that continuity possible no longer exist for most of us.

When the ecosystem changes, expectations have to change—not out of trying something new, but out of refusing to pretend. Older religious ecosystems rarely asked one relationship to carry everything. Even when one teacher was central, seekers were surrounded by layers—jurists, theologians, mentors, elders, companions—people close enough to see a life, not just a question. What held people wasn’t a single voice. It was a web.

Now, we often try to compress what used to be an ecosystem into a single relationship—either because we romanticize what earlier communities had, or because we do not fully understand how layered that guidance actually was. We want one teacher to carry theology and trauma, law and marriage, spiritual aspiration and family conflict. We may not say it out loud, but we feel it when the teacher sets a boundary, when the answer is brief, when the response is, “This is not my domain.” It is easy to interpret that limit as indifference, or failure, or rejection. It is healthier to call it what it usually is: the weight of our lives meeting the limits of a single human role.

That is why something like a mentor matrix can be less of a modern invention and more of an attempt to rebuild—on a smaller scale—what older communities provided organically: a teacher for knowledge and grounding, an elder for perspective, a trusted friend for companionship and accountability, and, when needed, therapeutic support for patterns we cannot see clearly on our own.² The point is not to collect names. It is to distribute weight.

But we also have to be honest about how we build that matrix. If the entire structure of our support is “overseas,” literally or figuratively (i.e., far away), then we have not rebuilt an ecosystem—we have rebuilt the old reflex: legitimacy lives elsewhere, and what is near us is not trustworthy enough to hold the sacred parts of our lives. Sometimes a distant scholar is a mercy. Sometimes distance protects clarity. But distance also limits counsel, because distance limits what a person can truly see.

A support structure meant for tarbiya (spiritual formation) usually requires at least some people who have context for our lives—people who can see patterns, who understand our environment, who can notice when our “questions” are really evasions. Not because local equals holy, but because guidance becomes thin when it has no lived picture to work with.

And for the parts of our counsel that are not local—because sometimes we do consult scholars at a distance—we benefit from knowing what we are consulting them on. Distance changes what is responsible to ask. In Usul al-Fiqh (legal theory), there is a principle that keeps us honest: al-hukm ‘ala al-shay’ far’un ‘an tasawwuruh (a judgment about a thing follows from properly conceiving it). If the person we are asking cannot truly conceive our situation—its constraints, relationships, unseen costs—then what they offer may still clarify principles, boundaries, and direction. But it may not be able to hold the full texture of a life.

Once we accept that, the structure regains its proper scale. We stop demanding that one far voice solve what only proximity can understand. We stop treating remoteness as a stamp of purity. We begin building a web of counsel that can hold modern burdens without forcing any single relationship to pretend it is an ecosystem.

And when our expectations shift like that, something else shifts with them: the spiritual path stops being confused with the container. The order becomes a means again —something that can be for us or against us depending on what we do with it. Association, by itself, does not grant merit. It can support our sincerity, or it can become a hiding place from sincerity. The same structure that steadies one person can flatter another’s ego. The difference is not the label. The difference is what we seek inside it.

Scaffolding, Not Salvation

Once we admit that association is not merit, one of the heart’s favorite shortcuts collapses. Belonging can no longer stand in for evidence. It leaves us with what we were quietly hoping structure would spare us from: uncertainty, ordinary weakness, the slow work of becoming someone Allah is pleased with when no one is watching.

That is why the language matters here—not as decoration, but as a boundary for the soul. Structure is scaffolding. It can steady us while something real is being built. But it cannot be the building, and it cannot be salvation. If we treat it like proof, we will either demand what it cannot give or resent it for being human. If we receive it as support, it regains its proper scale—meaningful, even blessed, but still a means.

And because it is a means, it can be for us or against us depending on what we do with it. The same nearness that helps one person become more sincere can become another person’s hiding place. A person can stand close to the sacred and still be asleep inside. Another can live far from the center of religious life and be quietly beloved to Allah. The question is not where we stand, but what is happening in us as we stand there.

A dua (supplication) of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ has become a quiet reorientation when we feel ourselves turning worldly measures into spiritual proof: “O Allah, do not make the dunya our greatest concern, nor the limit of our knowledge.”5 It does not ask us to despise the world. It asks Allah to keep the world from becoming our ceiling—and that plea reaches into spiritual life too. If the comfort of being “inside,” the security of having access, or the pride of affiliation becomes our greatest concern, we will eventually bend the path to protect the feeling the structure gives us.

So the work remains less dramatic than we wish. It is the work of keeping means as means: receiving structure with gratitude, accepting limitations without resentment, letting baraka be real without turning it into a certificate, letting companionship support us without turning it into a scoreboard. The path stays what it has always been—prayer, repentance, inner honesty—especially when nobody is watching.

And then, sometimes, Allah lets us see what community can do when it is healthy: not saving us by association, but supporting growth in ways that ripple beyond the rooms we thought were most important.

I think about my grandmother again—not as a symbol, but as a person. That first moment in 2007 carried the era’s fear and misunderstanding into our living room. Years later, she told me about something that happened at her church. Someone began speaking about Muslims in anti-Muslim, inflammatory ways—confident and careless, the way people can be when they’ve never had to look into the eyes of the people they’re talking about. My grandmother defended Islam and Muslims quietly but firmly. It wasn’t a debate performance. It was simply a refusal to let slander pass through her presence uncontested.

Someone asked her where she learned what she was saying. She told me she answered without hesitation: “My grandchildren are Muslim, and they taught me what Islam is about.”

Ultimately, with Allah is success.

London, 2019

In 2019, on my way to London, I remember feeling full of excitement. The kind of excitement one feels in anticipation of being with loved ones. I was going to meet one of my teachers and some of his students. For years we communicated on WhatsApp and in Zoom meetings, watching livestreamed lessons and recorded videos, but this was the first time we were meeting in person. In my mind, that meant something—some unspoken merit attached to the shared affiliation, some uniting force that made being together feel spiritually beneficial even before anything happened.

Knowing this was a momentous occasion for me, Mustafa Davis graciously flew from Turkey to meet me there to help facilitate things and protect me from my own naiveté. In conversation, I told him about my excitement, the way we mention ordinary things in passing, assuming they don’t need to be examined. He didn’t let it pass. After a series of interrogating questions, he told me, plainly, that we should not treat the Shaykh’s students any differently than we would treat any other Muslim.

It would be easy to pretend that sentence was simply about manners, like a reminder not to be awkward in front of “important” people. But it wasn’t that. It was sharper than etiquette and kinder than embarrassment. It pointed directly at the place where sincerity can quietly tilt: the heart’s tendency to prioritize, to sort, to create categories of people who deserve a different kind of attention.

What stayed with me wasn’t only the correction—it was what it revealed about what I had already started doing inwardly. I wasn’t planning to disrespect anyone. I wasn’t thinking of myself as better. I was simply assuming that closeness to the Shaykh created a kind of spiritual gravity, and that gravity justified a different type of warmth. The risk wasn’t that I’d be rude to the Shaykh’s students. The risk was that I would be less present with everyone else.

There is a form of hierarchy that doesn’t announce itself in speech. It enters through the eyes and settles in the heart. We don’t say “these people matter more,” but we behave as if the room has tiers. We soften our voice for some and keep it dry for others. We listen more carefully when the person in front of us feels connected to what we want. We make a private exception in the heart, and then we convince ourselves it is reverence.

What Mustafa’s sentence did was expose how easily we can confuse reverence with preference. Reverence in Islam has a moral clarity: it honors knowledge, age, service, dignity, and the rights people hold. Preference is something else. Preference is when the heart begins to treat affiliation as proof. It is when we start to believe that being “close” to a sacred source makes someone more worthy of our warmth than the Muslim in front of us, who we assume is merely trying to stay afloat.

That moment in London didn’t ruin anything for me. It didn’t make me less grateful for teachers or less eager for companionship. It did something more honest: it made me wary of the part of us that turns good longing into a quiet ranking system. It made me suspicious of how my heart reaches for certainty in places never meant to carry that kind of weight.

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Reflection: When we feel drawn to a circle that feels “sacred,” what do we quietly assume that closeness means—and who becomes ordinary in our eyes because of it?

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Proximity Changes The Air

What makes this difficult to name is that it doesn’t begin with ugliness. It begins with love. We want to be near people who remind us of Allah. We want to learn. We want companionship that protects us from our own forgetfulness. These are good instincts. But the heart doesn’t only love what is good. It also loves what feels like security, and it can quietly fuse the two together.

There are forms of closeness that don’t simply feel like opportunity; they feel like reassurance. Being known starts to resemble being safe. Being invited starts to resemble being chosen. A place in the room begins to carry more meaning than it should. That is the moment something shifts, even if nothing outward changes. The space is still sacred. The people are still sincere. But an inward economy begins—small and mostly invisible—where access becomes a kind of currency we spend our attention to acquire.

We can sense it when we become more careful than we need to be. Not careful in the way adab (decorum) asks—careful in the way fear asks. We soften our opinions before we even speak them. We adjust our posture, our humor, our tone, trying to become the kind of person the circle will keep. Even our service can develop a calculating edge, as if the heart is quietly asking whether what we’re doing will bring us closer to what we want.

That’s what makes it spiritually dangerous: it can look like devotion. It can even feel like devotion. But adab is different from performance in one central way. Adab doesn’t need to be witnessed to be real. It doesn’t inflate in the presence of “important” people and shrink in the presence of ordinary Muslims. When our gentleness and attentiveness become selective, we aren’t refining ourselves; we’re negotiating.

This is where the moral tension deepens, because the longing underneath can be genuine. Many of us aren’t being formed by an environment anymore. We have fragments—messages, short visits, occasional gatherings—and then long stretches where no one sees our inner life. In that kind of landscape, closeness starts to feel like oxygen. It’s not only that we want benefit. We want something stable. We want a place where our hearts can stop improvising.

The tragedy is that stability can become something we chase through proximity itself. The moment that happens, closeness becomes proof, and proof becomes pressure. We begin to read normal human limits—time, boundaries, capacity—as personal verdicts. We start to interpret a closed door as rejection, a delayed reply as demotion, and we begin the quiet work of becoming smaller versions of ourselves in the hope that the room will hold us.

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Reflection: If proximity starts to feel like proof, what are we tempted to do to secure it—and what parts of sincerity quietly get traded along the way?

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Proximity ≠ Piety

In another post, I explored how Iman (faith) does not equal feeling. Warmth is not a reliable proof, and dryness is not a reliable defeat. What carries us is what settles in us and what we do with what we’ve been given. That correction protects us from thinking our emotional weather is a metric for Allah’s regard.

A similar correction belongs here: Proximity is not the same thing as piety. Closeness to a teacher can mean many things, and some of them are beautiful. But if we make closeness the measure of spiritual worth, we will spend our lives reading the unseen through the visible, and that reading rarely produces humility. It produces restlessness, comparison, and a constant need for signs because spirituality—a term somewhat foreign to classical Islamic scholarly tradition—has an inherently metaphysical component.

Religious communities become dangerous to the heart when we turn them into scoreboards. The scoreboard is rarely explicit. It’s made of small observations and quiet interpretations: who is near, who is named, who receives time, who is remembered. We begin turning those observations into conclusions about who is “serious,” who is beloved, who matters. The heart counts even when the tongue refuses to confess it.

If we use a hospital metaphorically for a religious community, it helps disrupt the romance of proximity without mocking anyone’s longing. In a hospital, everyone is present because something needs healing. People don’t arrive to prove they are well. Everyone has a chart that isn’t ours. And the one closest to the doctor may not be the one with the healthiest body; sometimes they are the one with the most urgent case, the most complicated wound, and the heaviest work ahead. When we remember this, envy loses some of its certainty. It becomes harder to idealize someone else’s place without knowing what it costs them.

Closeness can also be pragmatic. Sometimes someone is near because they translate, coordinate, host, or handle logistics. Their position reflects function, not rank. Their nearness may reflect service rather than spiritual standing. This doesn’t diminish the closeness or the service; it simply frees us from treating every visible role as proof of holiness.

Even when someone’s closeness is both piety and prudence—when the person near the teacher is genuinely upright, and the decision to keep them close is also practical—we can still over-interpret what that closeness means. We assume proximity comes packaged with the Shaykh’s comprehension, as though the student carries the teacher’s depth in their pocket. But students remain students, and closeness doesn’t automatically bring a person into the full architecture of what a teacher understands. Sometimes the person closest may not even know the edges of their own ignorance, and sometimes we don’t see those edges either until we hand them something too heavy: a conflict, a crisis, an attempt at counsel that requires skill they were never trained to hold. And we can make a parallel mistake with our teachers, quietly expecting them to be scholars, counselors, and conflict‑resolvers all at once, then feeling bruised when their gift is guidance in one realm and not another. The path has always required more than one kind of skill; our hearts are the ones that keep wanting one face to become a guarantee.

Holding these realities makes room for another truth to stay intact: respect is not the same thing as ranking. We honor scholars. We honor teachers. Knowledge has rights. Elders have rights. But the moment our reverence expands for insiders and contracts for ordinary Muslims, we should become concerned. The baseline is still the baseline: we honor Muslims as Muslims. We don’t let affiliation dictate our warmth.

Even when we accept all of this, the ache of being outside remains. Sometimes exclusion genuinely hurts. Sometimes, not being invited, not being seen, or not being answered triggers something deeper than the moment itself. The heart begins to narrate: if we were more useful, more impressive, more loved, we’d be closer. That narration can quietly become entitlement. It tells us we deserve access because we’ve been sincere, because we’ve sacrificed, because we’ve waited.

Entitlement rarely arrives as arrogance. It arrives as wounded logic. It turns limits into humiliation, and absence into accusation. It makes us fragile, because it ties our steadiness to outcomes we don’t control. In that fragility, we can start bargaining again, reshaping ourselves again, hoping proximity will finally quiet the fear that we might be ordinary and still unheld.

Allah interrupts this entire reading of the world with a standard that refuses our social instincts: “Indeed, the most honored of you in the sight of Allah is the one with the most taqwa (God-consciousness).”² The verse doesn’t deny differences in circumstance or access. It simply denies our right to treat those differences as verdicts. It returns honor to something we cannot measure from the outside, and it forces our hearts back toward humility.

If taqwa is the measure, then proximity becomes what it always was: a means that can help, a burden that can test, a circumstance that can change. It can be a mercy and a trial. Either way, it isn’t proof. And if it isn’t proof, then the heart has an opportunity to become steadier—to keep walking without asking the room to certify our worth.

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Reflection: When we’re not “inside,” do we still walk with the same steadiness—and what kind of guidance do we actually need to keep walking well?

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A Baseline We Can Carry

What stayed with me from London wasn’t a new rule to recite. It was the sensation of being caught—gently, but unmistakably—right at the moment my heart starts making private exceptions. Not exceptions in an outward respect, but inward. The kind that feels like reverence until we notice who it quietly withholds itself from.

There’s a temptation, once we see that, to overcorrect into guardedness—to treat every circle as suspect and every longing as compromised. But sincerity isn’t numbness. It’s a slower honesty. It’s letting ourselves want benefit without turning that want into a ranking system. It’s remembering that adab doesn’t only live around people we admire. It lives in the ordinary, repetitive places where nobody is impressed by us.

Maybe that’s the deeper discomfort hidden inside the phrase “ordinary Muslims.” The term isn’t neutral. It’s a category our ego creates to make certain people feel like background—people who can’t give us access, who can’t improve our standing, who won’t place us closer to what we want. They become “ordinary” because we’ve decided they don’t change the story. And then we wonder why our hearts feel unwell in sacred spaces, while ignoring the place Allah may be training us most directly: in how we treat the ones we’re tempted to pass over.

It’s sobering to consider that part of our tarbiya (spiritual formation) might be this simple, and this costly: stepping outside our comfort zone—not only the comfort zone of familiar friends, but the comfort zone of proximity itself. The comfort of being near what feels spiritually “high,” near what carries status in our religious imaginations. Sometimes our tarbiya is found in getting physically closer to the center. Sometimes it’s in spending time with the overlooked and the unseen, and learning to lovingly serve without needing the scene to feel sacred first. Not as a performance of humility, and not as a project, but as a quiet return to the baseline Mustafa was protecting: warmth that isn’t selective, presence that isn’t strategic, reverence that doesn’t require a ladder.

If we’re honest, we might find that the most revealing question isn’t who we feel drawn to in the “sacred” room, but who we become capable of ignoring once we leave it—who we treat as interruption, who we treat as background, who we assume is merely trying to stay afloat. What would change in us if the people we’ve filed away as “ordinary” were the very place of our tarbiya and our closeness to Allah—where self‑righteousness can’t hide behind the atmosphere of sacred spaces, and nearness to Him is practiced through unglamorous tenderness, responsibility, and excellence?

Ultimately, with Allah is success.

For most of my life, I like things to be as simple and clean as possible. It’s partly a Merchant thing, but for me it removes ambiguities and helps ease my ability to keep my intentions ethically sound. My relationship with people is no different. It’s simple: I am here to serve. Not in the sentimental way people say “service” when they mean volunteering once a year. I mean the deeper instinct that makes us show up for people without doing the invisible math of what they can give us in return. I’ve always wanted my relationships to stay in that register—human, unranked, unstrategic.

And that is part of why money has always made me uneasy.

I don’t think it’s because I believe money is inherently evil. It’s because money changes the air. It arrives and suddenly our attention has something else to cling to. It makes us notice things we were proud we didn’t notice. It introduces subtle questions we didn’t want to ask: Who matters? Who has access? Who can open doors? Who can close them? Money doesn’t have to be spoken aloud for the room to begin orbiting around it.

I used to tell myself that protecting intention meant keeping money out of the equation. If I stayed far enough from it, I wouldn’t become the kind of person who treats others like resources. If I never had to ask anyone for anything, I wouldn’t be tempted to flatter, to perform, to tilt my dignity in exchange for support. In my mind, sincerity was a kind of distance.

This came up recently in a conversation with my friend and boss, Aly Orady. It wasn’t one of those dramatic conversations people quote later as a turning point. It was ordinary, and maybe that’s why it stayed with me. I was talking about that familiar anxiety—about how money can contaminate good work, how it can warp relationships that were meant to be sincere, how quickly the heart begins to bend toward those who have influence.

Aly listened and then reminded me of a dua (supplication) of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, “O Allah! Honor Islam through the most dear of these two men to You: AbuJahl or Umar b. Al-Khattab.”1

I had heard it before. I had even loved the story of Umar b. Al-Khattab (Allah be pleased with him)—his strength, his transformation, the way truth turned him from a danger into a fortress. But hearing that supplication juxtaposed to my fear about wealth and influence did something to me. It made the question less sentimental and more honest.

That supplication is not romantic. It doesn’t ask Allah to strengthen the faith through someone gentle and hidden. It specifically asks Allah to strengthen Islam through men who represented consequence in their society—names that carried weight in the mouths of others. It quietly admits what we often try to deny: that strength exists in the world, that influence exists, that public power shapes outcomes, and that the faith is not embarrassed by any of that. Islam doesn’t pretend some people can’t shift the atmosphere of a room; it asks Allah to redirect that power toward good.

What unsettled me was realizing that I was sometimes refusing to let Allah use means I didn’t approve of. I was shrinking sincerity into something small and controllable—treating the real mechanics of provision, networks, and capacity as spiritually suspicious—because then I could stay untested.

Maybe my instinct wasn’t always a moral instinct. Maybe it was a control instinct wearing the clothing of devotion. That doesn’t mean money is innocent. It means my fear of money wasn’t necessarily proof of sincerity. Sometimes fear is just fear, and sometimes the heart hides inside it.

What follows isn’t a manifesto against wealth, and it isn’t a defense of it either. It’s closer to a confession about the way our hearts keep reaching for certainty, even in places where Allah seems to invite us into something more uncomfortable: trust.

Imaginary Ladders

We can live in a culture that prides itself on rejecting hierarchy and still find ourselves quietly arranging people into ranks. We do it in ways that feel too subtle to confess. We tell ourselves it’s just “being realistic,” just “reading the room,” just “understanding how things work.” Then we catch ourselves—later, when the day is quiet—realizing how much of our energy was spent trying not to look small.

The hierarchy ladders are rarely announced. They’re built from glances, introductions, whose messages we return quickly, whose disappointment we fear, whose approval we secretly interpret as safety. Money is one rung, but it’s not the only one. Influence is a rung. Ease is a rung. Being “in the right circles” is a rung. Even religious respectability can become a rung, the kind of rank we pretend is piety.

What makes them “imaginary” isn’t that they have no consequences. It’s that they’re internal. Once the mind assigns rank, we start living as if we’re under review—restless in rooms that haven’t actually threatened us, rehearsing sentences, softening truth, shrinking ourselves just to stay near whatever we’ve decided is “above.”

That’s why a small moment from the Companions, may Allah be pleased with them, feels so alive. Carrying a very human worry, they came to the Prophet ﷺ, and said “The wealthy have taken the rewards; they pray as we pray, they fast as we fast, but they give charity from their extra wealth.”3

What comes through in this narration isn’t envy. It’s longing—and the fear of being left behind by circumstances they can’t change. Beneath that is an assumption that still lives in us: that the door of Allah’s pleasure might be built in the shape of what the world calls “capacity.”

The Prophet’s response ﷺ holds the reality of wealth without surrendering to it. Money can open doors of good, yes, but it is not the only doorway. He points them toward a different kind of nearness—dhikr (remembrance), tasbih (glorification), and small acts that keep the heart full even when the hands are light.²

That hadith doesn’t remove the ladder from the world, but it removes the ladder from being a final judgment. It loosens the way our hearts obsess over a single rung and forget the vastness of Allah’s mercy. It is a re-education of sight.

Different Gifts, Equal Tests

That dua—the one that names AbuJahl and Umar—reframed something for me. It taught me a principle I keep returning to: having wealth is equal an amanah (trust) and test as it is for someone who doesn’t have it, but has different gifts.

Equal tests aren’t equal experiences. Both are equal in weight. Neither abundance nor scarcity is a spiritual shortcut—both can raise us (in closeness to God) and both can ruin us, but both reveal what we’re actually clinging to.

We’re tempted to turn circumstances into verdicts because verdicts feel clean: “They have more because Allah loves them more,” “We have less because we’re being punished,” or “If we were given what they were given, we would finally be safe.” But Allah interrupts that whole way of reading the world with a verse that refuses our ladders, “Surley the most noble of you in the sight of Allah has the most taqwa (God-consciousness) [i.e., most righteous].”4

If honor is taqwa, then wealth is not honor. Lack is not humiliation. Influence is not rank, and being unknown is not failure. These are arzaq (plural of rizq, i.e., provisions or portions) and arzaq come with responsibilities that look different from person to person. Wealth carries its own temptations: entitlement that impedes gratitude, generosity that desires applause, humility that cracks under praise. Scarcity has its pressures too: patience that can sour into bitterness, contentment that can slip toward despair, compromises we swear we’d never make if we felt safe.

And then there are gifts we rarely name because they feel ordinary until they disappear: health, time, emotional steadiness, stable family, a reliable community, the ability to think beyond survival. Those gifts test us too. They can become doors of worship and service, or they can become the quiet reasons we forget Allah.

When we accept that gifts are tests, comparison changes shape. It becomes less about who is ahead and more about what we are being asked to carry. It becomes harder to romanticize another person’s rizq, because we don’t know what it costs them privately. It becomes harder to despise our own rizq, because we start to suspect it was given with wisdom, even if we can’t see the wisdom yet.

The First Time I Heard It

The phrase “it isn’t my money” first reached me through someone who actually had money, MashaAllah.

A sister was speaking about her family’s wealth, and what stayed with me wasn’t the number or the scale (because she never mentioned it). It was the posture. She wasn’t talking about lifestyle or prestige, but deployment—where to put wealth, how to move it toward something that matters, and how to carry it without letting it carry her. Then she said, with a calmness that felt almost unsettling: “It’s not my money.”

It didn’t sound like a slogan. It sounded like a fact she had accepted, the way we accept that our bodies belong to Allah, or that our time is already being spent whether we notice it or not. The wealth was in her hands, but not in the way our egos want things to be “ours.” It was a trust.

If “it isn’t my money” is true, then money becomes rizq. Provision is never a final verdict; it’s an amanah—a trust with rights attached, and accountability built in. That means we can plan and work without obsessing over outcomes, give without feeling diminished, and receive help without shame, because Allah provides through means.

Zuhd + Detachment

This is where the tradition gives us a word for what we’ve been circling. We’ve been talking about money changing the air, about ladders we pretend we don’t see, about the quiet panic of needing to stay untempted. Underneath all of it is the same longing: to hold the dunya without being held by it. That inner freedom has a name in our tradition—zuhd—and it’s deeper than “having nothing.” It’s about not being owned.

Imam Al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111) describes zuhd with a simplicity that leaves us nowhere to hide: it is “the turning of desire away from a thing toward what is better than it.” He isn’t saying desire disappears, rather it gets re-aimed. Our hearts will always lean toward something—some source of security, some promise of “I’ll be okay”—and zuhd is when that leaning turns away from what is temporary toward what is actually better: Allah’s pleasure, and what remains.6

When we hear it like that, zuhd stops sounding like retreat and starts sounding like honesty. It’s not that we stop caring; it’s that we stop asking the dunya to be our proof of worth, our guarantee of safety, our certificate of being loved. We learn—slowly, imperfectly—to want Allah’s pleasure more than we want the comfort of being ahead, and to want acceptance more than we want applause.

But that definition also forces us to admit where desire hides. Sometimes it hides in obvious things—money, comfort, attention. Sometimes it hides in more “religious” disguises: the desire to be seen as detached, the desire to be known as sincere, the desire to feel above temptation.

Detachment can become a badge we quietly worship. We can take pride in refusing wealth, build ladders out of renunciation, and still insist we hate ladders. Even “we don’t care” can become a performance—another way of asking to be noticed.

That brings us back to the “cleanliness” I love. Cleanliness can be a mercy—clarity, ethical steadiness, vigilance. But it can also become a hiding place. A way to stay untested, because tests introduce ambiguity, and ambiguity threatens my self-image.

The prophetic dua we started with doesn’t let us stay there. It suggests Allah can strengthen His religion through strength, through capacity, through influence—so long as the heart remembers who those gifts belong to. That doesn’t excuse the danger of money. It simply refuses the idea that “clean” always means “far away.”

What Owns Us

If there is one practical way to locate our attachments without theatrics, it is to watch our reactions.

Even the right sentences don’t guarantee freedom. We can talk about trust and still panic when our plans collapse. We can praise sincerity and still bend our dignity in rooms where influence is present. We can admire zuhd and still crave the reputation of being detached.

A clearer measure often shows itself when we ask two questions: What are we willing to sacrifice to get what we want? What do we become when what we have is threatened—or taken?

One measure is what we’re willing to trade for what we want—prayer, honesty, gentleness, integrity. Another is what happens inside us when a gift is threatened. Loss has a way of revealing what we didn’t know we had turned into identity.

This isn’t meant to shame us. It’s meant as an inventory—quiet, private, and sometimes painful—the kind we do at night, when we’ve finally stopped performing.

I don’t think the goal is to become people who feel nothing. Islam doesn’t ask us to pretend loss doesn’t hurt, or that inequality doesn’t press on the chest. The goal feels closer to steadiness: returning what we have back to Allah in the heart, so we can hold it without clinging—and if we lose it, not letting that loss harden into suspicion of Allah, contempt for people, or disgust with ourselves.

And then, underneath all the analysis, a simpler question waits: what does it look like to carry our portion well?

We don’t get to choose our trusts. We only get to carry them. Some of us are entrusted with wealth that can move things in the world. Some of us are entrusted with gifts that never trend: steadiness, patience, the ability to show up, the ability to listen without turning someone’s pain into a story about ourselves. Some of us are entrusted with leadership, or sharp thinking, or the kind of personality that makes rooms warmer. Some of us are entrusted with caregiving, with obscurity, with doing the same faithful acts so repeatedly that nobody sees them as heroic anymore. The test isn’t whether the trust looks glamorous. The test is whether we treat it like a trust at all—whether we handle it with responsibility, with gratitude, with restraint, with excellence, even when no one is watching and nothing about it makes us feel “ahead.”

Sometimes “it isn’t my money” feels like relief. It returns everything to the One who owns it anyway, and it lightens the tightness that comes from acting like we were meant to control outcomes. Other times, it feels like standing at the edge of uncertainty and remembering that uncertainty was always part of faith. Either way, the sentence keeps doing the same quiet work: loosening the ladder before we build our lives on it.

O Allah, make us faithful stewards of what You have entrusted to us with—our money, our time, our health, our knowledge, our relationships, our influence, our obscurity. Let us care for these gifts with excellence whether they are praised or ignored, whether they look like leadership or quiet maintenance, whether they come with applause or with nothing at all. “Do not make the dunya our greatest concern, nor the limit of our knowledge.” Make our work sincere without making us arrogant about sincerity. Let us remember what we keep forgetting: we were never owners; we are merely caretakers, and only for a while.

Ultimately, with Allah is success.

For the last two years, I borrowed a corner of Dr. Yaqub Mirza’s world without ever really belonging to it. Imam Mohamed Magid, Dr. Fatima Mirza (Dr. Yaqub’s daughter), and I used his conference room at Sterling Management weekly as a place to write. We came with drafts and questions, with paragraphs that refused to behave, and with the desire to be in each other’s suhba (companionship) in hopes of producing something beneficial.

Sterling Management is not a sentimental space. It does not perform warmth for you. There is no carpet softening your footsteps, and no coffee smell hovering in the air. It feels like what it is: a working office that expects work. The quiet there is practical, the kind that makes you hear little things—the click of a pen, the shift of a chair—because nothing else is trying to distract you.

Every so often, Dr. Yaqub would stop by. He did not enter like someone checking on his property. He did not come to audit our progress or ask what we had produced. He would greet us, set something down for us—most often cheese and crackers snack packs—and move on as if the gesture were beneath mention.

Not elaborate, not expensive, not symbolic in any deliberate way. Just a token of generosity and hospitality, offered with the unselfconscious consistency of someone who has learned that care does not need an audience to be real. The gifts were never big, but they were frequent. And because they were frequent, they carried something bigger than their size: a quiet permission to keep going.

On December 3, 2025, in the company of loved ones Dr. Yaqub Mirza passed away. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un (Surely to Allah we belong and to Him we [all] shall return).

Because of work travel, I was not able to attend his janazah (funeral prayer) and I could not sit in the ‘azza (condolences) service. That absence has its own ache, because sometimes grief is not only losing someone—it is realizing how little control you have over the ways you show up for one another. I have never handled death neatly, and my first response is often a stillness in dissociation where emotions fade away with time.

I used to judge that delayed grief, as if the heart’s silence meant the heart was absent. I still do sometimes. But I am trying to meet it with a little more gentleness, because dissociation is not always indifference; sometimes it is simply how a person stays upright until they have the strength to feel. I do not always know what to make of my own responses, but I know I do not want this loss to pass through me without changing anything. Tawakkul (reliance upon Allah) is not a denial of what I missed; it is placing my regret and my limitations back in the hands of the One who knows my intention and my weakness better than I do. I could not be there physically, but I can still ask Allah to accept my dua (supplication), and to let whatever is sincere in this remembrance become of benefit rather than just words.

Mountains and Pegs

The Quran speaks about mountains with a simplicity that hides a deep lesson: “Have We not made the earth as a resting place, and the mountains as pegs?”1 Mountains, in this image, are not scenery. They are stability made visible—massive, unmoving, and uninterested in our attention. Their permanence trains us into forgetfulness; we live as if what holds us will always hold. Only when we picture the land without them do we understand how much of our calm was borrowed from something that simply stood there, quietly doing its work.

Communities have mountains too. They are not always the most visible people, but they are the stabilizers: those who quietly absorb pressure, those who build and maintain what others stand on. When they are present, the community feels firm without necessarily knowing why. When they are gone, we feel the ground shift under conversations that used to feel steady.

A prophetic warning returns to me in seasons like this. The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said, “Allah does not remove knowledge by snatching it from people, but by taking the lives of those who carry it … then people take ignorant leaders and go astray.2 We usually hear this pertaining to scholars, and it is true—that is what the Hadith is referencing. But I also believe we can expand the warning to other forms of knowledge that keep communities stable: the knowledge of how to build, govern, plan for succession, mentor, and keep an institution from becoming a stage.

When a community loses a “mountain,” it loses more than a person. It loses a certain kind of moral and structural steadiness. And then everyone learns, in the quiet that follows, how much they had been depending—because the place that once held them has become a void.

Signs of a Mountain

If mountains are “pegs” in the earth, then the question for a community is painfully simple: who are the people who function as pegs, and how do we recognize them before they are gone? The answer is not always found in the spotlight. Often it is found in what quietly becomes easier around a person: burdens lifted, pathways clarified, institutions steadied, ethical life made more livable for ordinary people who are just trying to worship Allah without losing their footing.

One way Dr. Yaqub’s work touched the community was through ethical, faith-conscious investing. I do not say that to turn this into a finance discussion, but because money is one of the most powerful anxieties in modern life. Many of us carry a quiet fear that financial responsibility requires moral compromise, that participating in the world demands violating what Allah has prohibited. In that space, even a single lawful pathway can be a mercy—not because it makes life simple, but because it makes obedience possible without constant spiritual angst.

Mountains do not prove their value in a moment; they prove it over time. That is what makes the date more than a fact. The Amana Income Fund began operations on June 23, 1986, and Dr. Yaqub is named among its founding trustees.3 The significance is not merely that it existed—it is that he was part of laying that foundation early, then letting it quietly serve people he might never meet. That is stabilizing work: building lawful pathways that reduce spiritual anxiety, not by speeches, but by creating options that help families remain upright.

Another sign of a mountain is how it treats knowledge—not as decoration, but as something worth housing and protecting. George Mason University announced a three-million-dollar gift through the Mirza Family Foundation to rename and strengthen its Center for Global Islamic Studies in honor of Abdul Hamid AbuSulayman.4 Shenandoah University similarly reported a Mirza Family Foundation gift establishing the Mirza-Barzinji Fund for Global Virtual Learning, emphasizing the aim of perpetuating educational benefit beyond a single moment or generation.5 At Shenandoah, Dr. Yaqub also established the Center for Islam in the Contemporary World—another way of turning resources into a durable home for learning and public understanding.6

You do not have to live on a campus to understand what this means: it is someone treating the pursuit of understanding as an act worth sustaining—building places where Muslim life and thought can be studied, taught, and engaged with seriousness rather than caricature.

But the point of gathering these facts is not to admire a résumé, it is to notice the shape of a life and ask what it teaches the living. Most of us will never build at that scale, and we do not need to. The question is not whether we can reproduce his reach; it is whether we can reproduce his orientation: a willingness to reduce other people’s burden, to make ethical life more accessible, to invest in knowledge that outlives personal influence, to strengthen the Ummah (Muslim community) in ways that remain sturdy when personalities change.

And perhaps the clearest sign of all is this: he did not seem to need his name hovering over what he built. Even assembling these public markers requires some digging—following institutional announcements, reading annual reports, tracing the quiet footprints that do not announce themselves. That is not a weakness in his legacy; it is a testimony to it. In a time when so much service is packaged to be seen, he served in ways that could easily go unnoticed—until the day the community feels the gap and realizes how much was being held.

When you gather these signs, you begin to recognize what the community often overlooks: not just builders of institutions, but stabilizers of atmosphere. The ones who keep adab intact, who keep warmth consistent, who make the Ummah feel like home even when the familiar voices are not in the room. That presence deserves to be named—because it is also something we can learn to carry.

The Stabilizers

A stabilizer is not simply someone who “helps.” A stabilizer is someone whose presence makes the community feel like itself. Their gift is not only what they do, but what they preserve: the tone of a place, the tenderness of its norms, the quiet expectations that keep people from becoming harsh with one another. When they are present, the community stays familiar. When they are absent, something subtle changes—like a room losing heat.

We tend to speak about leadership as if it only happens out front, as if the most important work is what is said into a microphone, written into a vision statement, or performed by boards and executives. But much of what shapes a community happens when the known voices are not there. It happens in the hallway and at the door. It happens in who greets people without judging them. It happens in who notices the newcomer standing alone. It happens in who keeps the standard of adab (decorum) when tension rises—who lowers the volume, who refuses gossip, who turns conflict into a conversation instead of a fracture.

Stabilizers keep the community’s “normal” healthy. They protect the difference between a masjid that is busy and a masjid that is loving. They hold the social fabric in place with consistent, small acts: showing up, remembering names, quietly checking on someone, doing a task that no one will praise, absorbing stress without passing it on to others. They are the people who make faith feel possible on an ordinary day, not because they teach new ideas, but because they embody reliability.7

When I think back to Tuesday mornings at Sterling Management, I realize Dr. Yaqub’s cheese and crackers were not only generosity, they were part of that stabilizing presence. He did not need to sit with us to “lead” us. He did not need to insert himself into the work to make his presence felt. He simply reinforced a norm: people doing something difficult deserve to be treated with care. A small snack pack, placed down without ceremony, can be a quiet form of culture-setting. It teaches you what kind of space this is. It teaches you what kind of person you are standing near.

The more I sit with what “mountains” really are, the more I realize they aren’t measured by what they build, but by what they keep steady. Most of us will never establish a trust, endow a center, or build something large enough to carry our names. But everyone can become a stabilizer. Everyone can become the kind of presence that keeps the Ummah steady when others are absent. Everyone can contribute to a culture where the default is mercy, not suspicion; generosity, not coldness; patience, not impatience; dignity, not humiliation. Everyone can love and serve.

When a stabilizer is removed, we feel more than sadness. We feel exposure. Not because the community collapses immediately, but because we realize how much of our comfort came from someone else’s consistency. We begin to notice what was being held together—what was being softened, what was being prevented, what was being quietly maintained. And that discovery leaves a question hanging in the air, not meant to shame us, but to mature us: were we only receiving stability, or were we learning how to offer it?

That question is where the ground truly begins to shift—not outside of us, but within us.

When the Ground Shifts

When a mountain disappears, what rises first is not always grief in its pure form. Often it is something more tangled: a sudden exposure, as if the community has been standing in a sheltered place without realizing the wind was being held back. We feel it as restlessness in the body, as a tightening in the chest, as questions that arrive without invitation. Some of those questions are about the future, but many of them are about the present: Who was holding this together? What was I depending on without noticing?

The truth is, loss has a way of revealing our attachments. It shows us where we placed our confidence, where we outsourced our steadiness, where we assumed someone else would always be there to carry what we did not want to carry. Sometimes we discover that our love for a “mountain” was also a kind of dependence on a “mountain,” and we feel ashamed of that discovery. But shame is not always the right teacher. Sometimes the right teacher is honesty: to admit that we leaned too heavily on what Allah had only given us temporarily, and to ask to be returned—gently—back to the One who was never temporary.

This is why the verse about Musa (‘alayhi salam—peace be upon him) stays with me. When Musa asked to see Allah, he was directed to look at the mountain: “if it remained firm, then he would see.” But when Allah manifested to the mountain, it crumbled, and Musa collapsed.8 The mountain did not crumble because it was weak; it crumbled because it was created. Even mountains—literal ones—are not built to carry what only Allah can carry. That verse does not shame us for seeking stability; it reorders our hearts. It reminds us that the One we are meant to trust is not the sign, but the One who placed the sign.

And still, we do not pretend this feels simple. Some of us feel that the education was taken too early, as if the classroom door closed mid-lesson and we are left holding notes we did not finish reviewing. But perhaps that is part of the test: whether we were only consuming the steadiness of our mountains, or actually learning how steadiness is formed. What we received from them—quiet responsibility, ethical clarity, patience with unglamorous work—cannot remain admiration. It has to become an embodiment. Otherwise, the mountain’s absence becomes only a wound, not a charge.

So this moment invites something difficult and dignifying: to take what we learned and build it into ourselves. Sabr (patient perseverance) and tawakkul have to move from vocabulary to posture—firmness without panic, effort without grasping, trust without passivity. The mountain is gone, but the lesson does not have to be gone with it—if we are willing to let the void teach us where our roots still need to grow.

How to Carry the Legacy Forward

Honoring a “mountain” does not mean turning the person into a myth. It means learning from the kind of life they lived, and then trying—quietly, steadily—to carry its best qualities forward.

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said that when a person dies, their deeds end except for three: “Sadaqah jariyah (ongoing charity), beneficial knowledge, and a righteous child who prays for them.”9 The hadith is comfort, but it is also direction. It tells us what continues, and it tells us what kinds of lives are worth building.

So what do we do, in a community, when the people who built quietly are no longer here? We begin, as Islam teaches us to begin, with what is within our reach and within our hearts.

Prayer and presence. Begin with dua, and make it specific. Ask Allah to forgive Dr. Yaqub, to expand his grave with light, and to accept the good he placed into the world. Then add presence to prayer: check on the family (particularly for those who have relationships with them), support them when the crowd thins, remember them when we no longer “have to.”

Furthermore, we must pray for ourselves and the Ummah—that Allah bless us to be who strive for excellence and sincere servants to the Ummah of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. “Know that if the entire creation were to gather together to do something to benefit you- you would never get any benefit except that Allah had written for you. And if they were to gather to do something to harm you- you would never be harmed except that Allah had written for you.”10

Ethical clarity. Build ethical clarity in our own life. A community is steadier when its members are careful with their earnings, humble with their influence, and sincere in their service. Ethical discipline is not private self-improvement; it is community infrastructure. It makes presence more trustworthy, and it makes leadership less dangerous.

Mentorship. Mentor one person into steadiness. Not as a program. Not as a performance. One person you can take seriously, consistently. Teach them adab, patience, and the quiet dignity of behind-the-scenes service. This is slow, unglamorous work, but it is how “mountains” multiply.

Sadaqah jariyah. Choose one form of sadaqah jariyah and commit steadily. If you can give money, give it in a way that continues: scholarships, learning spaces, programs that protect knowledge and dignity. If you cannot give money, give time, skill, and reliability. The goal is not a dramatic gesture; the goal is a long pattern of benefit.

None of these actions will make grief disappear. But they will keep grief from turning into chaos. They will turn loss into a kind of responsibility. They will allow the community’s ground to become firm again, not because the mountain returned, but because Allah granted new pegs—through the steady service of many.

A Closing That Does Not Pretend

About a week or so after Dr. Yaqub’s passing, we returned to Sterling Management. The building was doing what buildings always do: lights on, doors opening, the ordinary rhythm of work continuing as it had before. That normalcy can feel like a kind of shock when someone has just left the world. Grief does not always arrive as tears; sometimes it arrives as disorientation, as the uneasy feeling that the world is moving forward too smoothly while your heart is still trying to catch up.

Before we began writing, Imam Magid asked for Dr. Yaqub’s office unlocked and the staff to gather inside. It was left exactly as he had left it. The room held that particular quiet that only comes when someone is deeply missed: not dramatic, not staged, just heavy with presence through absence. Imam Magid made a dua for him—nothing long, nothing performative—just sincere and heartfelt, the way a person turns to Allah when words are not meant to impress anyone, only to reach the One who hears what we cannot fully say.

As we were leaving, someone opened one of the boxes on the floor and offered us seasonal chocolate-covered almonds. He told us, “Dr. Yaqub loved giving gifts and would have wanted you all to take one.” And it felt, in that small moment, like a final lesson delivered in his own language: generosity without ceremony, warmth without spotlight, a quiet way of saying that even after someone returns to Allah, their instinct for khayr (goodness) can still reach the people they leave behind.

“Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajiʿun.”11 The verse does not cancel grief, it frames it. It reminds us that people belong to Allah before they belong to us, and that returning to Allah is not a tragedy for the believer, even if it is painful for the living.

What a community does after losing a mountain reveals whether it was only admiring steadiness, or learning how to become steady. The verse we recite in grief is not merely a way to cope; it is a way to locate ourselves. If we belong to Allah, then our lives are not meant to be spent drifting from moment to moment. They are meant to be planted—rooted enough that others can lean on what we build long after we are gone. That is where sabr becomes more than endurance: it becomes remaining in place until your roots take. That is where tawakkul becomes more than comfort: it becomes the courage to build without grasping, to serve without needing to control how the story ends, trusting Allah with outcomes we cannot guarantee. We must plant ourselves in the Ummah through consistent worship, sincere responsibility (whether public or private), and durable service, so that when we return to Allah, something still stands that makes obedience easier for those who remain.

“So truly with hardship comes ease” is not permission to wait for relief; it is a promise that firmness is never wasted.12

Allah have mercy on Dr. Yaqub Mirza. Forgive him and elevate him. Accept from him the good he placed into the world, and make it sadaqah jariyah that continues to benefit people after him. Comfort his family and all who loved him, and grant them sabr that softens rather than hardens.

Allah protect our communities from the chaos that can follow loss. Do not let ego and ignorance fill the spaces left by the righteous. Make us people who build sincerely and consistently. Make us pegs in the earth, stable enough that others can stand, and humble enough that we do not need anyone to know our names.​​

Over the past year, my son Noah began accompanying me more frequently to community events. Those trips—the commute and the time during the events—removed from the chaos of our own “Loud House,” a Nickelodeon cartoon about a boy with ten sisters that I jokingly say is Noah’s biography, give us an opportunity to have uninterrupted conversations. Just he and I, both seeking to understand and connect with each other a little bit better.

Noah is quickly approaching thirteen years old, MashaAllah. Previously, he feigned a shy, innocent naivete so well that we believed it as truth. But now, spending more time around his “uncles,” the act can no longer be sustained. We are watching him transform into a young man, MashaAllah. He has started sharing opinions that show he’s thinking deeply about things—e.g., children should not get allowance for completing chores because they should not get paid for doing their job—and he frequently interjects hilarious and witty commentary—e.g., after I resigned from ADAMS, someone referred to me as “Imam Merchant,” and he coughed and said, “EX-Imam.”

Parenting is gardening, not engineering. “Our children are not little projects of raw material to engineer into whatever we have always wished for them; rather, they are delicate flowers gifted to us by God to care for.”2 How we water them, and the earth in which they are planted, inevitably impacts the child in unimaginable ways. But what is often missed is how they also impact us.

According to my mother, when I was younger I was incredibly shy and introverted. She tells a story about pushing me to dance at a party—a moment that, in her telling, finally broke me out of my shell. I have no recollection of this, of course; I have always identified as an extrovert, fueled by good suhba (companionship). But the older I get, the more I feel that early shyness creeping back to the fore. Peace and quiet feel like a precious commodity these days, even if it is only achieved through noise-canceling headphones.

Juggling requires tremendous attention and focus. In the early stages, the hands feel jumbled and uncoordinated. The eyes dart from hand to hand to ensure every transition lands cleanly as the next motion begins. Over time, as skill develops, less and less focus is required. Experienced jugglers can raise the stakes, adding larger or more challenging objects while making the performance appear effortless to the untrained eye. That mastery is what makes the craft extraordinary.

I would argue that transitioning between roles and responsibilities—and carrying the emotional toll they demand—requires far more bandwidth than juggling physical objects. The stakes are higher, too, because figuratively dropping the ball can wound people. The greater the responsibility, the heavier the load and the higher the stakes.

During intermissions, performers retreat to a green room. Hidden from the audience’s gaze, shielded from the uninvited, the green room is a safe place to decompress before stepping into the next role. That is my commute.

For those fifteen to twenty minutes, I have the car to myself. If I want to sit in silence, listen to the radio, or simply crash, it becomes a controlled environment—alone, away from constituents and the familial gaze. More importantly, it is the place where I shed the weight of imamate before entering the responsibilities of patriarch.

Noah joining my commutes has completely changed that routine. It feels as though someone has tampered with the weight of my juggling pins, and now I am slightly off balance. What once felt effortless—even to me—has changed: minutes go by before I realize I have not said a word, so I stumble into awkward, belabored small talk, or he overhears me sending a voice note in a tone he is unaccustomed to hearing.

Tough Love

On our way to Sunday school, Noah and I stopped at a café near home—coffee for me, a chocolate milkshake for him. I know he probably should not be drinking a chocolate milkshake at 11:30 a.m., but it is my way of sweetening the pot, giving him something to look forward to on our trips. As we parked, I received a message from a young man and responded before we walked in.

The café was busier than usual. We placed our order and waited for his milkshake, my attention splitting between small talk with Noah and responding to the brother’s questions. I pointed out that they had added ice cream to his shake—hence the extra flavor—and told him he would need to stir it well, since the chocolate syrup had settled at the bottom. Almost simultaneously, as I buckled my seatbelt, I realized the brother was anxiously trying to get an answer from me that I was not going to give him. Noah joyfully started drinking his milkshake, and we headed to Tanwir Institute.

It was a beautiful day, MashaAllah. The windows were down, nashids were playing, and we were bantering away. My phone kept vibrating with messages from the brother. I did not fault him—he had no idea what was going on in my life, and I was under no obligation to reply immediately—but he also was not picking up on the subtle hints I was giving him. So I picked up my phone to send a voice note, and Noah, realizing I was speaking to someone else, rolled his window up. MashaAllah, Noah is a sweet boy and very socially aware. He also knows how to mind his business—it is a Black thing; we do not play that—but as soon as I finished the voice note he started chuckling. Surprised, I looked at him and asked, “What’s so funny, Baba?”

“How are you going to say, ‘Put your big-boy pants on’?!”

I try really hard to differentiate between being an Imam and being a father. It is not that I cannot separate the two, but my children are too young to appreciate the nuance of those roles. All Noah heard was his father speaking frankly and unfiltered to someone, without any of the surrounding context. So I had to explain:

Baba, I have been texting back and forth with this brother for about twenty minutes now, and he was not getting the picture. I said it many different ways and even tried ignoring the subject altogether. Eventually, I had to be honest and direct with him. My role is to serve people—I want them to improve and get better, even if that means I hurt their feelings a little. That is what true brothers are for. And because I love you, I would speak the same way to you if you were in his situation.

See, Baba, this is one of the problems in the community today. We live so far apart, and everyone is performing friendship. We are not real anymore. Just like Uncle Fulan always tells you when you speak improperly or do something wrong—that is because he loves you, and that is good. We need more of that. We need more real community. It will not always be easy or feel good, but that is how we grow. InshaAllah the brother trusts me enough to know that is where I am coming from and what I want for him.

I finished my little diatribe as we parked at Tanwir. I asked if Noah understood, and he affirmed by nodding goofily and saying, “Mm-hm.” Then we got out of the car and headed to class.

Unfortunately, kids do not come with a manual. So much of parenting feels like making educated guesses and trying my best—especially with the eldest. It is not that the other children require less labor, but, for better or worse, with each additional child comes a bit more confidence in your parenting style.

One of the qualities I desperately want my children to learn is to be principled.

What frightens me most is that I do not think you can teach this in any way other than by embodying it. It is one thing to worry about the individual consequences of being unprincipled—Allah says in the Quran, “How despicable it is in the sight of Allah that you say what you do not do!”3—but to become the cause of that loss for future generations is terrifying.

So I have to start at home. I have to model it for them, especially for Noah, who in the near future will have to lead a family—ours, as the only boy, and eventually his own. At this pivotal age, when his mind is capable of grasping philosophical ideas without yet being burdened by their weight, I have to explain the reasoning behind what he sees me model.

I have no clue how to do both effectively. Children are bombarded with inputs every day; if I do not make the effort, they will undoubtedly learn their principles elsewhere, beyond my reach.

Loyalty + Honor

Egyptians have a saying: “الشيخ البعيد سره باتع – the distant scholar’s secrets are profound.” As a community, we tend to recognize the bashariya (humanness) of religious leaders only when something goes wrong—when it touches close to home. Otherwise, we marvel at our perception of them, whether or not that perception is accurate. The truth is, religious leaders are human too. They get sick, have feelings, and have families they must support (who in turn support them). The difference is that true leaders often try to mask their less-than-ideal human qualities, and only those closest to them ever get to see behind the veil.

As an Imam, I have a public profile. When my kids were in elementary school, they once came home asking, “Baba, are you famous?!” because they had googled my name. Even before that, they asked, “Do you know everyone?” because we ran into someone who recognized me at the grocery store. My responsibility is two-fold: ensuring that they remain humble and do not use their father or their surname for personal advantage, while also doing everything I can to protect them from the unavoidable hazards that come with my vocation.

My mother has always emphasized the boundaries of “grown-folk conversations”: adults must be mindful of what is inappropriate for children to hear; likewise, children must know that not everything said around them is for them—if you are not being addressed, stay quiet, and do not repeat what you heard. She did not limit this to adults either; older children should not speak “grown” around younger children. For her, it was a matter of adab (decorum), and it is something I have always tried to uphold, especially within my home. Still, no matter how much my wife and I try to shield our children—sometimes by shifting into Arabic or changing names—they can be very attentive. And what is most striking is when they let us know they have picked up on something. On more than one occasion, Noah did just that.

Standing next to me, quietly observing, Noah saw a brother—someone who had betrayed me—come and give salams. The wound was still fresh, but it was a public event and I am naturally non-confrontational, so we shook hands and moved on. I did not think much of it. Noah, however, waited until the brother walked out of earshot and asked, “Baba, are we cool with Uncle Joe?”

It caught me off guard. How did Noah even know to ask that in the first place? What should I tell him? In an instant, standing there as the Imam in front of everyone, my mind raced. “No,” I finally said, “but it’s okay. We can talk about it later.”

We did talk, but apparently my answer had not been sufficient. A month later, the same situation occurred. As we walked to the car, Noah did not ask a question this time. Instead, he said something that cut even deeper: “I don’t know how you even shake his hand.”

This time, it was just the two of us in the car, so I tried to explain:

Baba, I’m not going to lie—Uncle Joe did betray my friendship, and it hurt. I thought our relationship was different, but I was wrong. Not everyone values relationships the same way, and not everyone acts responsibly or ethically. That is life, and it is a learning opportunity for me, Al-Humdulillah.

But because he was dishonorable does not mean that I should be. I cannot and will not allow someone else to take me outside of my own character. Please do not misunderstand me—I would much prefer to live peacefully and avoid interacting with him or anyone else who has betrayed me. But I also have to be cognizant of context. We were standing in front of the community, and no one there knows what you and I know. How would it look if I responded aggressively? I would be the fool then.

I love you, Baba, and I truly appreciate your loyalty. Life is not about what happens to us—it is about the choices we make when it happens. We must always strive to please Allah in whatever we do, no matter what anyone else does.

I use my therapist as a sounding board to challenge and refine my thinking. Recently I asked him, “Is it wrong that I prefer for my kids to be exposed to betrayal, heartbreak, and disappointment now, as opposed to when they are older? I feel like if they experience those emotions while they still have the safety of their parents’ love and support, they will be better equipped to handle them later—especially when, God forbid, we may not be around.” He agreed.

I may have the best intentions in a friendship, but others might not. My understanding of friendship—and the qualities it requires—may differ from theirs, or perhaps the relationship simply changes. Regardless, humans will be humans. I cannot control someone else’s actions, but I can control my own.

Imams are held to a higher standard, and rightfully so. We are entrusted with shepherding the community, and leadership comes with responsibility. If we do not like that, perhaps we are in the wrong vocation.

Because of this amanah (trust), some Imams attempt to embody a saintly disposition—overlooking aggressions and wrongdoings, withholding from taking positions for fear of choosing incorrectly. I acknowledge their sincerity, but it is not an ethic I can embrace. I do not only worry about what God or the community will think; I worry about what my children will think of their father’s decisions. What am I teaching them? I fear that inaction or indifference can, at times, become the sacrifice of integrity for popularity.

Dr. Cornel West said about this ,

“Something profoundly spiritual …is an acknowledgement of having a hermeneutical humility … [and] an intellectual humility—acknowledging that you could be wrong, and there’s a good chance that you are at times wrong—but you’re still willing to stand in your truth and try to speak your truth and opt for a deep integrity rather than a cheap popularity. Because so often times in America to be popular is to be well adjusted to injustice … [and] well adapted to indifference. … Justice is what love looks like in public, just like tenderness is what love feels like in private.”4

Small Gestures

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me was first released while I was still living in Makkah. It is an autobiographical reflection on the author’s inner-city upbringing, juxtaposed with his son’s suburban world. Reading it felt eerily familiar—not déjà vu from the author’s perspective, but from the vantage point of his son.

Unlike Coates, my parents divorced when I was eight years old. My mother moved us to Virginia to live in a densely populated Muslim community, while my father remained in Maryland, less than five miles from where he grew up. I was not just experiencing a world physically different from his; it was fundamentally different in every way. I was raised Muslim and attended a private Islamic school in the suburbs, whereas he was raised Christian and went to inner-city public schools.

Even so, we remained in contact. During family gatherings, I would usually find a way to sit next to him. Whether on the couch or standing in the stairwell, just the two of us, the chaos around us would quiet. For those brief moments, we connected. I always knew I was the younger, shorter, less handsome version of my father. I have always been fine with that—after all, it is not something I can change. But without fail, every conversation confirmed how similar our personalities truly are.

Recently, we were locked in the same way again—sitting on the couch with a cacophony of laughter and conversation ringing around us. I was excited, updating him on my new job, explaining the kind of work I was doing, when suddenly—

“Hold on one sec, Mike. I’m sorry.”

He paused me mid-sentence. He half-stood, reached down, and extended his hand to Noah, who was sitting on the floor. “I know we do not speak often, but I want you to know I am proud of you and I love you,” he said, before sitting back down next to me. “Sorry about that, Mike. I just wanted him to know. Please continue.”

Earlier that day, we had attended a janazah (funeral) prayer for the mother of Noah’s Sunday school teacher—may Allah have mercy on her. My wife spoke with him, I spoke with him, but he was downcast in a way we could not reach. So we gave him space. He drifted from one corner of the room to another like a leaf caught in the wind of his own melancholy, until Dad’s subtle gesture. Almost instantly, Noah was replanted on firm emotional ground, and he bloomed once again.

Time did what it promised at the start—it disclosed the truth. In a few quiet seconds beside my father, I learned that love is mostly timing: turning toward a child when his face is heavy, giving a clear word of love, offering a touch that steadies. No speech. No ceremony. Presence, arriving when it is needed.

Noah is my only son. That means I must give him time that is clearly his. Not grand moments, but ordinary ones—showing up, putting the phone down, asking real questions, listening until he is finished. He needs to be loved in ways he can feel, and he needs to feel loyalty. That looks like telling the truth with rahma (mercy), guarding his dignity in public, correcting him gently in private, and keeping my word when no one is watching. My father reminded me that these are not extras; they are the work.

Our Prophet Muhammad ﷺ showed his love openly to his grandchildren, and taught us that mercy to children is part of faith. Fatherhood is an amanah. The path is sabr (patience) and tawakkul (reliance on Allah). So I will borrow from my father’s example and give Noah what I saw him give—clear words, a loving hand, and time. May Allah guide my family to what is pleasing to Him, protect us from ourselves, make me faithful to this amanah, and Noah among the righteous. Ameen!

Ultimately, with Allah is all success!

In the first paper, we stood in the warmth of the Prophet’s ﷺ city. We learned the grammar that turned companionship into community: mu’akha (covenant of brotherhood), ithar (altruism), qana’ah (contentment), and attention that felt like shelter. We saw that culture is not an event, but a climate formed by repeated acts of mercy—each one braided with sabr (patience) and tawakkul (trust in Allah).

This second paper asks a practical question: How do we translate those first principles into a world whose architecture often resists touch? Streets curve into cul‑de‑sacs, calendars move faster than hearts, and our rooms risk becoming efficient but aloof. Our answer cannot be nostalgia. It must be niyyah (intention) made visible—through redesigns of space, schedule, and reflex that make mercy plausible again.

What follows is a mirror and then a map. We will face the habits our age has taught us, begin again with why, cultivate a culture that lingers after the program ends, and practice the interior weather—commitment, vulnerability, and initiative—that makes belonging durable. We will move slowly, with sabr and tawakkul, trusting that Allah adds what sincerity begins.

The Modern Mirror

Formation asks for a world where people can touch each other’s lives without an appointment. Yet much of our world resists touch. Streets curve into cul‑de‑sacs that keep us from wandering. Garage doors seal us in and out like airlocks. Apartment towers offer everything but a reason to knock next door. We did not always choose loneliness; often, we inherited a design that trains our habits. It becomes normal to pass one another at a pace that forbids interruption, to live adjacent without ever quite belonging.

Scholars have been naming this thinning for years. Robert D. Putnam traced the slow unraveling of civic life—how the clubs, leagues, and neighborhood rituals that once stitched strangers into neighbors have frayed—and he called the ache by its image: Bowling Alone.2 Zygmunt Bauman described how modern bonds turn liquid—light enough to carry, easy enough to drop—so that commitment feels like a hazard rather than a home.3 Their diagnoses are not revelations, but they help explain why the heart can feel homeless in a house: our built environment catechizes us into privacy, mobility, and exit.

Public health has caught up to what imams and counselors have heard for years in quiet rooms. The Surgeon General of the United States speaks of loneliness and isolation not only as sadness but as risk: higher rates of heart disease and stroke, depression and anxiety, and early mortality. The advisory’s remedy sounds familiar to anyone who has sat with the Prophet’s ﷺ city: rebuild relationships, recover meaningful purpose, and renew service that stretches across institutions and neighborhoods.4

Our mosques and organizations are not immune to the prevailing design trends. We can become efficient but aloof—strong at programming, thin at presence. We polish stages and forget the porches. We count attendance and those who left early. We perfect the run‑of‑show and neglect the slow‑of‑soul. People come, listen, and leave with the same ache they carried in. They needed a circle; we offered a schedule. They needed a companion; we gave them a calendar invitation. It is not malice. It is a drift toward what is measurable over what is meaningful.

Repentance, in this register, looks like redesign. If architecture teaches, then floor plans are a form of moral language. Build thresholds that are easy to cross. Choose rooms that default to circles, not rows, when the purpose is suhba. Place chairs so that eyes can meet without strain. Leave margins in the program for conversation that wanders into care. Budget for meals as if barakah were a line item, because it is. And create gentle ways for people to be seen without spectacle—sign‑ups that translate into real visits, text threads that become dinners, foyers that feel like invitations rather than corridors.

None of this denies the speed of our age; it chooses to set a counter‑rhythm. The Prophet ﷺ did not build a city by accelerating everyone; he built it by humanizing time—by welcoming interruption as a site of obedience, by turning attention into shelter, by expecting Allah to add what sincerity begins. Our mirror is honest: we have built for convenience and called it community. Our hope is practical: we can build for communion again. “The believers are but brothers,” the Quran reminds, and then commands us to reconcile and to be mindful so that mercy may descend.5 The path back is not dramatic. It is a series of small redesigns—of rooms, of calendars, of reflexes—until belonging stops feeling like an exception and starts feeling like the air.

Begin with Why

Before we ask what hospitality is—or how to do it—we must decide why we are doing it. Writer Simon Sinek frames it this way: people do not commit to what you do; they commit to why you do it.7 When the why is clear, the how stops feeling frantic, and the what begins to cohere. Our why is not branding; it is worship: to help people feel held by one another and drawn nearer to Allah, so that rooms become conduits of barakah and hearts learn trust. The Prophet ﷺ gave us the grammar for this: “Actions are only by intentions.”8 Say the intention first, or we will mistake activity for meaning.

Once the intention is spoken, the room changes. You can feel it in the way volunteers gather before anyone arrives. A short supplication settles the air. There is no hurry to impress, only a shared willingness to notice. Chairs are not placed to face a stage but to face each other, as if to say, “You matter more than the program.” Someone has prepared food that can stretch without embarrassment. Another has decided to wait by the door, not as a greeter with a script but as a host with time. The details are the same as any event—sign‑in, tea, seating—but the texture is different. Attention begins to preach long before a word is said.

When people enter, hospitality takes the shape of presence. The Prophet ﷺ turned his whole body toward the one who spoke; that posture is a school of its own. In our setting, it looks like slowing to learn a name without making the moment heavy, leaving a little silence in the conversation so meaning can breathe, allowing the shy to belong without performance. The food is modest but elastic, because the intention has already trained the room to expect increase. What could have been a schedule becomes a circle. What could have been a talk becomes a meeting place for lives.

Afterward, the intention keeps working. The measure of the night is not applause or photographs. It is whether someone who was on the edge now has a way back into the middle. A non-transactional message is sent. A visit is made without ceremony. The host remembers the burden named in passing and makes quiet room for it in the coming week. Budgets, calendars, and floor plans begin to bend around these minor compliances. Over time, they become a culture that can carry weight.

Hospitality, then, is not the why; it is how love keeps faith with the why. When we begin with intention, details turn into devotion. The room becomes plausible evidence of Allah’s nearness. People leave with a warmth that outlasts the evening, and the work continues in the ordinary—at a doorway, at a table, on a sidewalk—where sincerity is felt without being announced.

Culture That Lingers

Culture is not a checklist of universal practices, and building suhba is not a one‑size‑fits‑all formula. In hospitality, Will Guidara argues that truly human service must be tailored to the particular guest—“one size fits one”—an insight that travels well into sacred community.10 The Messenger of Allah ﷺ embodied this long before our manuals: he adjusted his way to the person in front of him without compromising principle—praising even a humble table with, “What an excellent condiment vinegar is,” so a poor host would feel honored rather than exposed.11

Culture is atmosphere, not architecture. It is what lingers once the program ends: the warmth in the room after the lamp is blown out, the scent that clings to your clothes when you leave a beloved house. In Madinah, that atmosphere came from repeated gestures of mercy more than from announced initiatives—the tone that made people brave enough to ask questions and gentle enough to hear difficult answers.12 Culture is the unspoken grammar of a community; you do not see it on a schedule, but you feel it in the pauses and the aftercare.

Such a culture does not appear by accident; it is cultivated on purpose. The Prophet ﷺ taught us to begin everything with niyyah: “Actions are only by intentions,” lest we mistake activity for meaning. He also taught us to trust small, faithful repetitions: “The most beloved deeds to Allah are those done consistently, even if they are few”—because what we repeat with sincerity slowly becomes who we are. Over time, intention plus repetition hardens into instinct; the community begins to choose mercy before metrics because mercy has become reflex.

When these threads hold, a prophetic culture begins to teach without speaking. People find themselves acting with gentleness when no one is watching; a newcomer is remembered the next day without being assigned; a burden mentioned in passing is carried as if it were one’s own. That is the test: not how loudly we declare our values, but whether their fragrance remains after the microphones are silent. And because the atmosphere does not sustain itself, it requires an inner grammar that keeps the air warm when memories fade. In Madinah, that grammar moved like three quiet vows shaping instinct from the inside out: a resolve to stay (commitment), a courage to be seen and to see (vulnerability), and a readiness to move first (initiative). What follows is not a new program, but the interior weather that makes any culture of suhba durable.

The Interior Weather

If culture is the air a community breathes, these three habits are the currents that keep it alive. They are not techniques; they are ways of being that the Prophet ﷺ nurtured until they felt native to the soul.

Commitment—staying long enough for love to work.

Madinah held because people did not treat each other as experiments. They tied their lives with covenantal seriousness and learned to repair rather than replace. Revelation names the bond and makes it an instruction: “The believers are but brothers; so make peace between your brothers, and be mindful of Allah so that you may receive mercy.”14 Commitment is what gives culture a memory; without it, every circle becomes a revolving door. In our present, commitment looks like refusing to let conflict do the scheduling, choosing to return to the table after hard words, and measuring success by who is still with us a year from now.

Vulnerability—letting truth have a body.

A city can be polite and still be spiritually mute. The Prophet’s ﷺ people learned a braver courtesy: to be truthful without spectacle and receptive without defensiveness. “O you who believe, be mindful of Allah and be with the truthful.”15 Vulnerability is not performance; it is proximity with the guards down enough for nasiha to land and for correction to heal. It sounds like, “I was wrong,” spoken early, and “I am with you,” spoken when someone expects to be left. In such air, purpose ceases to be a brand and becomes a shared prayer.

Initiative—love that moves first.

If everyone waits to be invited, no one is welcomed. The Prophet ﷺ coached a reflex that made welcome feel inevitable: “The food for two is sufficient for three, and the food of three is sufficient for four.” He widened tables for the poor of Ahlus-Suffah,16 directing households to add a guest beyond what seemed possible. Initiative is not a hustle ethic; it is khidmah as instinct—sending the message before it is asked for, showing up before the calendar insists, setting one more place because trust has taught you that Allah adds what love begins.

Held together, these three are the interior weather of belonging. They keep culture from becoming ambiance without a backbone. Commitment keeps us in the room; vulnerability makes the room truthful; initiative keeps the room generous. In that climate, barakah becomes plausible again—the room feels larger than its square footage, the conversation lingers beyond its minutes, and the circle remembers the one who almost slipped away.

Circles That Outlive Us

Return, for a moment, to that city the Prophet ﷺ warmed. Picture the women of the Ansar asking brave questions; the Muhajirun learning a new market by morning; a poor man from the Ahlus-Suffah eating because someone at the edge waved him into the center. None of that required spectacle. All of it needed sincerity—the kind that expects Allah to add what we cannot.

We will not build another Madinah, and we are not asked to. We are asked to build what made it holy: presence, care, and mercy offered for Allah’s sake. Public‑health language now names the medicine with data; Revelation names it with kinship: “They give preference to others even when they themselves are in need.”18 Between those two languages lies our path—relationships to keep, purposes to share, services to render.

So I begin where I am, seeking first principles rather than replicas. A shared meal that stretches. A visit that interrupts my schedule and becomes the memory of the week. A message that says, “I was thinking of you,” not because there is news, but because love needs rehearsal. I will practice turning my whole body toward whoever speaks. I will ask Allah for barakah and plan the dishes. I will start again next week.

O Allah, make us people of niyyah and suhba. Teach us to stay when staying is hard, to open our hearts enough to be known and to know others, and to take the first step in love before being asked. Let our rooms be warmer than their walls, and our programs a means of nurturing hearts, not measuring them. Fold us into circles of mercy that outlast our names. Clothe us in sabr and fill us with tawakkul, and make every small act a door to Your nearness. And when we are gone, let a quiet sweetness remain—enough to remind those who come after that we once tried to be together, for You. Ameen!

Ultimately, with Allah is all success.

Late at night, the house quiets, and the ache begins its small conversations. The screen glows. Names move like lanterns across a dark river. We can reach anyone and still not feel reached. This is more than a social hunger; it is a spiritual wound—an absence of mercy moving through the ordinary hours, a thinning of breath where remembrance should be.

Madinah itself did not teach anyone anything. It was the Messenger of Allah ﷺ who taught—who turned rooms into schools of mercy and hunger into trust. By his presence, attention, and prayer, he disciplined love until it became a way of life. He gathered the displaced and the rooted, the cautious and the warm, and taught each to make space for the other. He trained hearts to sit, to listen, to stretch a small meal and expect barakah (blessing), to live sabr (patience) and tawakkul (trust in Allah), not as ideas but as muscle. The city warmed because he was there; the climate changed because revelation was embodied in him.

This reflection continues a quiet thread from “Friendship: Deep, Not Wide”—moving from the scale of one faithful bond to the architecture of a city shaped by revelation.

I am not trying to recreate a museum of their streets. I am trying to walk with them long enough to learn first principles I can carry into a world they could not have imagined. I want to test what in their reality is transferable across centuries: ikhlas (sincerity) before strategy, niyyah (intention) before logistics, mu’akha (covenant of brotherhood) before contract, hospitality before programming, presence before performance, boundaries that protect dignity, rhythms that make mercy habitual. They were the best generation, and I approach them as a student who expects to be changed—because the Prophet ﷺ said, “The best people are those living in my generation, then those who will follow them, then those who will follow the latter.”1 It’s in their practices that I search for foundations, not replicas; for truths sturdy enough to hold in cul‑de‑sacs and high‑rises, under fluorescent lights and phone screens alike, wherever our era’s darkness asks to be met.

Two Histories, One Tapestry

Sayyida Aisha—may Allah be pleased with her—named something native to Madinah: modesty that did not silence learning. “How excellent are the women of the Ansar. Their modesty did not prevent them from learning their religion.”3 That single praise opens a sociocultural picture: an oasis town of palm groves and irrigation channels, clustered kin and ready doors. Questions there were part of reverence; neighborliness had a grammar formed by shared tools, shared time, and harvests that required one another.

Even the economy sounded like a garden. The Ansar were farmers; many of the Muhajirun (Emigrants) entered share‑cropping arrangements in the Ansar’s groves—reciprocity turning soil into school.4 Their civic memory also carried the ache of civil war—Aws and Khazraj (the two major Arab tribes) bleeding one another until the Day of Buʿāth, just before the Hijrah. Exhaustion made the city ready for a teacher who could turn rivals into kin.5

It was a mosaic as well—Muslim Emigrants, Ansar hosts, and established Jewish clans with their own law and land. Early on, the Prophet ﷺ set down a civic covenant—what later sources call the Sahifat al‑Madīnah—naming the believers one ummah (community) while binding neighbors to mutual obligation across difference. It did not erase sociocultural lines; it moralized them into responsibility.6 He established a market to guard fairness and make honesty public, so trade itself became a daily school for trust.7

Across from this stood the Makkan cohort—formed not by orchards but by pressure.8 They endured the long boycott in the valley of Abī Ṭālib, a schooling in hunger and vigilance.9 Khabbāb ibn al‑Aratt recalled sitting with the Prophet ﷺ by the Kaʿbah and pleading for relief, a memory that tells the temperature of those years.10 Revelation itself names their condition: “As for those who emigrated in ˹the cause of˺ Allah after being persecuted…”;11 “Remember when you had been vastly outnumbered and oppressed in the land…”12

Set side by side, these are formations, not essences. Madinah’s neighborly candor and Makkah’s disciplined caution met in the same house. The Prophet ﷺ did not flatten them; he tuned them—pairing Emigrants with Helpers in mu’akha, honoring the Ansar’s generosity while refining it, honoring the Muhajirun’s reserve while warming it.13 He taught the city to love the Ansar as a sign of faith, not of faction.14 From the Prophet’s ﷺ time onward, real communities have been tapestries—threads dyed by different histories, woven by a single intention, held together by sincerity. Our task is not to make everyone alike; it is to welcome what each history teaches and let revelation braid those differences into one fabric of belonging.

Love That Pays the Cost

When the Prophet ﷺ arrived in Madinah, he paired the displaced with the rooted—mu’akha. It was not charity but covenant, which is to say commitment that outlives mood. The classic scene: Saʿd ibn al‑Rabīʿ offered half his wealth to ʿAbd al‑Raḥmān ibn ʿAwf; ʿAbd al‑Raḥmān answered with gratitude and dignity: “May Allah bless your family and your wealth—show me the market.” Two virtues face one another across a threshold: ithar (altruism) and qana’ah (contentment). Both are love paying a cost, neither is theatrical. This is what friendship—deep, not wide—looks like when it scales: covenant first, convenience second.

Revelation named this posture a sign of success: “They give ˹the emigrants˺ preference over themselves even though they may be in need.”15 That verse descended into scarcity, not surplus. The Ansar did not distribute leftovers; they reallocated trust, believing that what left the hand would return to the heart as barakah.

The Prophet ﷺ coached this sacrificial reflex through ordinary choreography. “The food for two is sufficient for three, and the food of three is sufficient for four,” he said—training a city to expect increase where love adds places. In another report: “Food for one suffices two; food for two suffices four; food for four suffices eight.”16 He multiplied invitations for the poor of the Suffah17: “Whoever has food enough for two, let him take a third from among them; whoever has food for four, let him take a fifth or a sixth.”18 And he set the inner law of such giving: “None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.”19

This is the transferable second principle for us: in community, we must sacrifice for one another from a place of love. In our world, that sacrifice often looks like time and attention rather than loaves and rooms: changing a schedule to accompany someone to an appointment, doing unseen labor to make a space feel warm, carrying a reputation when a friend stumbles so that shame does not finish what sin began. The fuel is tawakkul and sabr. We give from what feels like not enough, believing the increase will come—even if it is not measurable.

An Ecosystem of Mercy

The day Sa’d b. Al-Rabi’ offered half his wealth to Abdul-Rahman b. ‘Awf and heard, “May Allah bless your family and your wealth—show me the market,” is not only a story of two men being noble; it is a window into how the city breathed. The Prophet ﷺ cultivated not isolated acts but a circulating life: giving, receiving, advising, and correcting moved like blood through a body. In that pulse, ithar met qana’ah, and trust kept the currents from stagnating.

Revelation sketched this as a social watershed: “The believers, both men and women, are guardians of one another. They encourage good and forbid evil, establish prayer and pay alms-tax, and obey Allah and His Messenger.”20 The ethic is widened elsewhere: “Cooperate with one another in goodness and righteousness, and do not cooperate in sin and transgression.”21 This is the Prophet’s ﷺ ecosystem: mutual guardianship, shared duties, reciprocal care.

He taught us to imagine the whole with two images. First, “A believer to another believer is like a building whose different parts reinforce one another,” and he interlaced his fingers to show the fit—complementarity as architecture.22 Second, “The believers, in their mutual love, mercy, and compassion, are like a single body; when one limb suffers, the whole responds with wakefulness and fever”—responsiveness as physiology.23

Seen this way, brotherhood is not merely the place where love appears; it is the infrastructure that carries mercy to where it is needed most. Hospitality generates presence; presence makes nasiha (sincere counsel) possible; counsel permits ta’dib (gentle correction) without humiliation; correction restores purpose; restored purpose returns as khidmah (service). The loop closes, and climate forms. In practice, it looks like: a household that adds two plates without drama; a neighborhood trade that becomes dignity instead of debt; a visit that interrupts despair before it hardens. The Quran names the root: “Hold firmly, all together, to the rope of Allah, and do not be divided… He united your hearts, and by His grace you became brothers.”24 The ecosystem is what that grace feels like at street level—mercy traveling on ordinary routes until the whole city is warm.

Companionship as Formation

If mercy moves through a city like blood, this is the heart that pushes it. The Prophet ﷺ did not assemble audiences; he formed companions. He treated proximity as pedagogy and attention as hospitality. “A person is upon the religion of his close companion; so let each of you look carefully to whom he befriends.”25 This is not a slogan; it is an account of how character transfers. We become like what we draw near.

His method was disarmingly ordinary and relentlessly faithful. He turned his whole body to the one speaking, making listening a shelter where shame could not grow. He trained a city to expect barakah by stretching small food—“The food for two is sufficient for three, and the food of three is sufficient for four”—so that generosity became muscle memory rather than mood. He kept the vulnerable within arm’s reach, corrected without spectacle, praised without flattery. In those micro‑practices, souls were apprenticed into a different way of being.

Later sages only named what his suhba (companionship) had already proved. Sit with the people of God and you carry their scent; nearness transfers state.26 This is why niyyah must precede logistics, why nasiha must ride on affection, or it will not be heard, and why taʾdīb must be gentle, or it will not heal. Formation is not an event; it is a climate of nearness where habits of love are rehearsed until they feel native.

This is the first principle I must bring forward into our very different world: treat companionship as formation. Build circles where attention is habitual, meals are elastic, errands are shared, and confession can be safe without becoming spectacle. Without this engine, we will refine programs and remain unchanged; with it, the broader ecosystem of mercy becomes a school of the soul. In that school, sabr is practiced until it becomes reflex, and tawakkul is learned until interruptions feel like invitations from Him.

Where Barakah Begins

We have not been asked to rebuild their streets; we have been invited to relearn their reflexes. In Madinah, love did not depend on abundance. It depended on niyyah, sabr, and tawakkul. The Messenger of Allah ﷺ trained hearts until generosity became muscle, counsel became shelter, and presence became a school.

If we carry only one lesson forward, let it be this: companionship is formation. It is how Allah grows us for one another and toward Him. Treat nearness as a pedagogy, not a convenience. Make attention a home where shame cannot multiply. Expect barakah precisely where your measures predict shortage, and let sabr hold the door open long enough for that increase to arrive.

Three small obediences begin the rebuilding: turn your whole body toward whoever speaks so listening becomes safety; stretch a meal for one more and expect barakah; keep covenant when mood fades, letting sabr and tawakkul hold the door open until the increase arrives.

The rope of Allah is held together by these quiet choices. When they are repeated, they harden into culture. When they are neglected, programs grow while people shrink. Let us therefore attend to the seed, not the scaffolding: sincerity before strategy, presence before performance. The plans and floor‑lines will come. First, we choose to stay, to see, and to move toward one another—believing that what leaves the hand returns to the heart as mercy.

With Allah are the openings, and with Him is the increase.

“Why don’t you just stay with us?” is what I told Imam Farhan Siddiqi back in 2008.

I had just finished my first semester in Umm al-Qura’s Arabic program when I heard that an American student was looking for a place to stay in the dorms. All the beds in our room were taken, so I walked with him to the other dorms to help find a space. It was tough—he had recently left his own apartment, and due to visa issues, his pregnant wife had returned home alone. While my dorm wasn’t luxurious by any means, the other places we saw were far worse. So, despite not knowing each other for more than a few days, he agreed to stay with us.

What I quickly realized was that Farhan and I couldn’t have been more different. I was eighteen, living away from my mother’s home—and America—for the first time. He was twenty-five, already married, and had lived in multiple countries. I was a quiet, obedient kid raised by a religious Blackamerican single mom who listened to alternative rock and smooth jazz. He was a confident rebel raised in a Pakistani immigrant household, listening to hardcore hip-hop. About the only thing we had in common was that we were both trying to study Islam.

MashaAllah, nearly twenty years later—despite being different in so many ways, despite life changes, relocations, and even working for the same organization—we’re still friends, Al-Humdulillah. Just last month, we spoke on the same stage and our differences were literally in full display—me in jeans and a beanie, him in full Khaleeji regalia. After the event, I found myself reflecting: What has allowed our friendship to last this long? What held us together through it all?

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Humility

When Farhan and I first started spending time together, I was utterly lost. I had just arrived in Makkah, and every week I found myself floating between different groups—hanging with the Brits, then the older American students about to graduate, then the younger guys who were just trying to have fun. I didn’t have a study plan. I didn’t have rhythm. I was burning through my stipend without any idea how to sustain myself, and I was far too proud to admit I was struggling.

Farhan never sat me down and said, “Let me teach you how to live.” There was no formal mentorship agreement. He just quietly pulled me under his wing. I now recognize that for him, it was important that I learn to become self-sufficient and stable—values that would later define my life. He once told me, “You’re a young man. You’ve got to stop running to mommie every time you overspend.” Then, instead of leaving me to figure it out on my own, he introduced me to the university cafeteria, which offered subsidized meals I didn’t even know existed. He showed me how to track taxi rides to the Haram so I could create a steady schedule. In a short time, I was living off half my stipend and using the rest for books. What I didn’t know at the time was that he also called my mom behind my back and told her to stop sending me extra money.

He also wouldn’t help me search Google. I remember asking him to help me find something online and him just saying, “Bro, figure it out.” It sounds small, but those were formative moments—acts of tough love that forced me to grow. Now, much older myself, I can better appreciate what it must have been like for Farhan. As an Imam today, I have the luxury of going home at the end of the day, or choosing not to answer my phone if I need space (sorry guys, lol). But Farhan lived with me. And at the time, I was loud, extroverted, and often unaware of how much space I took up emotionally and socially.

What stands out most to me now is the humility he embodied. Despite being older, wiser, and more spiritually grounded, he never made me feel small. He never asserted himself to dominate or impose his way of thinking. Instead, he offered quiet guidance and gave me the space to grow at my own pace. That kind of humility—to live with someone so different, without ego or entitlement—is rare. He could have found another room or rented a separate apartment. But he stayed. He walked alongside me, not above me.

Most of my life, I’ve been surrounded by friends older than me. But Farhan was different. This was the first time I experienced real tough love. And it wasn’t easy. I didn’t take it well at first. As soon as I’d start complaining, he’d imitate Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop and say, “Stop whining!” But once I stopped resisting and realized I had something to gain from the relationship, everything began to change.

Ithaar (Altruism)

“None of you [truly] believes until he loves for his brother that which he loves for himself.”1 –Prophet Muhammad ﷺ

Looking back, I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for Farhan. He was looking for a place to stay and found, instead, a little brother—restless, emotionally hungry, and far from home. He had no obligation to take on that role. And yet, he took it graciously with quiet consistency.

We often approach relationships—whether platonic or romantic—by keeping score. Who did more? Who owes what? But that way of thinking only cheapens what could be sacred. I mentioned in Ya Banati 2: “Love is not a calculation of who gave more or who sacrificed less. True love is not transactional; it is altruistic. It thrives when given freely—not in anticipation of something in return, but as an act of sincerity and devotion.” If we’re not careful, entitlement blinds us to the goodness right in front of us.

I remember once spending an entire evening hanging out with a colleague. At the end of the night, instead of dropping me off at my dorm, he pulled over at the corner so I could walk the rest of the way. It was a short walk—just a few minutes—but he had a car and simply didn’t want to make the U-turn. That moment stayed with me—not because he meant harm, but because he didn’t go out of his way to extend care. Around the same time, I got sick. Farhan walked four times that distance to our favorite Yemeni restaurant to buy me broth soup. No complaints. No fanfare. Just care.

From where I stood, I was getting far more out of the relationship than he was. He wasn’t lacking in friends—Farhan was well-loved by many, mashAllah. But despite that, he remained loyal to me. He stayed close. He kept showing up. And looking back now, I see how much of that was rooted not just in personality, but in character—specifically in ithaar, a selfless concern for the other.

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Loyalty

A few years later, Farhan moved into his own place and was reunited with his wife in Makkah. But our suhba didn’t stop. When I got married, my wife and I stayed with him for two weeks before moving to the other side of the mountain. We’d ride to school together almost daily, and since I didn’t have a car, we’d do our grocery shopping together too.

That car—Fadla—was blessed. No A/C, no working speedometer, but she got us where we needed to go. When I wanted to take my wife to Madinah, Farhan let us drive her there. And later, when he upgraded to a newer car, he just gave Fadla to me. No fanfare. No conditions. Just quiet generosity.

By that point, our relationship had started to shift. I was no longer the teenage kid who couldn’t manage his stipend or keep a steady routine. I was now a husband with responsibilities, living in a different part of the city, making my own decisions. One day, Farhan stopped by my apartment and said—gently but directly—“Our relationship isn’t a mentor-mentee relationship anymore. We’re just friends now.”

I smiled and nodded. But truthfully, I felt a quiet ache. I didn’t feel disrespected or dismissed—it wasn’t that. It was as if something precious was being redefined, and even though I understood it, I still had to grieve a little for it.

But now, years later, I see that moment as one of the clearest expressions of loyalty I’ve ever experienced.

Because loyalty isn’t just sticking around when the bond is easy. It’s being willing to adjust when the dynamics change. It’s having enough care for someone to tell them the truth, even when the truth is that something has shifted. Farhan didn’t ghost me. He didn’t pull away and leave me confused. He respected me enough to name what was happening—and still stand beside me.

Too often, we assume loyalty means praise, protection, or silence. But real loyalty includes critique. It includes honesty. It’s not just about holding on to someone—it’s about helping them grow, even when that growth is uncomfortable. As the Prophet ﷺ said, “No two people loved one another for the sake of Allah Almighty, or for Islam, then separated from one another but that it was due to a sin one of them committed.”2

Loyalty, then, is not just presence. It’s presence with purpose. It’s telling someone, “I’m still here, but we’re different now, and that’s okay.” And Farhan did exactly that—with love, clarity, and respect. That’s what anchored our friendship then. That’s what still anchors it now.

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Compassion + Forgiveness

After graduation, Farhan and I both returned to the States. He served as an Imam first in Virginia, then New Jersey. I moved to Boston and enrolled in grad school. We mostly kept in touch through DMs and occasional phone calls—checking in, sending reflections, trading stories from the trenches of community work.

After finishing my master’s, I was rejected from my first round of doctoral applications. Shaykh Yasir—whose mentorship had brought me to Boston—had moved back to New Jersey, and I felt untethered. I sent Farhan a job listing for a chaplaincy role at Columbia. He asked, “Would you consider leaving Boston?” I said yes, and he immediately started helping me explore my options.

I ended up with two serious prospects: one at Columbia, the other back home in Northern Virginia. The Columbia opportunity fell through just a few hours after I was offered the Virginia position. That job involved leading a young professionals initiative while serving as an Imam. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the third space project was under Farhan’s organization.

It wasn’t a formal reporting structure, but emotionally it was complex. I had spent years growing into my own voice and approach. I came into the job expecting creative freedom. But Farhan worked through strategy and systems, while I moved on presence and intuition. The tension between our styles grew quietly.

I got frustrated with how the project was moving. I’m sure the administrative team got frustrated with me too. Farhan and I began to speak less. There was no falling out—just distance. Something unspoken, but felt.

Still, I refused to think negatively of him. This was the man who housed me, taught me how to budget, walked across the city to bring me soup, and gave me his car. He corrected me without ego and loved me without strings. That kind of loyalty doesn’t evaporate over miscommunication or misalignment.

I can’t even tell you what helped us move past the weirdness. Maybe a call. Maybe a visit. Maybe one of us just softened. But we didn’t need a formal reconciliation. We just started talking again.

That’s what real suhba looks like. Compassion is not a mood—it’s a commitment. Forgiveness is not pretending nothing happened—it’s choosing not to weaponize what did. Especially when someone has already proven their sincerity over years of presence.

The easiest thing to do is to walk away. But we must be careful not to mistake pride for boundaries or withdrawal for wisdom. Sometimes we avoid hard conversations not because the person is unsafe, but because mercy stretches us in ways that ego resists.

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said, “Beware of suspicion, for suspicion is the worst of false tales; and do not look for the others’ faults and do not spy, and do not be jealous of one another, and do not desert one another, and do not hate one another; and O Allah’s worshipers! Be brothers.”3

Farhan has always been that for me. Not because we never drifted, but because we always found our way back.

Conclusion

What has kept Farhan and me connected all these years isn’t that we’re alike—we’re not. We’ve lived different lives, had different temperaments, and walked different paths at times. We’ve disagreed, drifted, and even grown apart in certain seasons. And yet, somehow, we’ve remained. Not always close, but always rooted. And I’ve started to wonder if that’s because, even if imperfectly, our friendship has been centered on something higher than just ourselves.

I don’t say that with certainty—only with hope. I hope that our bond has been, in some quiet way, for the sake of Allah. Because when I look back, I see something deeper than convenience or compatibility. I see care that wasn’t transactional, forgiveness that didn’t need an apology, and loyalty that stayed even when life changed. And I can’t help but think that this kind of suhba doesn’t last without some trace of divine anchoring.

Friendships built only on shared interests or constant alignment tend to fade when those things shift. But when Allah is at the center—even if that awareness is subtle or unspoken—something holds. You return after silence. You choose mercy over pride. You stay, even when staying is quiet and simple.

I still have so much to learn about what it means to be a true friend for the sake of Allah. But I know that whatever Farhan and I have been to one another over the years, it has helped me grow. And that, I believe, is one of the clearest signs of a friendship worth keeping close.

May Allah allow us to be among those who are shaded by His throne on the Day there is no shade but His—those who loved one another for His sake, and remained bound by that love through changing seasons. And may Allah reward my brother Farhan—for his humility, his quiet acts of altruism, his unwavering loyalty, his compassion, and for the countless times he forgave me when I did not even know I needed forgiving. May our friendship continue to be a source of mercy in this life and a witness for us in the next. 

And may Allah bless us all with friends who bring us closer to Him—those who remind us when we forget, forgive us when we fall short, and stay with us when life becomes uncertain. May He protect us from companions who drain our hearts, distort our values, or distract us from our purpose. And may He fill the loneliness that no person can touch with His nearness and mercy. 

Ameen.

At forty years of age, revelation descended upon him, and with it came both embrace and rejection. His beloved wife, Lady Khadijah, accepted his call immediately, followed by Imam Ali, Abu Bakr, and Zayd ibn Haritha—may Allah be pleased with them all. Yet it was also his clansmen who resisted most fiercely: Abu Lahab, Abu Sufyan, and others. For thirteen years he proclaimed the oneness of Allah, enduring mockery, boycott, and persecution.

Finally, when Allah opened the way for migration, the Prophet ﷺ departed his beloved city—not out of desire, but out of necessity. Standing on an eastern hill, he looked back with aching love and apostrophized:

“By Allah! You are the best of Allah’s earth, and the most beloved of Allah’s earth to Allah, and if it were not that I was expelled from you I would not have left”1

That single statement carries the tension of every human transition: the grief of leaving what is beloved, and the courage of stepping into what is unknown. It is here that my own reflections on Makkah, Boston, and Virginia begin.

Makkah: Formation + First Anxiety

By the spring of 2016, I had lived in Makkah for nearly a decade. Despite its reputation for being rough, even abrasive, it was home. It raised me.

It was in Makkah that I felt the sharp sting of grief for the first time—losing loved ones, leaving behind family. It was in Makkah that I felt the sweetness of joy—marrying my wife, visiting Madinah. It was where I signed the lease for my first apartment and bought my first car. It was the soil where formative friendships grew—Imam Farhan Siddiqi, Mustafa Davis, Sh. Yasir Fahmy—and where my passion for Islamic spirituality and mental health was first awakened.

Life there was its own rhythm: traffic laws treated like suggestions (cars commonly drive in between lanes, as if the lines are to mark the center of the car, and overtake you on highway on and off ramps), bureaucracy requiring endless signatures, a degree plan stretched over nearly two hundred credit hours. The tribalistic nature of society often made it lonely for foreigners, but it was a system I understood.

I remember asking fellow students, just two years into my Makkan chapter, “What will you do after graduation?” Some hoped to remain, others had no plan. I did not know why, but even in those early years I could sense that my time there would not be permanent. Perhaps it was simply youth, the restlessness of knowing that after study comes something else. Yet as the years passed, I grew comfortable, and before I knew it, graduation was approaching.

That comfort gave way to anxiety. I was married, with children, and had no job lined up. I remember sitting in class one day, my mind racing. I bolted as soon as it ended, ran to an empty library, and collapsed in an aisle, trembling in what I now recognize was a panic attack. Another time, confiding in a brother during ʿUmrah, he told me, “You’re like the brothers who were in jail and now they’re being released.” His words stung—because they were partly true.

Unlike the Prophet ﷺ, no one was expelling me from Makkah. My time had simply come to its natural close. Yet the grief of leaving what was familiar, and the dread of reentering a world I no longer knew—the United States—felt suffocating.

And then Allah opened a door. Sh. Yasir Fahmy graciously accepted me as his understudy. It was not an answer I had engineered. It was given. And yet, even with that blessing, I carried the Prophet’s words in my heart: “If it were not that I was expelled from you, I would not have left.”

Boston: Scaffolding + Community

If Makkah was the soil of my formation, Boston was the scaffolding that helped me stand. Not because of the city itself, but because of the people—most of all, Sh. Yasir Fahmy and Yusufi Vali.

In “From the Etiquettes of Mentorship” I mentioned,

When I arrived in Boston to serve under Sh. Yasir Fahmy, it was my first time working so closely with a scholar. I was a naive and inexperienced Blackamerican Saudi graduate from Northern Virginia and Sh. Yasir is an Egyptian-American Azhari par excellence from Northern New Jersey. We could not have been from more different worlds; so much was difficult for me to grasp. Initially, I thought the relationship was unhealthy. But, through constant consultation with another mentor, I was shown my naivety to the world of khidma and tarbiya (the process of cultivating adab) and how to understand and eventually serve Sh. Yasir.

Then there was Yusufi, one of the community’s unsung heroes. He was not a scholar but a servant—“the consummate public servant, deeply beloved by the people whose lives he touches.”2 As Executive Director, he carried burdens far beyond his role. He pushed me into interfaith work through the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, into counseling training at Boston Children’s Hospital’s Refugee Trauma and Resilience Center. After khutbahs (sermons) or halaqas (lectures), he gave critical feedback. And when payroll was uncertain, he reassured staff that he would protect them—and he did. He carried the community with a quiet, relentless compassion.

Still, even after Yusufi resigned and eventually Sh. Yasir left Boston, there was the community itself. Families took my wife and children as their own. Sisters treated my kids like nieces and nephews, whisking them away to the beach, buying them chocolate. Brothers appeared in my office with unexpected gifts. People traveled with us, laughed with us, prayed with us. Bonds were woven in those years that still endure.

Leaving Boston was bittersweet. Bitter, because we had finally begun to feel stable, rooted. Sweet, because the move brought us closer to family—back to the DMV. It felt less like exile, and more like a gentle nudge forward.

Virginia: Return + Responsibility

After fifteen years away, returning to Virginia felt like rediscovering a childhood home—familiar, yet changed.

At the MAS Community Center, I found myself among youth who trusted me with their unfiltered honesty. Gen Z is unencumbered by social expectation once trust is earned and these jokers asked about everything—boys about advances at school, girls about BBLs. Their questions were raw, but they also listened. In those two and a half years, we traveled together, ate together, and sometimes they called me on the brink of despair. To be invited into their lives was a profound honor.

At ADAMS, the scope widened. Six branches, thirty-three Jummah prayers, seven Imams under Imam Magid and Sh. Abd Ar-Rafaa Ouertani. My work shifted to primarily young professionals and pastoral care. Through Qahwa (ADAMS in-house coffee shop and third-space), I explored mental health in an Islamic frame. Through Qurtuba (ADAMS education department), I designed a graduate-level syllabus, teaching both Family Systems in Islam and classical texts like Ibn Qudama’s Mukhtasar Minhaj al-Qasidin.

ADAMS felt like a culmination of my experiences—childhood in diverse mosques, studies in Makkah, counseling training. It also became fertile ground for writing: outlines for books, reflections, essays.

Leaving ADAMS, and MAS before that, was unlike leaving Makkah or Boston. It was not panic, nor bittersweetness, but fear of letting people down. Communities become family, and stepping away always feels like betrayal. My beard's grey hairs continue increasing under the weight of that responsibility.

Processing Transitions: The Wilderness of Waiting

What unsettles me about transitions is not only what they take away, but the space they create. That gap between what was familiar and what has not yet begun. It feels like wilderness—vast, unstructured, and silent.

I think of the Prophet ﷺ standing on that hill outside Makkah. He loved his city, its stones and its air. And yet, he had to leave. In that pause between departure and arrival, he was suspended in the unknown. That space has always felt haunting to me, because I know it too well.

In Makkah, it came as panic. A tightening of the chest, racing thoughts, the sensation of drowning while surrounded by people. I remember hiding in the library aisle, praying that no one would see me, ashamed that faith did not insulate me from fear. That wilderness taught me that anxiety is not solved by ideas alone. Sometimes it simply has to be survived, breath by breath.

In Boston, the wilderness took a different shape. It was not panic but bittersweetness. Packing boxes while neighbors hugged us, my children asking why we had to leave friends who felt like family. There were nights I lay awake asking Allah why stability is allowed to last only long enough for one to taste it. The Qur’an says, “We alternate these days ˹of victory and defeat˺ among people so that Allah may reveal the ˹true˺ believers.”3 At that time, those words did not soothe me; they unsettled me. Why should sweetness have to be taken away just when it begins to feel like home?

In Virginia, the wilderness was quieter but heavier. It was the fear of letting people down. Every goodbye felt like betrayal. Crafting a farewell letter carried the risk of disappointment. I love the people, and I know they love me. Yet love itself made leaving more painful.

Over time, I have learned that these moments demand two things: first, the willingness to pause and reflect; second, the courage to act.

Pause and Reflect.

Transitions are bookmarks in the story of our lives, moments when Allah allows us to stop and remember. To look back at how He carried us before, and to trust He will carry us again. Each move—Makkah, Boston, Virginia—left behind a marker in my history, a reminder that anxiety may blur the present but never erases His past generosity. Reflection also opens space for growth. Each figurative hijra (migration) reveals something new I must learn—sometimes resilience, sometimes gratitude, sometimes the humility of letting others carry me when I cannot carry myself.

Sphere of Influence.

Reflection also forces me to measure what lies within my control and what lies beyond it. Anxiety thrives on pretending I can master the future. But the Prophet ﷺ taught us to act while knowing the outcome rests with Allah. Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-ʿAs said, “Work for your life in this world as though you will live forever, and work for your Hereafter as though you will die tomorrow.”4 My responsibility is only to tend to the sphere Allah has given me—the conversations I can have, the preparations I can make, the prayers I can lift. Beyond that, the future belongs to Him.

Act.

After pausing, and after trying to discern what lies within my sphere of influence, I’ve learned that I cannot remain still forever. The Qur’an says, ‘Work, for Allah will see your work, and His Messenger, and the believers…”5 Acting does not mean I control the future; it only means I try to honor the present. In Makkah, that looked like finishing my studies even as uncertainty pressed in. In Boston, it meant attempting to embrace mentorship, even when I did not always understand it. In Virginia, it was simply showing up for people, even as my own heart wavered. My steps have been small, often faltering, but they have kept me moving. Sometimes the only way anxiety loosens its grip is when we take even the smallest step forward, trusting that Allah will meet us there.

Transitions are not tidy arcs of growth. They are jagged. They are humiliating. They are often more wilderness than clarity. But if I pause and reflect, remember my personal history, discern my sphere of influence, and then act within it, I find that Allah meets me there—not always with the answers I crave, but with the strength to take the next step. And sometimes, that is enough.

Conclusion: Moving When Allah Calls Us

The Prophet ﷺ did not leave Makkah by choice. He exhausted every possibility there, bore years of rejection and persecution, and only when he was forced did he look north to a new beginning. His love for the city never wavered, but when Allah called him forward, he obeyed.

We too move when Allah sends us signs. Sometimes those signs are gentle—a graduation on the horizon, the quiet close of a chapter. Other times they are more direct—a phone call from a mentor, the unmistakable weight of responsibility.

For me, it was all three. The pressure of graduation in Makkah forced me to reckon with a future I had deferred. The call from Sh. Yasir Fahmy opened a door into mentorship and service. And most recently, after resigning from ADAMS, Allah blessed me with another door opening: I stepped into a new role at a startup philanthropic foundation as Program Director and Imam in Residence, tasked with creating a nationwide fellowship for Imams.

Each of these was a figurative hijra. Each demanded that I leave behind what I loved, embrace what I did not yet know, and trust that Allah’s plan was greater than my own. We do not choose the timing. We do not always choose the place. But when Allah calls us to move—by force of circumstance, by the closing of a door, or by the gentle opening of a new one—the task is not to resist. It is to walk forward. Carrying love for what we leave. Carrying trust in the One who guides us to what comes next.

As we face the trials of life’s transitions, may Allah help us pause and remember His care, discern our steps, grow through what He sends, and steady our hearts to walk with trust as He carries us closer to Him. Ameen!

Ultimately, with Him is all success.

Despite his age, Fulan is a serious and grounded young man. MashaAllah, professionally, he has landed a solid job right out of college and has been excelling ever since, thanks to his technical skill, ambition, and social intelligence. Personally, he is deeply self-aware and very intentionally seeks mentorship. Also, emotionally, because of his past trauma, he’s an open book—unafraid of vulnerability or difficult conversations.

But as the relationship progressed, that very openness began to overwhelm the sister. Though she was well-accomplished and emotionally intelligent in her own right, she began to feel uneasy. And rather than process those emotions with a trusted friend, mentor, or even him—she turned to ChatGPT.

Unbeknownst to Fulan, she had been using the chatbot regularly as her therapist. When she asked for guidance, the AI interpreted the intensity of her feelings as a red flag—labeling it “moving too fast” and recommending she end the relationship to protect her emotional well-being. She took the advice immediately and relayed the decision to Fulan, word for word. No conversation. No discernment. Just a prompt and a parting message.

Fulan was completely blindsided.

The advice may have been logical, but it lacked the emotional, spiritual, and relational nuance she might have received had she spoken to a human being—someone who could weigh not just patterns and probabilities, but care, context, and consequence.

Months have passed since Fulan shared how the relationship ended. But as OpenAI (ChatGPT’s parent company) now moves to add new mental health guardrails to its chatbots, I keep coming back to this question: Why are so many people turning to AI to mediate their hearts? What happens when algorithms mediate our trust, intuition, and attachment?

This is not a critique of individuals—especially not of the sister in the story. Rather, it’s an attempt to interrogate a deeper crisis: a crisis of connection. Machines can reflect feelings, but not mercy. They can simulate presence, but not offer companionship.

As AI becomes a surrogate therapist and emotional compass for so many, this paper explores the ethical, psychological, and spiritual dangers of outsourcing our inner lives to machines. The crisis we face is not rooted in technology itself, but about what we’ve lost: real presence, meaningful bonds, and trust in God and one another. What we need is not smarter algorithms, but suhba (sacred companionship) and community are the healing response.

Sociological Roots

Due to a myriad of factors, since the 1980s America has gradually shifted away from collectivistic values to hyper-individualism. We shifted from “we” to “me.” So, while emotional self-sufficiency is now idealized, it comes at a high cost: isolation, shallow connections, and loneliness. It wasn’t by surprise either. French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville (d. 1859) said in his seminal work, Democracy in America, almost a century before shift, “Individualism is a calm considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself … and withdraw from the mass of his fellows.”1 Or, as sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman (d. 2017) said, “What used to be mutually binding togetherness is now more like a succession of loosely tied episodes. Easy to enter, easy to abandon.”2

Fulan didn’t rely on traditional methods (i.e., family connections or “rishta“ aunties) to find a spouse, he turned to matrimonial apps. It wasn’t due to a lack of trying either. Our communal structures—extended family, neighborhood bonds, and spiritual communities—have collapsed and left us untethered. Even our traditional third spaces—like houses of worship, local parks, etc.—no longer function as default gathering places. We engage with them on a personal-need basis, not casually or looking for socialization, and consequently emotional and spiritual mentorship has waned, particularly across generations.

In the void of enduring relationships and genuine community, many turn to social media, therapy memes, parasocial “friendships,” and AI chatbots. These sources give the illusion of connection, but lack risk, sacrifice, and commitment. The algorithms provide a tailored response—offering predictable and nonjudgmental replies, safety from rejection, and 24/7 availability—but with no real presence. As soon as Fulan found out that the sister was consulting ChatGPT for advice he was worried about the potential outcomes. The emotional engagement feels less risky, but also less real (to those who know it). It’s a simulation; AI emotional intelligence is only ever one-sided. They cannot sit with pain, hold silence, or offer mercy. ChatGPT cannot differentiate between the proverbial butterflies associated with a burgeoning relationship and someone using intense language prompts from legitimate safety threats.

The rise of AI therapy is not just about innovation, it’s about insulation. We are not merely seeking answers; we are avoiding the vulnerability of being known. What we need is not more personalized data, more personalized presence. Not smarter machines, but committed hearts.

Why AI Fails

1. Machines can mirror, but not mediate

AI excels at recognizing language patterns and mirroring back emotional content, but it lacks awareness of the embodied self. Chatbots, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is a large language model (LLM) that cannot read posture, tone, or spiritual states—or recognize when someone needs silence instead of speech. Sociologist Sherry Turkle has an entire book—Alone Together— dedicated to “we expect more from technology and less from each other.”4

2. Hierarchies of Values

AI operates on probabilistic logic and secular ethics: minimize discomfort and maximize perceived well-being. Even if programmed with ethical reasoning and given guardrails specifically for mental health intervention, it still has ethical risks.

“They may inadvertently reinforce negative thought patterns or fail to recognize severe symptoms that require immediate professional intervention. Relying on these chatbots could discourage individuals from seeking help from human professionals, leading to delayed treatment of serious conditions. In addition, both types of chatbots raise privacy concerns, as sensitive personal data could be mishandled or exploited, further compromising users’ well-being. For chatbots that are not specifically designed for depression intervention, this risk might be even higher.”5

Contrarily, Islamic ethics is guided by maqasid al-shari’ah (the higher objectives of the Sacred Law— safeguarding faith, intellect, life, lineage, and property), not utilitarian ethics. The ends do not justify the means, and the maqasid is an entire philosophical framework that cannot be determined absolutely by machines. Only a human, specifically with extensive personal and technical training, can properly assess what will help someone determine spiritually transformative or morally redemptive.

3. Psychological Flattening

Determining emotional well-being is a dynamic and nuanced process shaped by a person’s unique social, spiritual, and cultural history. Psychology, unlike the natural sciences, is interpretive and relational by nature. Therapeutic success often depends on personal trust, patience, and embodied rapport. All of the seminal figures of psychology—Freud, Jung, Rodgers, and others—-engaged with meaning, trauma, and identity (not universal constants), making it fundamentally incompatible with algorithmic certainty. AI can recognize patterns, but cannot access the lived meaning or sacred aspirations behind them. Additionally, “AI chatbots may oversimplify complex mental health issues and risk normalizing emotionally passive responses.”6 For Muslims, emotional healing is not just about functioning but about walking towards Allah, a far more comprehensive process.

4. Empathy Without Presence

Compassion without shared suffering becomes either clever mimicry—or worse, pity. Pity sees pain and is apathetic, if not recoil, whereas compassion sees pain and draws near; pity reinforces hierarchy, whereas compassion fosters solidarity. In Islam, rahma (mercy) is not a passive state, it is a divine embodied action. Real empathy requires presence, witnessing, and a willingness to carry part of the emotional or spiritual load. The Prophet ﷺ wept with the grieving,7 walked with the wounded,8 and uplifted the fallen.9 AI lacks soul and suffering—can simulate concern, but they do not feel with the us.

5. Misguided Trust + Hallucinations

In addition to emotional flattening, there are also cognitive risks: LLMs inspire trust due to their eloquence, not wisdom. Their confidence masks shallowness and their errors cannot be held accountable because they actually don’t know what they’re talking about.10 Furthermore, they hallucinate—confident about false outputs. That’s especially dangerous when used for emotional discernment. As we saw with Fulan’s situation, misguidance from AI can rupture relationships, but also delusion and “AI psychosis.”11

AI can respond, but it cannot relate. It does not witness, it does not remember, and it does not love. When life becomes heavy, we do not need outputs—we need people. People who show up, who carry burdens with us, who remind us of God when we forget ourselves. This is the work of suhba—not a feature or tool, but a sacred bond that grounds us in mercy, mutual accountability, and shared striving.

The Deeper Spiritual Struggle

If AI’s rise in emotional and spiritual life exposes a technological turn, beneath it lies something deeper—a spiritual crisis that runs quietly beneath our modern habits. This is not just about digital tools or psychological shortcuts. It is about the state of our hearts, our fears, and the deeper conditions that make us reach for simulations instead of souls.

Many people are not drawn to AI because it offers better answers, but because it demands nothing in return. Real relationships come with risk. To open one’s heart to another person is to risk being misunderstood, rejected, or even judged. AI, in contrast, feels safe. It does not ask for vulnerability—it receives it without flinching. But perhaps that’s precisely the problem. The Prophet ﷺ said, “The believer is the mirror of the believer.”13 Mirrors reflect not just the polished exterior, but the blemishes, too. Suhba offers truth with tenderness. But that truth, even when loving, is still uncomfortable. Machines, on the other hand, offer relief without reflection.

For many, the appeal of AI lies in the illusion of control. You can revise your prompt, erase what you shared, ask the same question a hundred different ways until it sounds “right.” You control the speed, the topic, and the depth. You are never asked to pause, to sit in silence, to carry the weight of another. This control is comforting—but spiritually, it is stunting. Growth does not happen on your own terms. It comes when you surrender, when you trust in Allah and allow the unpredictability of real relationships to shape you. Tawakkul (trust in Allah) is not about having power over outcomes—it is about relinquishing control to the One who knows what you need better than you do. As Allah says in the Quran, “And whoever puts their trust in Allah, then He ˹alone˺ is sufficient for them.”14

And for many, there is a simpler reason: We have been hurt. People—teachers, parents, religious leaders, even friends—have failed us. We’ve felt unheard, unprotected, or unloved. So we turn to something we believe cannot hurt us. This is not a sign of weakness, but of wounding. Yet spiritual healing cannot happen in isolation. Rahma cannot be simulated. It must be witnessed. And while AI can mimic language, it cannot carry your story. It cannot remember your pain from last week or recognize the growth in your voice today.

There is also a subtle avoidance at play—not just of people, but of the self. AI allows us to vent, to strategize, to seek comfort—but rarely to confront. It provides clarity without repentance, validation without introspection. But Islamic healing is never about bypassing pain. It is about meeting it, naming it, and asking Allah for meaning within it. Mujahada (spiritual struggle) is not avoided; it is embraced. The soul does not transform through ease—it is polished by striving.

At the core of this turn to simulation is a loneliness that is not just emotional—it is spiritual. It is the ache of the soul to be seen. Not just by people, but by God. And in our avoidance of people, we sometimes also distance ourselves from the places and relationships where we might feel Him most—among the truthful, the striving, the sincere. “O you who believe,” says Allah in the Quran, “be mindful of Allah and be with the truthful.”15 The antidote to spiritual loneliness is not more answers. It is more presence. More witnessing. More hearts that fear Allah and love you for His sake.

This section is not meant to judge. Rather, it is an invitation to look inward. Before we turn to another app, another chatbot, another output, we must ask: What am I really seeking? And what am I afraid of receiving?

Because only when we name the struggle, can we prepare ourselves to receive the gift of suhba—not as a product of ease, but as a fruit of courage. And yet, even in our hesitations and hurts, Allah does not leave us without a way forward. He sends us people—those who remind us of Him, hold space for our growth, and walk with us through the messiness of becoming. This is the mercy and gift of suhba.

The Antidote: Suhba

When the Prophet ﷺ passed his legacy was not preserved because of physical buildings or formal organization; rather he ﷺ left behind him a religion preserved in the hearts of the Sahaba (his companions), Allah be pleased with them. His companions became the Sahaba through being in his presence—they traveled, grieved, and rejoiced with him ﷺ. Real transformation comes through proximity and presence, through suhba. While curricula and programs impart knowledge, the development of khuluq (character) and adab (manners) happens in person.

Suhba ≠ Friendship

Suhba goes beyond friendship: friendship is rooted in affinity and suhba is rooted in intention; friendship is often comfort-based and suhba is growth-based; and friendship prioritizes harmony while suhba prioritizes truth with mercy. The intention is that, through this connection, we have come together for the sake of Allah, hoping to earn His pleasure and shade on the Day of Judgement.16 Through that expansive intention (i.e., seeking the pleasure of Allah), Suhba becomes a covenant, not a convenience; a mirror, not a mask.

Suhba is not a role we perform, it’s a disposition we carry. We don’t find the right person, we become one. It doesn’t appear or disappear based on context (e.g., in the boardroom versus the group chat). Being a colleague or supervisor does not exempt us from our spiritual responsibility of adab. Furthermore, the temptation to compartmentalize—warm and gentle at the masjid, cold and harsh in professional ones—is a modern dysfunction and contradictory to the prophetic model. The Prophet ﷺ displayed consistency and integrity across all settings.

The Prophet ﷺ said, “Kindness is not to be found in anything but that it adds to its beauty and it is not withdrawn from anything but it makes it defective.”17 We mustn’t use professionalism as a license for coldness. Boundaries are necessary, but never at the expense of compassion. It’s because of the richness of suhba that we have higher expectations or kindness, protection,18 and love.19

Sacrifice

Arabs have a saying, “Yad wahid la yusafaq—You cannot clap with only one hand” and suhba is no different. One person cannot carry the weight of the relationship. It doesn’t mean that both people will be the best of friends, but because of their shared intention to earn Allah’s pleasure, both parties have to be willing to contribute. If not, it’s merely a transaction. But, unlike transactional relationships, it isn’t scorekeeping. It’s genuinely striving to care for another and cultivating a relationship where affection turns into trust.

Suhba, like all deep relationships, requires work. But unlike ordinary friendships, it’s spiritual nature calls for a higher level of sacrifice. We must have theocentric altruism, as the Prophet ﷺ said, “None of you truly believes until you love for your brother what you love for yourself.”20 The cost of this sacrifice is ego, time, and emotional energy, but the return is baraka (blessings). Additionally, through sacrifice and service is how we make others feel safe. Suhba dies where entitlement grows and thrives where humility reigns.

Community

If suhba is the seed, community is the orchard. They aren’t defined by the places where people convene— e.g., Masjids and third spaces. Community is the manifestation of suhba en masse, when sacred companionships extend beyond two people and relationship nodes intermesh to a dyadic web of rooted connections. As I mentioned in Cultivating Community: Why the Juice is Worth the Squeeze, “A healthy community is an altruistic and sustainable ecosystem that cultivates a sense of belonging among its members and generates a cohesive confidence rooted in the shared desire to engage, contribute, and serve.”

For more on this topic, please see the paper below.

Conclusion: From Simulation to Suhba

Fulan did not need perfect advice. He needed presence. He needed someone who could sit with him in his confusion, hold space for his hopes, and gently help him discern between emotional turbulence and spiritual clarity. But instead of a person, the sister turned to a prompt. And while the machine may have generated a well-structured reply, it failed to offer what only human beings can give: care, context, and commitment.

His story is not just about a relationship that ended too soon. It is a parable of our time—a cautionary tale about what happens when we allow simulations to mediate the most sacred parts of our inner lives. Chatbots may be available at all hours, but they cannot hold us in silence. They may be trained on trillions of words, but they cannot speak from love. They may reflect back our feelings, but they cannot witness our souls.

What happened with Fulan reveals a deeper trend we now face—it’s not technological, it’s spiritual. It is the loss of a way of being with one another that is rooted in mercy, mutual striving, and remembrance of Allah. We are suffering not because machines are too intelligent, but because our relationships have become too thin, too transactional, too disembodied. We are longing for guidance, but avoiding the vulnerability that real guidance requires. We want to feel known, but resist the patience, humility, and sacrifice that knowing demands.

This is why we must return to suhba—not as a nostalgic ideal, but as a living, breathing necessity. Suhba grounds us. It slows us down. It teaches us how to listen, how to carry, how to be carried. It reminds us that mercy is not optional, that truth must be spoken with tenderness, and that healing begins not in clever advice, but in the shelter of another heart that fears Allah and loves you for His sake.

Fulan may have lost a relationship, but he did not lose hope. That experience became a turning point—not just in how he seeks companionship, but in how he understands what it means to be seen. He learned that discernment does not come from code, but from connection. That healing requires more than output—it requires witnessing. And most of all, he learned that the kind of companionship worth seeking is not fast, frictionless, or filtered through a screen. It is earned. It is built. And it is sacred.

What we need now is not smarter algorithms, but softer hearts. Not better simulations, but deeper relationships. Not convenience, but conviction—that companionship rooted in Allah is still the truest technology of the soul.

And, ultimately, Allah knows best.

In 2017, Boston University accepted me into their School of Theology’s graduate program. It was nerve-wracking because I did not know what to expect. In all honesty, I was not deeply interested in the academy or theology—I had intended to train as a social worker—but Boston University offered a dual master’s program, and most students began with theology. I also knew it would give me a different perspective from my traditional Islamic studies training and would look good on my résumé, so I took the leap and quickly realized I was in the deep end.

Beyond my personal commitments—at the time I was serving full-time as an Imam, had two children at home, and was expecting a third—I did not know how to use the library, let alone data mine, and yet I took a full course load. To make matters more challenging, I had one professor who took no nonsense. Dr. Kathy Darr—I will never forget how phenomenal an instructor she was. She knew that, because it was an introductory course on which much of our later work would build, many of us did not yet understand what it meant to be a graduate student. She made nothing easy for us. If you wanted to pass her class, you had to earn it—complete all the readings, write the papers, pass the exams, and attend every lecture. She was charismatic, dynamic, and seemed to know everything about the Hebrew Bible.

The Western academy is very different from my more Eastern Islamic studies background. In the Eastern system, the emphasis is on memorization—which I did not do—and on studying a subject in a structured and incremental way, with each book becoming progressively more technical and broad. The Western academy does not follow this same structure. Because of this, Dr. Darr seemed like a juggernaut, seamlessly weaving together multiple epistemological and methodological approaches alongside cultural references. As a budding academic, it was overwhelming—how would I ever reach that level of proficiency and prowess?

Towards the end of my graduate program, I noticed something: professors typically taught the same courses every year. Each time they taught, they refined their slides, mentored teaching assistants, reviewed papers, and answered questions. This repeated cycle of exposure, practice, and refinement was how they honed their skills as professors. What I had once mistaken for an unattainable level of greatness was, in fact, the accumulation of “dedication, hard work, plus patience,” to quote a late Blackamerican poet.

Planting Seeds

Before I started the graduate program, I sought the advice of a respected elder in the community, . She has been an activist and community leader for longer than my mother has been alive and holds a graduate degree herself. She told me, “Make the program yours.”

I do not think I understood what she meant at the time, but as the program progressed, that is exactly what I did. I took classes at Harvard Divinity School through the Boston Theological Interreligious Consortium and, most importantly, regardless of the subject, I found a way to make every paper I wrote about Islam—either theologically or practically. Each class, every professor and TA, alongside my many conversations with Shaykh Yasir Fahmy about what I was learning, stretched my understanding of the world, religion, and mental health. It mattered deeply to me because I could see its direct application to my service as a chaplain and Imam. I did not have a specific target or a fully charted course of study, but I knew I had to find my voice.

During my last semester, I served as the Muslim chaplain at the Essex County Correctional Facility. It was the height of the pandemic, and safety protocols restricted inmates’ movement to the programming building—where I primarily served and religious services were held. Large portions of my day were spent in my office with little to do, so in an effort to keep my income halal (permissible) and to continue engaging with the inmates, I created a newsletter for them.

It was simple—nothing fancy—just one horizontal sheet of paper, front and back, divided into four sections so it could be folded like a leaflet. But it was a labor of love. When I finished it, I showed it to my boss, and she said, “What a beautiful extension of your pastoral care.” I had never thought about writing from the perspective of pastoral care before. I had not even recognized that I had something to say. But something clicked in that moment—she planted a seed in my mind.

Maturity’s Discernment

Immediately after completing my graduate program, I had big dreams for writing. I admired online periodicals with dedicated editorial boards and clear intellectual vision—places like The New Atlantis and PALLADIUM Magazine. I longed for more Muslims to engage in public intellectual life with the same rigor and reach. I imagined perhaps I could help organize such a platform—never really seeing myself as a contributor, aside from a few academic co-authorships and smaller reflections.

The more I explored the idea, the more it overwhelmed me. It could’ve been naïveté, but I quickly realized that producing high-caliber work at scale requires what I did not have—time, money, and sustained attention. I also began to wonder if that kind of work would still have a meaningful audience, as public discourse moves away from longform essays to micro-video and soundbite media.

So I let the idea go, and it wasn’t easy.

Not every idea deserves your “yes.” No matter how noble or needed, every dream comes with a cost—and our time and energy are already running on loan. Allah reminds us in the Qur’an, “Every soul will taste death. And We test you with good and evil as a trial, then to Us you will all return.”2

Maturity is learning the difference between what excites you and what anchors you. It is discerning where your energy serves best, not just where it shines. I once thought I needed to build something big. But a few years later, after feeling intellectually bored and creatively frustrated, I started Khawatir—a humble, personal offering. And maybe that is the seed I am meant to stay with.

Watering

Whenever I speak to the Shabab about investing in whatever passion they have, two things repeatedly come up:

• Seemingly too many interests that lead to a lack of mission clarity

• Mission clarity, but uncomfortable with the necessary things to accomplish it

Finding Mission Clarity

We live in privilege’s twilight zone. The privilege of our family’s financial security affords us to live independently, removed from community—now, in the age of internet and social media, completely removed from human interaction—and to, simultaneously, explore whatever career options we so desire. The consequence of this is we have all the theoretical options in the world without any real-world practical exposure or the people to potentially learn from.

The weight of this can feel suffocating, especially with the sociocultural expectations we inherited—i.e., that through one’s efforts you can “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” and achieve the “American Dream.” It raises the question: how can I achieve the greatness I see from previous generations or from the people today who, sometimes from doing some dances on camera from the comfort of their bedroom, make it seem so easy? Furthermore, where do I even start when the choices seem endless and I have so many interests?

For me, it was just a matter of being gracious with myself by trying a multitude of things without concern of failing. In the beginning stages, we’re merely pouring water onto untilled ground in hopes that something may grow. Writing, for me, became the rose that grew from the concrete. It forces me to think deeper deliberately about things I’m passionate about, and

Once we start noticing a semblance of success—and that will look differently for everyone: for some it may be competency, others it may be interests, etc.—that’s where we focus our attention.

Deliberate Practice

Greatness (or success) doesn't happen overnight and it is not because of someone’s innate talent. In fact, “By shining our spotlight on talent, we risk leaving everything else in the shadows. We inadvertently send the message that these other factors—including grit—don’t matter as much as they really do.”4 In Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell argues that expertise in any complex field is rarely due to innate talent alone; instead, it usually comes after approximately 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.

I don’t believe I’m particularly talented in anything, including writing. During my graduate program I was trained to write academic papers, so when I decided to start writing Khawatir that’s how I wrote—the topics were very precise, the language was formal and concise, the tone was objective, and I cited all of my sources. I knew it might be inaccessible to some and wasn’t typically how public intellectual writing was done—I don’t even think there is a definitive definition of what that is or how it should look—but I knew I had to start and couldn’t wait for perfection.

Of course some people have certain proclivities, but no one is born great at anything. It’s only through grit—passion and perseverance for long-term goals, as Psychologist Angela Duckworth defines it5—we are able to achieve greatness. But, just like some of my classmates couldn’t stand Dr. Darr, greatness is always in varying degrees of subjectivity. “There’s nothing like [Allah],”6 He is Al-Akbar (The Greatest), and Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is “exalted above having a rival in his perfections; in him is the undivided essence of beauty.”7 Therefore, the greatness we should ultimately seek is a the best holistic version of ourselves, Ihsan (spiritual excellence).

As I first mentioned in Ruminations: Grief, Mentor Matrix, + Therapy, “Khawatir was intended to serve others by writing about things that impact the community, but what I realized in Ramadan was that there is no separating the artist from his art. It serves me too.” Nevertheless, the process of writing is not easy for me. In grad school my classmates could sit in front of a computer and bust out a 10-20,000 word paper, what would take me a month to write, in a matter of hours. So, to ensure I hit my twice-a-month publication goal, in March 2024, I asked a local sister to hold me accountable. Writing requires me spending hours in front of my laptop trying to articulate and expand upon what was once just a flighting thought. It’s not glamorous and is frequently frustratingly masochistic, but that’s the only way to sharpen my skills and grow.

Hidden Growth

The roots are the most important part of plants, especially in the early stages of its growth. They anchor the plant for future growth, providing the foundation through which it gets its nourishment, and all while unseen underground. No one praises a rose for how intricate and thick its roots are, in fact those are things we quickly disregard when we’re appreciating the end results, but without the roots there is no rose.

In our lives, establishing roots is integral for our survival. We mustn’t overlook the time and effort required to build a strong foundation (that success is later built upon), is predicated on discipline, and frequently happens in private and outside of the public eye. Even for things we do see, as so much is documented for public consumption nowadays, we mustn’t confuse the performance of growth as genuine growth—one happens for likes and validation whereas the other for longevity and real transformation. The Prophet ﷺ told us, "Do good deeds properly, sincerely and moderately and know that your deeds will not make you enter Paradise, and that the most beloved deed to Allah is the most regular and constant even if it were little."8

Conclusion

Roots do not rush. They drink slowly, deep in the dark, where no one applauds. Their labor is silent and unseen, but it is the only reason a tree can reach for the sky without snapping in the wind. My professors—especially Dr. Darr—taught me this without ever naming it. Through her rigor, I learned that growth is not the product of a single leap, but of returning to the same soil, day after day, until something alive begins to take hold.

When I began writing Khawatir, I didn’t have a grand vision or clear method—just a desire to put thoughts on paper before they slipped away. Some weeks the words came; other weeks, they didn’t. I still feel like I’m learning how to write with every post. There are drafts that never see the light of day, pieces I wish I had written differently, and plenty of moments where I question whether it is worth the time. But showing up, even in that uncertainty, has been its own kind of rooting—quiet, repetitive, unseen work that may, in time, bear fruit.

The world celebrates blossoms, not roots. It scrolls past the slow seasons, the years of repetition, the stubborn faith it takes to keep working when there is nothing to show for it yet. But Allah sees the work no one else sees. And perhaps those private seasons are the most beloved to Him, because they are done without performance—done only for Him.

And this is the heart of it: if you want to grow something that lasts, you must be willing to tend it in secret. You must plant, water, and guard it without knowing when—or if—the flower will bloom. You must hold your craft, your service, your worship in the quiet of sincerity, far from the stage.

The Prophet ﷺ said, “If the Final Hour comes while you have a seed in your hand, plant it.” There is no promise you will see the tree. There is no guarantee the fruit will ever touch your lips. But plant it anyway. Plant it because the act itself is worship. Plant it because your roots are drinking from the unseen mercy of Allah. And plant it because the work you do quietly, for His sake alone, is the only work that will stand when everything else falls away.

And, ultimately, Allah knows best!

I always preferred learning from others. Their perspectives and experiences highlight my own biases and ignorance. Since my early days in Makkah, I would speak with muʿtamirīn (pilgrims) about everything from the impact of geopolitics (e.g., the Egyptian Revolution, the war in Yemen, etc.) to sociocultural norms and values. So, when one of my teachers started describing his family’s internal dynamics and how it affects outsiders, my ears immediately perked up. Not only was I intrigued to learn about his family for my own personal reasons, but it also provided insight into a family dynamic I deeply respect.

This family has been in the country for three generations, and, MashaAllah TabarikAllah, everyone remains strongly connected to their culture and Islam. While this is undoubtedly a blessing, it seems to beat the odds.

At the eldest grandchild’s wedding, the family patriarch said, “When I came to America, I was worried about my children retaining their Islam, so I married a practicing Muslim woman and did my best with my children. When my daughter, the groom’s mother, wanted to get married, I made sure her husband was a good, practicing Muslim man. Now, it is such a blessing to be in the Masjid at my grandson’s wedding—he’s marrying a good Muslim woman.”

Today, we often think of family in individualistic terms—a group of people (i.e., individuals) whose purpose is to fulfill the needs of its members. The problem with this is that it weakens the family’s long-term viability; as soon as the family ceases to serve the individuals’ needs, it becomes burdensome and eventually dissipates. The same can be said about community; both are at their healthiest when viewed collectivistically—when we prioritize interdependence, cohesion, and mutual duty.

What struck me most about this family was not simply their religious consistency, but the quiet intentionality that made that consistency possible. Their choices across generations were not random—they were relational. Each generation made sacrifices not only for their own stability, but for the spiritual health of those who would come after them. That is what true legacy looks like: not just individual piety, but intergenerational coherence. And in many ways, this is what a community must also strive for. Strong communities, like strong families, are built not merely through shared space or shared goals, but through sustained investment in each other’s futures. They prioritize continuity over comfort and trust that planting faithfully today will yield fruit for those who come next.

Hence, when my teacher described his family, my mind immediately went to thinking about community, and by the time we finished our conversation, I had formed a mental image, much like the image of an orange.

Type of Orange

Metaphors are powerful literary tools. Allah even uses them in the Qur’an; my favorite is in Surah Ibrahim, where Allah compares a good word to a good tree—“Its root is firm and its branches reach the sky, ˹always˺ yielding its fruit in every season by the Will of its Lord.”1 Metaphors provide context and depth to subjects that may have previously felt inaccessible. Furthermore, once thoroughly grasped, they tend to remain in the mind and facilitate lasting recall. So, if you want to think of all the necessary parts of a community, just think of an orange.

I love oranges. They’re probably my favorite fruit (after dates). However, due to the modern methods of food acquisition, it’s easy to forget that they don’t come clean and perfectly selected in plastic net bags, and that their juice doesn’t come pre-squeezed and depulped in pretty bottles. Oranges are found on trees in specific climates and must be picked at a particular time of year. Before we can properly utilize this metaphor—dissecting the parts of an orange to understand its whole—we must first recognize that oranges aren’t all the same. Within the genus of oranges, there are many different species, each with its own qualities. The type we select should depend on how we plan to use it. For example, navel oranges are very different than clementines, but both serve a purpose—I prefer the size and taste of navel oranges for juicing and the seedlessness and peeling ease of clementines for eating. Community is no different.

We must spend some time in muhasaba (introspection) to assess who we are and what we need from a community. Different dispositions and life experiences, as well as various seasons of life, will all require something different. Starting with the most generic qualities of ourselves, we must slowly—over years, if not decades—interrogate: Who are we? What do we need from a community? And how can we best serve it? Because no two communities are the same.

It would be nonsensical for someone seeking didactic instruction and structured guidance to join a community that prioritizes service and experiential learning, and vice versa. But even as we reflect on fit, we must be wary of slipping into a consumer mentality. While it is wise to look for communities that align with our values and spiritual needs, no community will be a perfect match. At some point, growth requires sacrifice. Just as no orange is purely sweet without some pulp, bitterness, or seeds, no community will deliver sweetness without some effort, discomfort, or disappointment. Sometimes what we need is not a better fit, but the humility to commit to a place, the patience to serve when it is hard, and the faith to stay long enough to contribute to its growth. The goal is not to find a flawless community, but to be part of building a faithful one. Fit matters—but so does sacrifice.

The Peel

Orange peels are interesting. We take them for granted because of their omnipresence; they’re a mere inconvenience that impedes our ability to achieve our goal. Still, we shouldn’t dismiss a thing’s utility simply because we view its function as expired. Despite their tough texture and bitter taste, orange peels are the exterior barrier protecting the internal fruit—the goal we seek.

Simply put, we cannot enjoy an orange without first confronting and enduring its peel. Furthermore, how we handle the peel will determine how intact the fruit will be after peeling. In community life, the metaphorical equivalent of an orange peel is adab (good manners).

Adab is more than etiquette—it is spiritual character and presence. As I reflected in From the Etiquettes of Mentorship, true adab often looks like humility and deference: “Head down, mouth shut, just serve.” That posture is not weakness—it’s strength rooted in sincerity. In communal life, this translates into how we carry ourselves in masjid spaces, how we speak to elders and youth alike, and how we honor the people around us—even when no one is watching. I’ve personally experienced this in masjid spaces growing up, where elders—many of whom did not share my background—welcomed me as a Blackamerican child not because of similarity, but because of their own grounding in adab. That kind of conduct is more than a social nicety; it becomes the emotional skin of the community. Adab is what softens us enough to reach for the sweetness, and it’s also what protects the fruit from being spoiled before it’s even tasted.

Today, however, adab is often mistaken for outdated formality or dismissed altogether as irrelevant—especially in a cultural moment that prizes bluntness, instant expression, and speed over restraint, patience, and presence. But adab is not just about social codes; it is about spiritual posture. It is how we show up with humility in spaces shared with others and in the unseen presence of Allah. In a world shaped by individualism and emotional reactivity, adab is countercultural. It slows us down. It protects us from arrogance. And, perhaps most importantly, it reminds us that every interaction is an opportunity to either nourish or damage the soul of the community.

We’re also wired now to think of community in individualistic—or worse, capitalistic—terms. “Roughly half of customers say they would switch to a competitor after just one bad experience. In the case of more than one bad experience, that number snowballs to 80%.”3 The loss of a customer for a business translates to a matter of dollars and cents—it’s a material loss, and there are ways we can adjust to account for that. But the loss of someone’s heart deprives the community of them and deprives them of a community.

That is why forgiveness and repair must be part of the ecosystem we build. Disappointment, friction, and even harm are inevitable in real community life—not because the community is broken, but because it is alive. The sweetness of community is not found in the absence of difficulty, but in our willingness to return to one another after difficulty. To forgive, to be held accountable, to apologize, and to begin again—these are not threats to community, they are the work of it. Without the courage to repair what has been damaged, we risk reducing community to a disposable experience. But when we face conflict with sincerity and faith, we become not just consumers of community, but caretakers of it.

The stakes are high for everyone. We must remember Allah described the believers in the Quran as “compassionate with one another.”4 For those already belonging to a community, our adab is: a representation of the entire community (not just ourselves), the foundation on which we build camaraderie with others, and the first thing others from outside the community encounter. For those who don’t belong to a community, our adab works in the opposite way—making it easier for others to receive us. Just as people can be repelled by a community member’s poor adab, community members can be less receptive and welcoming to us if our adab is poor. We all have to work together.

Just like the peel of every orange differs in thickness and peelability, every community has specific adab and there’s no circumventing that. Albeit a steep learning curve, especially if the community is very different from the one we grew up in, it behooves us to put in the effort for the sake of Allah. The underlying reason why we want to be in community is to aid us on our path to Allah’s pleasure; therefore, we must center and prioritize Allah from the onset. Ibn Ata’illah Al-Askandari (d. 709/1310) said, “Among the signs of success at the end is the turning to God at the beginning.”5

The Juice

How do you describe the taste of orange juice to someone who’s never had it before? The best we can do is describe its pleasurable attributes and benefits. The same goes for the community. Whenever my teachers spoke about community and community building it always seemed like something theoretical and esoteric, not because I hadn’t been in community before, but because how they described it wasn’t my experience. Serving in the community space for a decade now, I’ve come to realize that my experience is shared by many—either we speak about it as a pre-modern conceptualization (i.e., the ummah) or as a post-modern entity (i.e., organizations)—yet it still feels inaccessible and, worse, dissatisfying. 

A healthy community is not an independently autonomous entity, whose purpose is to provide a physical space or engaging programming. When the perspective is focused on either the space or programming, the relationship is fundamentally capitalistic—its success and failure are determined by aesthetics or attendance, rather than function or impact—producing a parasitic relationship where community workers compete for economic viability via aggregating atomized community participants (not genuine members because they go wherever the aesthetic or attendance they desire is found without establishing any loyal membership anywhere) with no incentive to engage more than physical attendance or monetary donation. Legal entities, physical spaces, and engaging programming are important parts of community, but they aren’t the sweetness that we seek from community—they aren’t the juice we want to drink—and they definitely shouldn’t be the goal. Those are means to accomplish the overarching goal. A healthy community is an altruistic and sustainable ecosystem that cultivates a sense of belonging among its members and generates a cohesive confidence rooted in the shared desire to engage, contribute, and serve.

Creating a sense of “belonging” is a relatively easy task, but it differs for individuals and groups. In general, it only takes connecting with people with shared interests and a modicum of cordiality. For individuals, once that connection is created, the onus of sustaining it is entirely on them. If, for whatever reason, they fall out of connection—life happens—then their sense of belonging also goes, and they must recreate an entirely new bond. There’s a lot at stake, especially as we age and have more responsibilities (and less “free time”), and vulnerability typically comes less easily. God forbid thatith repeated disappointment, and we may lose hope of finding belonging al it is coupled wtogether. For groups, the dynamic changes; the onus of sustaining the point of connection is democratized amongst group members. Still, groups aren’t necessarily communities or sustainable ecosystems

The concept of sustainable ecosystems is not new nor one I created, but taken from biology, and is defined as, “One that, over the normal cycle of disturbance events, maintains its characteristic diversity of major functional groups, productivity, soil fertility, and rates of biogeochemical cycling.”6 A sustainable community is one that does not merely survive adversity, but adapts and continues to nurture the well-being of its members through it. Like a healthy ecosystem, it holds fast to its core identity—its values, roles, and relationships—even when shaken by hardship, conflict, or change. Its strength lies not in uniformity, but in the diversity of contributions from elders, youth, caregivers, teachers, and others, each offering something essential to the whole. Among the most essential roles in this ecosystem are those of elders and spiritual guides—individuals who carry wisdom not only from books, but from life experience, restraint, and tested faith. They function like keystone species or internal regulators: quietly maintaining balance, preventing the overgrowth of harmful dynamics, and stabilizing the system in times of stress. Without them, a community may look vibrant on the surface but remain inwardly fragile—vulnerable to ideological swings, burnout, or moral confusion. A sustainable community honors its elders not just symbolically, but structurally—by listening to them, seeking their counsel, and building pathways for intergenerational transmission. As much as we need innovation and energy, we also need rootedness—those who remind us who we are, and Who we are ultimately serving.

Just as fertile soil allows plants to grow, a community rich in compassion, justice, and shared purpose creates space for individuals to flourish internally and externally. And like the unseen cycles that sustain nature, the constant exchange of trust, care, wisdom, and resources quietly sustains communal life. When these elements remain in balance, the community becomes a place of refuge and growth—a source of strength in uncertain times.

This is precisely the type of cohesion that Allah calls us toward: “Let there arise from among you a group inviting to all that is good, enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong. It is they who will be successful.”7 While this verse speaks to the Ummah as a whole—a global body of moral witness and spiritual responsibility—it begins with the emergence of smaller, committed collectives who embody these values in their immediate context. Our communities are microcosms of that broader vision, and they become truly meaningful when they reflect its light in tangible, lived ways.

This is what the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ built in Madinah: not just a city, but a sanctuary of shared purpose. His community was not held together by mere proximity or rituals, but by trust, mutual care, spiritual striving, and moral clarity. Every person—young or old, new or native—had a place and a purpose. He ﷺ cultivated a society where people felt seen, where goodness was organized, where harm was addressed, and where no one’s contribution was too small to matter. That Prophetic model is not a distant ideal; it is the blueprint we are called to emulate.

A healthy community, then, generates a cohesive confidence—a shared spiritual assurance—that we are not alone in our striving. It moves people to serve not because of programming or pressure, but because they feel spiritually anchored and morally needed. Their service becomes a reflection of their belonging. When this local ecosystem functions as it should, each person knows that their presence matters, that goodness is both invited and protected, and that success is measured not by visibility, but by sincerity. This is the unseen sweetness we long to taste—the juice we all hope to drink.

The question that remains is not whether such communities are possible, but whether we are willing to commit to the slow, sacred work of building them.

Conclusion

We live in a time that tempts us toward speed, ease, and disposability. But communities—like oranges—do not grow overnight, and they are not manufactured. They are cultivated. The sweetness we seek cannot be bottled or outsourced. It must be grown from the inside out: by choosing our soil, honoring the peel, and trusting that the fruit will come in its season.

A healthy community is not one where everything fits neatly, where there is no disagreement or discomfort. It is one where people stay long enough to be known, where trust is earned slowly, where elders are honored, where conflict can be repaired, and where belonging is built through a shared desire to please Allah. It is, above all, a place where people are not merely served—but formed.

The Prophet ﷺ did not offer a utopia. He cultivated a garden—with roots in revelation, shade in compassion, and fruit in service. If we are serious about wanting to taste the juice of community, then we must also be serious about tending its tree: with presence, with patience, and with prayer.

The fruit is real. The sweetness is possible. But only if we are willing to do the slow, sacred work of planting.

At the beginning of this year, Sh. Yasir Fahmy’s team shared that this year he would be leading a group on Hajj, and I immediately messaged him, “I’m coming! You need me there. Let’s make it happen!” Al-Humdulillah, I am blessed to have lived in Makkah. I had performed Hajj many times before, so what concerned me wasn’t making Hajj; I wanted to make it with Sh. Yasir and, more importantly, I saw this as an opportunity to serve him. I didn’t mince my words either, “Hajj [is difficult]. I hate it, and love it too. [But], I just know you will need a Khadim (servant) and I’m the #1 draft pick.”

“I don’t need a tour guide, I need a grunt,” Sh. Yasir told me. I responded, “Shaykh, I have done the job before, Al-Humdulillah. I speak Arabic [fluently] and I know Makkah very well. I’m your man!” After the short conversation, I was honored he accepted, and we spent the next five months planning. There were countless meetings—some with Shaykh alone, the travel agency, the Prophetic Living team, and then the hujjaaj (pilgrims) that were coming with us—and things were starting to get serious.

In 2022, I led a group from my Masjid on a trip to Umrah. It was the first time I had returned to Saudi Arabia since graduating six years prior. Also, I was blessed to have my wife with us. After a long journey, with a layover in Istanbul, we arrived in Jeddah wearing Ihram. After my wife went through immigration, I handed over my passport to the officer. He checked my visa and asked me to scan my fingerprints, but then he paused. He asked me if I had ever been deported from Saudi before. I told him, “No, I lived here for ten years and graduated from Umm al-Qura University." Despite his confusion, after six hours of waiting without an answer, I was sent back home.

Until today, I don’t know why this happened, but other graduates of Saudi universities who were in the same situation had their problems resolved, and because my name was submitted with theirs, I thought I was good to go. Now, three years later, with the opportunity to make Hajj, I was relieved to have my passport cleared to be a Hajj tour guide. However, just two weeks before my departure, the owner of the travel agency sent me a message, informing me that my Hajj visa had been rejected.

A Lesson in Faqr

Disappointment

I try to keep my expectations as low as possible, especially when things are outside of my control. The higher the anticipation level of things is, the less excited I get. I received the visa update while sitting at my brother-in-law's college graduation party at the table with my family; I closed my phone, went back to the festivities, and didn’t mention it until we got home.

I hoped miraculously something might change, so I let things be. I didn’t tell anyone or make any travel changes, but when the Nusuk App canceled my status as a Hajj guide, I knew it was time to hang it up. I wasn’t going to Hajj this year. Nevertheless, I knew it would be good for me to visit one of my teachers instead—in my mind, if I couldn’t visit Makkah and the Prophet ﷺ in Madinah, this was the next best thing. To my surprise, some of my friends were hosting Shaykh Muhammad Haydara Al-Jilani at a summit in South America, and they allowed me to tag along.

Of course, I was disappointed, but since I never had complete confidence that I was going, my expectations for this reality were low, and I didn’t feel too impacted. Additionally, I thought being able to see Shaykh would soften the blow. Still, when a mentor started problematizing how to solve my Saudi visa issue, asking questions about what could be done, the levees of my emotional dissociation broke, and despair began to creep in. I have already exhausted all possible options.

As much as my mind tried to hide it, this momentary break highlighted some structural issues within my spiritual life. The goal post is, as Allah tells us in the Quran, “Do not lose hope in Allah’s mercy.”1 If Allah revealed this verse because some of the Prophet’s companions thought their sins would never be forgiven, what about merely things not going my way?! While I’m under no delusion to believe or claim any level of sincerity, this leads me to question what my underlying intention was from the beginning, truly to serve and earn Allah’s pleasure, or for some personal gain?

Nourishment

Immediately after boarding the plane, I noticed a familiar face. It was comforting because, despite never spending time together, I didn’t know who I would be with on this trip. Suhba (companionship) with teachers rarely occurs in a vacuum (just one-on-one with the shaykh); instead, it takes place in a shared communal experience among peers. It’s in this symbiotic exchange that we're stretched to practice what our teachers preach, because it usually cannot happen in isolation.

When we landed, two-thirds of the summit attendees did as well, and this is where I began to notice things. These brothers and sisters were chill and, dare I say, just normal. No one was being “extra,” performing all the right external signifiers of humility and in-crowd membership (i.e., special handshakes or wearing unique, culturally specific garb), and everyone was genuinely caring. Once everyone had their luggage, I noticed that people were ordering Ubers before I could. As everyone organically peeled off into the cars, a brother invited me to join him and his family so I wouldn’t have to ride alone. This sentiment prevailed throughout the entire summit.

The attendees came together with no other intention than to be in suhba with a Shaykh from the family of the Prophet ﷺ and, then, work together to come up with solutions that serve the Ummah. If anyone had something meaningful to contribute it was welcomed, regardless of age (the youngest participant was fourteen years old and the eldest was in their seventies, but young children were running around) or profession (we had Hollywood actors, professional comedians, hedge fund founders, tech entrepreneurs, tenured professors, lawyers, specialist doctors, consultants, stay-at-home moms, and Imams). It was as if sincerity was the only necessary credential..

An example of this is when, one night, Sh. Muhammad was sitting on the floor eating dinner and welcomed two brothers and me to join him. Now, Shaykh speaks English; so, when I heard one brother ask the other, “Hey, you want to get cigars tonight?” I internally shook my head, restraining a mixture of shock and laughter. These guys were so genuine that they didn't mind having this conversation right in front of Shaykh. After the other responded, “InshaAllah, let’s do it!” the first brother turned to Shaykh and asked, “Shaykh, we’re going to get cigars tonight. Is that ok?” Shaykh chuckled and responded simply with, “I don’t think so.” I thought to myself, “What a beautiful answer. He didn’t shame them or anything.” But the conversation didn’t stop there! He followed up with, “Oh shaykh! I was hoping you would give us permission, “ and the other brother said, “Shaykh, have you ever smoked before?!” And Shaykh continued smiling and simply said, “No.”

Sh. Muhammad wasn’t humoring those brothers. It was evident to everyone that he genuinely loved them. He loves everyone. It is this prophetic quality that teaches us how to love and be with others.

Every time I get to visit Sh. Muhammad, I get at least one new lesson, sometimes from him and sometimes from those around him, but always for me. I’m generally an extroverted guy and enjoy being with people, but this suhba was special. It showed me what a healthy community could look like. It doesn’t look like a group of androids, everyone reflecting the similarities of each other; rather, it is people who find a way to work together interdependently based on love and service.

Tawakkul

We had a loose schedule for the summit: one session before Dhuhr, another afterwards, and then social time from Asr until Maghrib. The sessions were a mixture of presentations from subject-matter experts on their findings and brainstorming solutions to problems. Everyone sat around the room, some on the floor, while others in chairs and on a couch, humble and passionately engaged, asking questions and sharing feedback.

The social time ended up being a passive continuation of the previous conversations, and frequently over coffee. It was riveting, but the pinnacle of our day was our time with Shaykh Muhammad. He was physically present in the home—he joked that he hadn’t left all week and had gone outside for a walk one night—and would pray and eat meals with us. However, it was after Maghrib that he would give us a khatira and field our questions.

By the second or third day, we started to notice that Shaykh’s messaging was essentially the same, centering around two things:

1. Keep things in perspective,

2. Trust in Allah

3. Take initiative with whatever you have.

Keep things in perspective

A sister posed a question around decision making and analysis paralysis, and Shaykh responded, “Sometimes we look at things on a big screen. Put it on a small screen.” The answer was so matter-of-fact that I didn’t appreciate its depth, initially found it comical, and struggled to restrain a giggle. He continued, “When you look at things on a big screen, things appear larger than they are. But, if you put them on a small screen, they are in perspective.”

I was dumbfounded—such a simple message, yet so comprehensive.

When we’re watching on a screen, we’re not looking at something in reality. Even if it isn’t a highly produced piece of media, the camera and lens quality alone drastically impact the final image. If we introduce professional lighting and editing, we can take the same scene, shot from the exact location, and make it unrecognizably different. Life is no different. Our perspective, what we consciously or unconsciously use as a processing filter to our experiences, directly impacts how we think and feel. After all, Allah said in a Hadith Qudsi, “I am as my servant thinks I am.”2

Trust in Allah

Now, I could have switched the order of points one and two or combined them, but I wanted to clearly define the role of perspective. That said, for Shaykh Muhammad, the two seem to be inseparable. He wasn’t just talking about the perspective we hold, but rather taking something that may initially appear overwhelming and reminding us that nothing is too great for Allah. Shaykh makes molehills out of mountains.

Ask anyone who has spent time with him, and they will tell you he is always radically optimistic. For me, Shaykh’s disposition is an embodiment of the verse where Allah says,

“And whoever is mindful of Allah, He will make a way out for them, and provide for them from sources they could never imagine. And whoever puts their trust in Allah, then He ˹alone˺ is sufficient for them. Certainly Allah achieves His Will. Allah has already set a destiny for everything.”3

The challenge to this level of trust in Allah is that it isn’t a plug-and-play solution. We cannot expect to simply spend time or read about people of this status and think we can, with the flick of a switch, uphold it ourselves. Outside of divine intervention, it requires consistent work over prolonged periods, practicing spiritual humility (intending an internal and external connectedness to God). Through perpetually striving to discover Allah’s magnificence, we are shown its direct counterdistinction in ourselves and, simultaneously, raised in status with Him.4

Take initiative with whatever you have.

A brother asked Shaykh Muhammad a question about perfectionism, and he answered, “The problem is you see yourself at the top of the mountain, but your body is still at the bottom. Just take one step.”

Even if we have correctly understood things internally, have a focused perspective, and have embodied our theology, it doesn’t exempt us from taking action. Furthermore, it doesn’t mean we should wait to act until our expectations are met. In fact, “Trying our best (i.e., striving to have Ihsan, or spiritual excellence) does not mean giving up or cowering away. It is a spiritually ethical disposition, internally and externally, the epitome of our tawakkul.”

In Perspective: A Quranic Hermeneutic of the Isra Wal-Mi'raj I said,

As we journey through our lives—souls carried by magical beasts (i.e., our bodies)—we, too, exist in a metaphorical darkness. The future is entirely unknown (to us, not Allah), and so much lies outside our control. Nevertheless, we must not be paralyzed by this; Allah commanded us, “Take action! God will see your actions.” Our responsibility is to what lies within our sphere of influence. Abdullah b. Amr b Al-Aas, a sahabi (companion) of the Prophet ﷺ, said, “Work for your life down here as if you’ll live forever, and work for the next life as if you will die tomorrow.” What lies beyond our sphere of influence we leave to God because, ultimately, from Allah we come, and to Him we shall return.

Conclusion

Hajj is a journey of submission, where we migrate from all over the world to one central location, strip ourselves of any socioeconomic signifiers to wear what is essentially two white beach towels, and follow the tradition of Prophet Ibrahim (‘alayhi salam—peace be upon him). We pray that the reward of these five days’ sacrifice is the spiritual revival of our previous sins forgiven. Although I wasn’t invited to visit the holy lands and perform Hajj this year, I was inadvertently sent on a pilgrimage of sorts. I am reminded of the verse, “Perhaps you dislike something which is good for you and like something which is bad for you. Allah knows and you do not know.” In reality, I have very little control over what I can do. Objectively good things (e.g., like serving one’s teachers or making Hajj) might not be what is best for me in the moment.

The two things that I probably speak about the most—suhba and tarbiya (spiritual nurturing)—are areas in which I learned the most on this journey, both drastically reshaped by humility. With suhba, humility reminds us that true companionship is not about ideal conditions or flawless people but about the willingness to be shaped by others, to receive counsel, and to keep showing up even when we feel unworthy or incomplete. With tarbiya, humility teaches us that knowledge and perspective mean little if they do not prompt us to take the next small, sincere step, trusting that Allah sees the effort, not just the outcome. This pilgrimage of the heart revealed to me that even when our plans are redirected, our striving is never in vain. In truth, this all boils down to humility—bowing to the reality that we have so little control, surrendering what lies beyond our reach, and taking initiative with what we have. It is through this humble submission that we trust in Allah’s wisdom, walk the path laid before us, and find our hearts revived, just as every true pilgrimage intends.

And, ultimately, with Allah is all success.

That session actually had nothing to do with writing; it was focused on grief. I specifically asked him if we could talk about that emotion because it's one I know so well, yet don’t know at all.

Every time we go through difficulties, it feels like the worst we have ever experienced. Still, the last twelve months (really twenty-four) have been the most emotionally tumultuous I have experienced in my life. I wrote about it a little in Ruminations: 2024 and some other places too. Khawatir was intended to serve others by writing about things that impact the community, but what I realized in Ramadan was that there is no separating the artist from his art. It serves me too, but I typically don’t address my problems head-on; I just lean forward and keep on grinding. Moreover, I have learned to mask it with a smile to the point that most people would never notice, whether in writing or person.

Resilience is a learned skill that often serves as a coping mechanism for managing difficult circumstances. But, if we’re not careful, it can lead to figuratively brushing things under the rug, and that’s what I was doing. I wasn’t processing my feelings and was just masterfully compartmentalizing things for short-term optimal performance. Particularly grief.

Grief

Grief is a complex emotion for me. It’s much easier for me to discuss it vicariously than to address my own. It feels like profound sadness and anger wrestling for space in my heart; with each round of life, they vie to win and come to the fore. Then, if I double-click and zoom into the emotion, searching for the deeper impetus behind my most painful feelings of grief, it’s a longing for what could or should have been.

My therapist once told me, “All feelings are valid, but not all feelings need to be validated.” I can’t dismiss how I’m feeling, but I have to interrogate where those feelings are coming from and if they are worth the weight of what I’m feeling. That’s a hard pill to swallow. It requires honestly and humbly looking into the figurative mirror and asking, “Why do I feel the way I do?” In my situation, even if we take Stephen Wilson Jr.'s perspective that “Grief is only love,” it doesn’t mean that the love I’m searching for is justified or possible. Furthermore, are my feelings in harmony with my theological beliefs and spiritual aspirations? Sultan Al-Awliya (Sultan of the Saints), Sh. Abdul-Qadir Al-Jilani (d. 561/1166) said,

“The servant does not experience love until he becomes a seeker, and he does not become a seeker until his commitment to the search is absolute. His commitment to the search does not become absolute, until the firebrand of reverent awe [jamrat al-khashya] has been cast into his heart, and has burned everything it contains.”1

Somewhere in life, I learned—perhaps from being a man (responsible for a family), an Imam (responsible for a community), or simply feeling incapable of changing the outcomes—it was easier to simply ignore grief than to bear its consequences. It was as if whatever emotional receptors took in inputs and translated them to my mind were completely disassociated. But, only well into my thirties, I was able to recognize some of the stages of grief, particularly depression and anger, and had good tools for managing them, but things felt like they were spilling over. In public, I found it more challenging to mask my feelings—every smile felt exhausting, like a fatigued endurance runner waiting to finish the race—and, in private, there wasn’t much energy for anything; I often found myself slouched on the couch, watching TV. Then, last year, a told me, “Bro, you should go to therapy.”

Mentor Matrix

In April, I was blessed to attend Prophetic Living’s first “Sacred Manhood” retreat for brothers, led by Shaykh Yasir Fahmy, in Stratton Mountain, Vermont. Initially, the team was hoping to have fifty attendees. Still, so many were eager to hear Shaykh’s treatment of the topic that they had to put people on a waiting list because 150 brothers flew in from around the country to attend. As with all Prophetic Living retreats, it ultimately proved to be a phenomenal experience, both educationally and spiritually.

Something Shaykh referenced throughout the retreat was the “Mentor Matrix.” “Everyone needs a teacher, wise elder, and experienced friend,” he said. It really stood out to me, not only has mentorship been (and continues to be) one of the most influential things in my life, but also because it is incredibly difficult to find these days. Academics have long written about how American social and civic life has dramatically declined over the past several decades. We are Bowling Alone—still engaging in activities, but without the communal bonds that once accompanied them. As a result, our relationships have become increasingly transactional.

When we think about mentorship, we think about it from a professional perspective. First, in college, there is an office of “academic advisors” waiting to guide us through our collegiate life. We cannot register for classes without their approval. Then, once we graduate and transition into the workforce, industry experts are readily available for a formal (often paid) relationship. The “Mentor Matrix,” on the other hand, is the polar opposite—it’s not transactional, it’s relational.

Teachers

Traditionally, the deen (religion) is studied with teachers, not autodidactically, and systematically to ensure that knowledge is properly understood before progressing onto the next phase. At a minimum, we are all responsible to learn what is fard 3yn (individually obligatory) upon us—those things that, without them—in the external (fiqh), internal (‘aqidah), and spiritual (tasowwuf) sciences—we cannot worship God with a basic level of clarity and certainty.

Even if traditional learning is not possible or desired, teachers are those individuals who possess knowledge, as Allah instructed us in the Quran, “Ask if you don’t know.”3 Therefore, everyone must identify a teacher for themselves. Doing this has a dual benefit: intellectually, it establishes an epistemological hierarchy, and spiritually, it practices humility by recognizing our own ignorance.

For more information on this topic, please refer to the paper below.

Elders

Whenever embarking on a new endeavor, it’s only natural to consider its economic viability. Unfortunately, we also do this for children; hence why Allah told us in the Quran, “Do not kill your children for fear of poverty. We provide for them and for you. Surely killing them is a heinous sin.”4 That said, in pre-Islamic Arabia, they practiced female infanticide, not for economic reasons, but due to a perverted value system. Allah said in the Quran,

“Whenever one of them is given the good news of a baby girl, his face grows gloomy, as he suppresses his rage. He hides himself from the people because of the bad news he has received. Should he keep her in disgrace, or bury her ˹alive˺ in the ground? Evil indeed is their judgment!”5

When Islam emerged in the Arabian Peninsula almost 1,500 years ago, it completely shifted the paradigm of life, decoupling it from economic viability and social value. Unfortunately, in our postmodern society, things have come full circle. While much of our focus remains on the present, whether in our lives or the unborn, we often overlook the past or how to maintain continuity into the future—the work of elders.

The specific circumstances of our experiences are unique to us; no one can ever comprehend exactly how they impact us or precisely know how to change them for the better. Nevertheless, there are patterns in life and, as my grandmother would say, “What you don’t know could create another world.” Elders—by definition, those who have lived longer than us—are a goldmine of experience. Through sitting with them and asking thoughtful questions, we extract valuable knowledge for our own lives.

But gold doesn’t come directly from a mine; the ore must be refined, separating the gold from other impurities. It would be foolish to throw ore away simply because it doesn’t come out of the mine pre-refined. Similarly, we must remember that, like us, our elders are human with their own biases and unique perspectives. Just because it isn’t pre-packaged or one-size-fits-all doesn’t make it less valuable; it just means we must filter through a lens of humility and discernment.

We need elders, not just for mentorship and advice, but also for cultural continuity, especially for those of us living in America. Not to say that “the melting pot” completely erases our cultural memory, but it does create dementia. Culture is all about the nuances often learned via osmosis, not from a book or in a class. Intergenerational socializing ensures we, and our children, keep our cultural memory strong for as long as possible.

The Wise

The Prophet ﷺ said, “A man follows the religion of his friend; so each one should consider whom he makes his friend.”7 This should be self-evident, but it is becoming increasingly challenging. We maintain relationships out of social or familial obligation without much consideration of the impact it has on us. Because of this, the people we seek advice and support from are therapists.

I have no problem with therapy—after all, I did eventually heed my friends’ advice and have a therapist myself—but I think it should be a part of the larger “Mentor Matrix,” not the end goal. Additionally, we must be thoughtful about what that relationship looks like.

Therapy

Personal Hangups

I have always had a weird relationship with therapy—I encourage people to see professional help all the time, but I have philosophical reservations about it nevertheless. I have been blessed to work alongside therapists since 2016, Al-Hamdulillah, and value their training and contributions greatly; however, they have served as figurative icing on a cake whose flavor I already know.

I’m naturally an empath, and after a decade of serving pastorally, Allah has blessed me to almost read people’s faces. Fortunately, and unfortunately, there’s no turning that off, and it applies to my own emotions as well. I often find myself lost in thought, trying to understand why I feel the way I do and the source of my emotions. Whenever I get stuck on something or want a more profound insight, I consult with friends who are professional therapists. So, when Saad encouraged me to seek professional help, I went to Dr. Hamza Quadri (my PsychShaykh) and Dr. Fatima Mirza. Unfortunately, they both supported the idea.

Committing to therapy challenged me because it required humility in a way I had never experienced before. In 2017, I committed myself to a life of service, and that's a significant part of my identity—I’m an infantryman, striving to serve my teachers dutifully. I take care of others, and therefore, for anything personal bogging me down, I just need to be patched up well enough to continue service. Unfortunately, with that no longer being sufficient, Dr. Hamza explained that a therapeutic relationship is like any other relationship; it is built over time, through working together.

Selection Criterion

Once I accepted that I was going to start this process, I had to find out who the therapist was going to be. In full transparency, I had to find a criterion for my wife to find the therapist for me—going through providers’ profiles was a barrier that would have prevented me from committing.

1. Gender — Male. If I’m going to be regularly speaking with someone about the intimate details of my life and mind, intentionally building a relationship, I wanted to make sure there was no chance of romantic interest getting in the way.

2. Religion — Non-Muslim, but religious. By Allah’s grace and mercy, I studied Islam traditionally for nearly a decade and continued to pursue religious learning. While I recognize I do not possess scholarly knowledge, I serve people pastorally daily, and I feel comfortable processing the religious (i.e., jurisprudent, theological, and spiritual) implications that arise in therapy, either alone or with my teachers. I also didn’t want anyone else’s understanding of Islam or bias to infringe on the therapeutic process. That is, I wanted my therapist to help me with my mind, not my heart. That said, religion is a fundamental part of my life, and I wanted someone who is religious themselves, so I wouldn’t have to explain or defend God, religious conviction, or devotion.

3. Race — Black. Something Dr. Fatima pointed out was that, in addition to always being the racial minority in society at large of the Muslim community, some of my disposition comes from Blackamerican culture. Being a Third Culture Kid, that isn’t something I had previously ever considered, but it did make a lot of sense and could potentially be insightful.

Parameters

Al-Humdulillah, I was blessed to strike out on my first try. I really enjoy my therapist, but something was still off. We met weekly to address a significant portion of my history and establish our initial rapport, which felt burdensome. Then we switched to a bi-weekly cadence, and I still felt like we were talking for the sake of talking. I have friends, and that wasn’t what I wanted him for. So, we switched to every three weeks. This cadence allows for sufficient time for new things to happen, but not too much time where they no longer feel relevant to discuss. It also forces me to do my own homework.

Prior to beginning therapy, I knew that I didn’t want my therapist to be a glorified paid friend. I don’t need someone to just talk to or share my ideas because I tend to be very solution-oriented. I wanted someone to critique those thoughts and help me explore better ways of handling them. This was something I shared with my therapist from the onset, and found that, Al-Humdulillah, he shared a similar disposition and agreed to keep me honest. That means forcing vulnerability and accountability by prodding deeper into areas that might be uncomfortable.

Typically my sessions are broken into three sections: the first twenty minutes of me giving an update on the last three weeks that passed, the next thirty minutes before we shift to whatever point I want to delve deeper into, and the last ten minutes talking about culture or connecting the sessions subject to something esoteric. This requires that I have independently started processing (ideally by journaling) the major events since my therapist and I last spoke. I also take notes during the session on any significant points to (hopefully, but not always successfully) reflect on further in the future and identify potential patterns.

In the last five minutes of my last therapy session, we spoke about post-traumatic growth without naming it. It was a difficult conversation for both of us, given the nature of our work: he as a therapist and I as an Imam. Neither one of us wants nor would encourage someone to be in pain. I shared that it’s a religious principle—the Prophet ﷺ said, "A believer is not stung twice (by something) out of one and the same hole"8 and “whenever given the choice of one of two matters, he would choose the easier of the two.”9 But, we also acknowledge, particularly as Black men, that tremendous pain and oppression have caused some of the most beautiful art.

I wanted to end with a du’a (supplication), but couldn’t think of anything other than the du’a one of my teachers frequently makes. If you’re interested, please see the attachment below.

And, ultimately, Allah knows best.

"The Comprehensive Supplication"

2.18MB ∙ PDF file

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This du'a is one frequently recited by one of my teachers, Shaykh Muhammad Haydara Al-Jilani, that was given to him by his father (his Shaykh).

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