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.

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.​​

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.

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.

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.

The prophets and messengers came with a mission. Some had great wealthy kingdoms while others left nothing, but their mission was always to call people to Allah. If boiled down to its core, that is helping them orient their lives in a way that is pleasing to God as articulated in the living tradition of His Prophet ﷺ—externally (in our actions and conduct), internally (in our thoughts and emotions), and spiritually. They used everything at their disposal to fulfill that mission and nothing else. Furthermore, what we remember of their legacy is not the riches or sociopolitical status and influence but rather the people who preserve their tradition until today. In essence, the mission of the prophets and righteous was to develop people.

As community servants, we are “dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants,” merely trying to follow in their footsteps. With the weightiness of this responsibility, who knows why anyone does it? That only emphasizes the importance of remembering our mission. In the programs and the classes we give, the events and the retreats we facilitate, the weddings and the funerals we perform, the counseling and the conversations we have, and the countless things no one imagines—everything is a means to an end. This is not to undermine the importance of organizations; they are integral for providing institutional backing and financial stability, but we mustn't forget that this is our primary responsibility. We build people.

I focused on an individual perspective in parts one and two of Advice to Community Servants. However, there comes a time in community service when you have to give back. In that case—perhaps because you’re now an elder in your community, you have a unique skill or knowledge, or Allah decreed that people look to you for mentorship—this paper seeks to provide a guiding mission and vision for your work.

Invest

After graduating from Umm al-Qura University, I relocated to Boston. I knew only three people in the entire state and had only previously met them briefly, but it didn’t matter. I wanted to serve under and learn specifically under Sh. Yasir Fahmy. While my relationship with him is well-documented, what isn’t is that after the first year, I started looking for another job.

It wasn’t Shaykh’s fault, of course. I was just returning to America; this was my first real job. He’s from New Jersey, stoic, and, in many ways, the polar opposite of twenty-seven-year-old me. Additionally, I needed him emotionally, and he definitely didn’t need me. He was like the Muslim equivalent of the Pope of Boston, and I couldn’t fully appreciate that. So, when Shaykh was busy trying to lay the foundation for our work, I felt neglected.

Somehow, Shaykh received news of my application for a youth director position at one of the suburban Masjids, and he confronted me about it. I don’t remember too much about that conversation other than that we were walking on the Harvard side of the Charles River on a cold fall day and that there were two takeaways: 1. Shaykh was disappointed in me for not speaking to him about my frustrations, and 2. He was committed to walking with me weekly.

Sh. Yasir’s walks around the Harvard campus were legendary, MashaAllah. But to get across town by 8:00 a.m., I had to leave my house no later than 7:15 a.m. Any later, and my forty-five-minute drive would nearly double. Back then, what I felt was a form of pre-modern torture is what I miss the most about Boston. It was on those three-plus-hour walks that the magic happened—where I built my relationship with Shaykh and, most importantly, where he shaped me.

Just as businesses require mission, vision, and value statements, community servants also need a structured plan. Our mission focuses on developing individuals, with the vision that these individuals will eventually exceed us. Achieving this depends on our value statement, which emphasizes providing scaffolding through emotional investment, dedicated time, and honesty.

Emotionally

Internal Feelings

Emotionally investing in people is twofold: how we feel about and treat them. So often, we forget about the first part, sufficing with superficial engagement. But people know. It’s palpable when someone is only kind to us out of obligation or formalities. This is why our faith is connected to our thoughts and feelings about our brothers and sisters. Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said, “None of you truly believe until you love for your brother what you love for yourself.”1

Before we start investing in developing people, we must love them. True love is altruistic, not reciprocal or, worse, transactional. True love is self-sacrificing, prioritizing the other. As community servants, we should really sit with and interrogate our first-, second-, and third-order intentions to ensure we embody this prophetic ethic because that’s how he was ﷺ. He cared so much about the Ummah that Allah told him, “Perhaps you ˹O Prophet˺ will grieve yourself to death over their denial, if they ˹continue to˺ disbelieve in this message.”2 And if we cannot, if we cannot bring ourselves to love those we serve genuinely, love to see them better and, ultimately, their salvation, then we shouldn’t be in this work.3

External Treatment

Imam Al-Qushairi described three types of suhba: companionship with someone above us, below us, and a peer. Regarding someone below us, he said, “Companionship with someone below you requires that the follower be treated with compassion and kindness.”4 That isn’t to say we’re always soft and delicate. We must treat people in a way that reflects our love for them. Sometimes, that may be tough, but it should always be rooted in love.

When Sh. Yasir hired me he took a twenty-six-year-old dude with minimal work experience and went all in. He gambled the community's future on me, and while I knew that, I didn’t have the same level of commitment. As we started our walks together, I immediately felt more connected to Sh. Yasir, but I was still, as my mom would say, “Paying the fifty.” I was only halfway committed to the community.

I don’t think our walks ever followed a specific intellectual pedagogy. We just spent time together. Initially, we would meet for bagels and coffee and go for a walk, but it quickly evolved into a spontaneity—whatever Shaykh’s son wanted, if we needed coffee, or if there was someplace new on Harvard Yard we wanted to try. We spoke about everything too—school (I was in graduate school then), the religious tradition, and what was happening in the American Muslim community, life, and work.

I will never forget one day, on our way back to Shaykh’s old apartment, right next to Blue Bottle Coffee, we crossed the street. Shaykh told me sternly, “Abdul-Malik, maybe being an Imam isn’t for you. You should look for a secretary job in some place Islam is adjacent.” It broke my heart and blew my mind all at once.

The drive home after this walk was a haze. I was on autopilot, lost, trying to process the information I had just received. “Did I spend nearly a decade studying and leave everyone and everything behind coming to Boston to be told I wasn’t good enough?!” But then something clicked. Of course, I didn’t. I had to change my ways.

Shaykh doesn’t recall that day, but when I asked him about it years later, he confirmed that I needed tough love. He used reverse psychology to get me to wake up and commit myself to community work. Because of my position, we didn’t have time to waste.

This approach may not work for everyone and definitely shouldn’t be the one we lead with, but what I appreciated was that Shaykh Yasir cared about my well-being (albeit using a bit of reverse psychology). That’s all most people need: someone they respect and who is genuinely invested in their well-being. How many people are hurt, and perhaps even turned away from religion altogether, simply because someone in a place of religious authority mistreated them?

As I mentioned in the first Advice for Community Servants, “Mustafa Davis told me in 2015, ‘True leaders are the shepherds who never abandon their flock. They protect and care for their flock, never ridiculing, condemning, or exploiting them. That is the work of wolves. Wolves are dangerous, as they are only concerned with themselves. They aren't true leaders.’"

Allah protect us all.

Time

Whenever I think about anything Allah has blessed me to posess, it’s unquestionably because of the people who graciously gave me time—Pre-Makkah, Abdus-Samad Beard hung out and masjid hopped with teenage me; in Makkah, Imam Farhan Siddiqui taught me how to budget my money and not whine so much in Makkah, Mu’taz pushed to think independently in religious issues, Mustafa Davis was my big brother and impacted me in more ways than I can count; and Post-Makkah: Hajjah Ashaki prepared me for grad school, Dr. Fernando Ona saw and pushed me academically, and, of course, Sh. Yasir Fahmy.

Unfortunately, because we all want the quick-fix solution, tarbiya is only impactful when administered over time; therefore, we must be patient and make ourselves available and accessible. If people believe you love and care for them but cannot get time with you, it doesn’t do them much good in their growth and development. While everyone’s role in the community differs, the demographic you’ve been entrusted with should know how and where they can have time with you.5

You can mitigate this in two ways: formally and informally. If you have consistent formal office hours, whether scheduled or unscheduled, people will build trust and know where to find you. The easier it is, the better. I find it ideal to give people a link where they can pick from an array of appointments at their convenience. I don’t have to go back and forth with them, and I have their contact information to communicate with them if need be.

That said, many of the connections and benefits happen in informal, unscheduled meetings. While I spoke extensively about my scheduled walks, I learned so much nuance from Sh. Yasir in the unscheduled times. Sometimes, I sneaked into his office between meetings, watched him after Jummah stood in the middle of the Musalla giving Salams and fielding questions, or dived into him somewhere. None of that could have happened if he had been closed off and uninviting.

I remember once in the early days, I was driving Shaykh somewhere and started talking about generational wealth. He listened patiently, and when I finished speaking, he said, “I don’t know about that. Wealth is important, and ensuring our families are cared for is also important, but we should think about that more.” He didn’t fully critique my opinion or provide his own, but his pause caused me to think about the concept differently. Al-Humdulillah, we had many conversations about money and wealth over the years, but that one stands out and is something I will return to seven years later.

Not everyone will be comfortable setting up an appointment; some things need to happen organically. Find a time and place, ideally when you will have access to the most considerable amount of your demographic in one place (e.g., before and after programs), and loiter. Just hang out with a welcoming disposition (e.g., keep the door open or purposely hand or in the common area), and people will passively find ways to connect with you.

Honesty

Once you find your people, those who, for some reason or another, you’re drawn to, or they’re drawn to you, be generous with your time and lean in. But that means we know what we offer and never go beyond that point. As previously mentioned in Identifying a Mentor: A Guiding Framework, “You cannot give what you don’t have.” So, if you don’t have any experience or knowledge in counseling, don’t do it, and if you haven’t studied fiqh, don’t give rulings.

Staying in our lane does not reduce our value; it gives us principled boundaries. It ensures we fulfill our amanah (trust) of religious authority and leadership with as much Ihsan (spiritual excellence) as possible. Furthermore, it establishes trust with the community. They will know and respect that you were vulnerable enough to say, “I don’t know, but I can try to find out.” It also allows us to focus on our niche area of interest and deepen our expertise there.

Empower

Our initial investment in people provides the foundational scaffolding that allows us to begin empowering them. Those we serve will never be better than us if they aren’t empowered to challenge themselves for growth and improvement.

When I first met Sh. Yasir, I was very insecure. I knew that my traditional studies were anything but conventional. I didn’t memorize a lot of texts or earn Ijazas (certificates), but I did graduate Al-Humdulillah. So, when he asked me how I was interested in serving the community, I was honest, “If you’re looking for someone to give fatawa (religious verdicts), I am not your guy. That said, I deeply care about people, particularly the disenfranchised, Black people, and the incarcerated.” He responded with the statement of Umar b. Abdul-Aziz (d. 101/720), “May Allah have mercy on a man who knows his place.”7

Empowering people is challenging because it requires recognizing and honoring where they are and where they want to go. Until today, Sh. Yasir has never pushed me to pursue additional training in Fiqh (law) or Usool Al-Fiqh (legal theory) because he knows that’s not my primary interest. But, whenever I show interest in something, like graduate school or writing, he constantly challenges me and pushes me to go deeper and be better.

We cannot empower people if we don’t first love them. We must learn what interests them, what they’re good at, and their capacity to achieve it. Perhaps right now isn’t feasible, and that’s alright. Just like we are unable to metamorphize instantaneously, neither can others. We must remain patient with others, more than we would like others to be with us while ensuring they know a mistake won’t sever our relationship. We will accompany them, to the best of our ability, in times of good and bad.

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I was blessed to serve Sh. Yasir Fahmy and the Boston Muslim community for five years. Had I not been blessed with that opportunity, I have no clue where or what I would be doing. He invested in me and then empowered me to explore the things I was interested in. But none of that could have happened in isolation. It was only possible because we were embedded in a community.

When I say “community,” I mean the people, not the organizations or physical buildings. A community is a group of people who have come together around a shared purpose or vision. In our postmodern society, the word has lost its original meaning and has shifted from being a group of people to legal structures (e.g., organizations and institutions). This philosophical shift changes how the administrators interact with the community and, in turn, how the community interacts with them. If it gets big enough, or there are sufficient impediments over time, eventually, the community will view its corporatized organizations capitalistically. Their entire relationship with religious organizations will be to attend programs and receive services without any sense of allegiance or investment. In the free market of religious services, whoever has the best (or coolest) program will get their service.

While I plan to write about this more, InshaAllah (God-willing), nevertheless, what is important in developing people is that we can embed people in a healthy community and around people with similar values. Even if that organized community space doesn’t exist, perhaps we can help facilitate connecting people to others who may. This will allow them to practice their work while providing social support and encouragement.

Having the largest mosque in New England (like I had) is unnecessary when trying to foster community. Sometimes, you must create interest-specific groups within existing organizations that serve their needs, which is required when serving others. None of the initiatives I currently lead in my community came from me. Every single one of them—“Rijaal” (a weekly men’s support group), “Towards the Hereafter” (a weekly Halaqa on Tazkiya Al-Nafs), or “Lattes&Lit” (a bi-weekly book club)—came from a someone asking for a specific program and then community grew from it organically.

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Conclusion

At its heart, developing others is a labor of love, grounded in faith and driven by sincerity. It is about seeing the potential in people and walking alongside them as they grow, trusting in Allah’s wisdom and timing. It requires patience, sacrifice, and an unshakable belief that even small efforts, when done with sincerity, can lead to profound transformation.

This work is not about recognition or results we can see—it is about planting seeds, nurturing hearts, and trusting that Allah will bring forth the fruit. It reminds us that true success is not found in what we achieve for ourselves but in the light, we help others carry forward. May Allah guide our steps, purify our intentions, and make us vessels of His mercy. Ameen.

Ultimately, with Allah is all success.

In the first part of Advice to Community Servants, we explored the foundational elements of service—honoring the act of service itself, maintaining pure intentions, and staying focused on what is within our control. But as we continue down this path, it becomes clear that the journey of community service is ongoing, with new challenges and opportunities arising at every stage.

This second part delves deeper into the personal, vocational, and spiritual dimensions of service. It’s not just about serving; it’s about growing as a servant—constantly renewing our intentions, maintaining our integrity through financial sustainability, and embracing the inevitable loneliness that accompanies leadership. Each step brings us closer to understanding that service is both an act of love and a test of faith, requiring a constant balance between giving to others and preserving our own well-being.

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Whether we are just beginning our journey or have been serving for many years, I pray these twenty additional pieces of advice will help us sustain our efforts and strengthen our resolve, reminding us that the reward for our service is ultimately with Allah.

Personal Commitment

Constantly Renew Our Intentions

1. Distractions (criticism, pride, demands) will inevitably arise.

2. Regularly reflect on why we serve—intending worship, seeking Allah’s pleasure.

3. Keep values central to maintain pure intentions and stay focused on serving Allah.

Consistency

4. “Be steadfast as you are commanded,” by Allah in the Quran (11:112)

5. Consistency builds trust, allowing people to rely on us, and inconsistency diminishes our impact and erodes trust.

Career + Vocation

Diversified Income Streams

6. Trust in Allah as the ultimate Provider; accept that outcomes are from Him, but work hard nevertheless.

7. Exhausting our means is part of worship and trusting in Allah's plan.

8. Financial stability enables independence and preserves integrity, and diversified income streams help prevent burnout.

Networking

9. Build connections with peers (to share resources and ideas) and experts (to learn and grow).

10. Balance expanding horizons without compromising mission, values, or well-being.

Spiritual Development

Sphere of Influence

11. Focus on what is within our control (spiritually and physically), and leave the rest to Allah.

12. Submission to Allah’s magnificent knowledge and power, juxtaposed with our inadequacy, brings trust in His wisdom and peace with the outcomes.

Service = Love = Worship ≠ Ego

13. True service is love and devotion to Allah, not self-promotion.

14. Avoid seeking validation or recognition; be humble and grateful to serve if you are tested with it.

Community Engagement

Impostor Syndrome

15. Everyone feels inadequate at times, but we cannot let these feelings limit us. What truly matters is Allah’s pleasure, not our self-perception or how much we produce.

16. Strive for congruence in our private and public lives.

17. Recognizing our shortcomings is a blessing and an opportunity for growth.

Loneliness

18. The best of creation (the prophets and the righteous) faced isolation and grief.

19. We must not seek emotional fulfillment from those we serve; our role is to give.

20. Building relationships outside of service, clearly distinguishing when we are serving and when we are being served, is essential for preserving ethical boundaries.

Conclusion

As community servants, we must continuously strive for personal and spiritual growth, recognizing that our connection with Allah must deepen with every step we take. The challenges we encounter in service are not obstacles to be avoided but opportunities designed to strengthen our sincerity and commitment to Him. These hardships are part of the divine test, reminding us that true success lies not in outcomes or recognition but in our steadfast reliance on Allah and our intention to serve solely for His sake.

These trials refine our character and draw us closer to Allah. Every difficulty invites us to increase our patience, humility, and devotion. Rather than focusing on the external results of our efforts, we must remember that our true success is measured by our intentions' purity and our hearts' perseverance. Ultimately, our reward is with Allah alone, and the challenges we face on this journey are the means through which we grow into more sincere and devoted servants of His cause.

And, ultimately, with Allah is all success!

Some additional articles on this topic:

• Raindrops of Mercy: Spiritual Tools for Difficult Times

  With this post I explore the metaphor of a storm to provide context for how we can reframe how we look at difficult times.

• Spiritual Holding Patterns

  Expounding on a pleasantly nostalgic memory of a fishing trip I went on with one of my teachers, this article explores the plateauing phases of life that I call “spiritual holding patterns.”

• Presence: A Quranic Framework to Finding Spiritual Harmony
  "Being present (muhadara) is the presence of a heart with the Lord from behind a veil of sequential proofs, discursive thought, or the overwhelming power of invocation [dhikr]." – Ahmed b. Ajiba

“Hana!” my wife screamed my daughter's name repeatedly. Our house is narrow and tall, so sometimes, my wife and I must yell to get the kid’s attention. We understand that sometimes they don’t hear us or are distracted, but this time the shouts of “HANA!” repeated five or more times. That is utterly unacceptable to me because I am the disciplinarian in our family. Frequently, my name is evoked to ensure compliance because everyone knows the buck stops with me. It is a role I take very seriously: while I cannot ensure my children’s piety, I can ensure they have good manners. 

Hearing my wife repeat herself really got under my skin. I ran upstairs to the main floor, and Hana still hadn’t come down, nor did I hear her respond to her mom, so I stormed up the next flight of stairs. I’m a big guy, and my storming upstairs makes a lot of noise. What I didn’t know was that Hana was on her way down. She met me at the half-turn to my stomps and yelled, “Get downstairs right now! Didn’t you hear your mother calling you?!” 

I was absolutely furious, but I didn’t realize that I was scaring Hana. In addition to being startled on the steps, I am three times her size, angrily barking at her. She started crying and only nodded her head in response. 

“Go to your room, turn off the lights, and take a nap! This is completely unacceptable adab,” I concluded my diatribe.

When the dust settled, the look on her face replayed in my mind. Hana, the most delicate of my daughters, was scared of me, her father. I started feeling sick to my stomach, so I went to her bedroom to apologize, but she was still very worked up. I also noticed she’d wet the bed. After triaging why, because she’s nine years old now, I asked her, “Did this happen because Baba yelled at you?” and, through her sniffles, she faintly said, “Yes.” My heart broke. 

How I treated my daughter is unequivocally unacceptable. Full stop. We can make excuses—Hana was disrespectful to her mother, they know the rules of the home, this wasn’t the first time you’ve had to tell her, etc.—but they do not justify my actions. As a community, we must differentiate between making excuses for our brothers and holding people accountable for their actions. Although they are interconnected, they are mutually exclusive. 

Making Excuses

We are only responsible for ourselves, and that should be our sole focus. Allah told us in the Quran, “No soul burdened with sin will bear the burden of another, and each person will only have what they endeavored towards.”2 Therefore, generally, what others do isn’t our concern. And this is a huge relief! I have entirely too many sins and faults to be concerned with someone else’s deeds. My mentors always told me, what has become a personal maxim: Head down. Mouth shut. Just serve.

The reality is that we do not live in a vacuum-sealed silo or a utopia where everyone has perfect adab, never wronging or offending another. This is where excuses come in handy. While focusing on our relationship with Allah, we make excuses for the wrongs of others, not for their benefit but for ours. The excuses are an internal process to ensure our thoughts about Allah are as healthy as possible because that translates into our external actions and spiritual disposition. 

When I share the story of how I treated my daughter, you can have husnul-dhun (good opinions) about my relationship with Allah. That’s good for you—literally. It helps you have husnul-dhun about Allah and healthily process the world. Whether your husnl-dhun is reality or not, it still does not excuse my actions. Had I done an injustice to myself alone, that’s between me and Allah. It doesn’t harm anyone else and is no one else’s concern (except for their love and well-wishes for me). But, as soon as my indiscretions impact someone else (in this case, my daughter), we must ensure it stops. 

Al-Humdulillah, I had my amazing wife to discuss the situation with. She took Hana alone to the store, bought her a treat, and called me so I could apologize again. But imagine I brushed it under the rug—out of fear (i.e., embarrassment) or apathy—and Hana never got the apology she deserved. Worse, imagine I normalized this behavior—I did get the desired outcome I wanted after all! If we make excuses for the injustices we see of others, then it allows for harm to perpetuate, and that is why we must stand for accountability.

Accountability

Accountability is a cornerstone of all interpersonal relationships and community life. Once a man was ascertained for stealing said to Umar b. Al-Khattab, “I only stole by Allah’s decree.” Umar responded, “Yes, it was Allah’s decree that you stole, and it is also Allah’s decree that your hand should be cut off.” Although capital punishment is exclusively reserved for the legal authorities, its enforcement is not a judgment on the person’s metaphysical reality and standing with Allah. That’s not our responsibility, but standing for justice and ensuring accountability within our capacity through official legal channels is. 

The further an injustice’s impact extends, the greater the need for accountability. Because I was rude and mean to Hana in a public setting (i.e., in front of the entire family), I also had to speak to my other children about my inappropriate behavior. I am supposed to be the Qowwam (humble servant leader) of my home, and I cannot do that if those under my responsibility are scared of me—fear indicates distrust and genuine love cannot be built upon distrust. Without accountability and behavioral change, my actions can impact generations to come, and without even realizing it, God forbid, I create a legacy of trauma and abuse. 

Protecting Ourselves

Protecting ourselves and our community is no easy feat because these are often endemic human problems and are not exclusive to any particular community. That said, traditional society had individual and social mechanisms that are worth considering in our modern times:

1. Individual Level — Muraqaba (introception) and Muhasaba (self-accountability):

Being critical of others is easy; anyone can do it. But before considering protecting ourselves, we must ensure we protect others from us. The first thing we will be held accountable for is our deeds. To do this, we must constantly engage in a process of self-analysis: what are we doing, and what have we done? Without this, there is no way for growth; even with Towbah (repentance), the first step is having nadm (remorse) for whatever we’re repenting.

Also, a part of this is recognizing our goals and whether we are prioritizing them appropriately. As a first-generation Muslim (my mom converted when I was eight years old), I don’t have an extensive religious cultural history to pull from and instill in my children. I do my best. Nevertheless, my number one parenting goal is to raise well-mannered children. That is something I can do. If I am really committed to that priority, I must ensure that my character reflects that. Moreover, I must ensure those I associate with and look up to share and reflect my goal. The Prophet ﷺ said, “A man follows the religion of his friend, so each one should consider whom he makes his friend.”4

Our environment directly impacts our spiritual (internal and external) disposition. If we feel something is off, trust your gut. As Allah said in the Quran, “Ask the people of knowledge if you don’t know.”5 That doesn’t mean we jump to conclusions, but Allah blessed us with intuitions for a reason, and people of knowledge (even if you’re uncomfortable because of a clergy member) should be able to use their understanding of the Shariah (Islamic law) to help you triage your situation. If they cannot, or won’t, help you, then find someone else. At the end of the day, you aren’t compelled to obey anyone other than the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. Even if we accept that he speaks to people (in dreams or awakened state), it will never contradict the law. Additionally, what someone else saw is not legally binding for you. 

Trust your gut!

2. Social Level — Teachers, Religious Communities, and Institutions:

Clergy—Imams, Shaykhs, teachers, mentors, etc.—don’t materialize from thin air; they have teachers and are part of religious communities. One’s intellectual and spiritual pedigree should be known publicly, and if it isn’t, we should be highly skeptical. Our teachers inform our teleological, epistemological, and methodological worldview, but it also provides a level of accountability. If problems arise, they are a higher authority who can hold the clergy accountable, and clergy members should welcome this. Any opportunity to recognize our faults is a gift from Allah because we can rectify ourselves in this life before we’re held accountable in the next. 

Furthermore, clergy are associated institutions that serve as an avenue for accountability. Unfortunately, some things don’t happen in public—e.g., without my admission, you wouldn’t know about me scaring my daughter—but that doesn’t mean the organization cannot do anything. The process might not be efficient or impervious to biases and tampering; however, it is still important because, depending on the severity, we need to ensure no one else is harmed. 

Conclusion

A man came to the Prophet ﷺ and asked, “O Messenger of Allah, should I tie my camel and trust in Allah, or should I leave her untied and trust in Allah?” This Sahabi (companion) was asking about the spiritual connection to asbaab (means); should I do my due diligence OR suffice with my reliance upon Allah? The Prophet ﷺ responded, “Tie her and trust in Allah.”7

Our spiritual mandate to connect with Allah does not absolve us from exhausting our means. Whenever we see injustice, we have a responsibility to stop it as much as possible, be it at our own hands or others. Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said, “Whoever amongst you sees an evil, he must change it with his hand; if he is unable to do so, then with his tongue; and if he is unable to do so, then with his heart; and that is the weakest form of Iman (faith).”8 

Passiveness towards injustice not only impacts society at large, but it also harms us too—planting seeds of apathy towards injustice in our hearts, and that distances us from Allah. The Prophet ﷺ said, “None of you truly believe until you want for your brother what you want for yourself.”9 We should want everyone to have the same peace and tranquility as we want for ourselves in this life and the next. Admittedly, it is a lofty aspiration, but if we all start striving to achieve it, imagine how much more fruitful and wholesome our community experience would be. 

I ask Allah to forgive my overreaction and, more importantly, pray I never conduct myself in such a way again. May He bless our families and community with love and piety, protecting us from all injustice, whether by our hands or others. Ameen!

Ultimately, with Allah is success!

Good mentors, in my opinion, are the shortest and most fruitful way to self-improvement known to man. It’s Biblical!—"Iron sharpens iron, and one person sharpens the wits of another. Anyone who tends a fig tree will eat its fruit, and anyone who takes care of a master will be honored.”1 Whenever anyone asks, “What is the number one piece of advice you would give your younger self?” my answer is always unequivocally, “Get mentors!” So, when my good friend Isma’il Uddin, Bently University’s Muslim Life Program Coordinator, asked me to write specifically on choosing mentors, I felt obliged. 

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Despite addressing the etiquette of mentorship in a previous paper, what to look for in a mentor was not addressed, and that is equally, if not more, important. Mentors are people we entrust to provide counsel or advice about a given topic;2 therefore, we must be extremely careful they are worthy of this trust. We must be cautious to whom we give that position in our hearts. A primary criterion we can use to identify suitable mentors is to ensure (to the best of our ability) that they are pious, knowledgeable, have experience, and are available for you.

1. Knowledge

If extended to the furthest logical conclusion (regardless of the domain), our mentors help guide us to Allah. Everything in our lives as Muslims, ideally, is just a means to aid us in our self-improvement and spiritual development. That is a lofty responsibility; thus, before assessing a potential mentor’s knowledge, we must ensure they are pious.

a. Piety and Good Manners

A true mentor does not just possess knowledge—they embody it in their actions and character. Their piety is reflected in how they live according to the principles of the faith, striving to please Allah in all they do. Likewise, their good manners shine through in their humility, patience, and respect. A mentor with good akhlaq (character) is loving in correction and sincere in their care for your well-being, seeking an ultimate goal of the mentee surpasses them. Their conduct becomes a living example of how knowledge and piety are meant to be lived, guiding you through their words and actions, inspiring you to follow spiritually and morally in their footsteps. As IbnQuddama (d. 620 /1223) said, “It is not knowledge or piety that calm someone down once angry, it is good character.”3

While we may consult someone knowledgeable about a particular subject who lacks these qualities, a mentor is a far more intimate relationship. Piety and good character, which go hand-in-glove together, should be present in anyone we take as a mentor, whether religious or secular. By the nature of the relationship, we will spend extensive time with our mentors and, as Imam Malik’s mother would tell him before embarking on his journey to seek knowledge, we must “ learn from [our teachers] manners before [their] knowledge.”4

b. Knowledge of the Shariah 

Trust is the foundation of the mentor-mentee relationship, so for those looking for spiritual or religious mentorship, finding someone with extensive contextualized knowledge of Shariah (Islamic law) is essential. This knowledge ensures that the advice you receive is aligned with and rooted in Islamic principles. Whether about daily life matters or complex spiritual questions, a knowledgeable mentor well-versed in Islamic scholarship and cultural tradition illuminates the path. Otherwise, “You cannot give what you do not have.” 

2. Experience

Theoretical technical knowledge is important, but its application experientially is vital. A mentor who has gone through a mentorship process can bring the Shariah into context. This is akin to any technical specialty, be it law or medicine. It is one thing to pass the bar or board exams but another to have clinical in-person training.

a. Tarbiya with a Sanad

Once, I was told of some discrepancies in one of my teacher’s sanad, specifically that he did not have the authority I was under the understanding he had. So, when he came to town, and most people had left the gathering, I asked him plainly and directly, “Shaykh, I was told you do not have authority from your teacher. Is that true?” He smiled and said, “No, it is not.” So I responded, “Please excuse my poor manners and bluntness, but could you show me something so that I do not have any doubt when I meet these people in the future?” He said, “I will do you one better;” he searched for a PDF of his ijaza (license) on his phone, AirDropped it to me, and then graciously sat with me to ensure I understood what I was reading.

While I do not encourage repeating my brashness, sanad (a chain of transmission linking them to past scholars) is essential in the Islamic tradition. It ensures they are part of a living tradition, passing down timeless wisdom that has been tried and tested across generations. A mentor who has received tarbiya (spiritual and moral development) through a sanad brings with them deep-rooted training and reliability.

Before choosing a potential mentor, ask about their spiritual heritage and where they received their training. Furthermore, ask about the nature and extent of their training and those who can attest to it. One’s sanad should not be a matter of pride but merely a matter of fact that none should have apprehension about sharing. This is important because it informs what and how they learned and also provides a level of accountability. You would be surprised how many exaggerated bios and religious resumes are posted on fliers and personalized websites. Through one’s sanad, you and the mentor have an accessible body of people to refer to, particularly if there are challenges or confusion.

b. Life Experience and Contextual Understanding

A mentor's life experience should ideally align with your own. Still, at the very least, they must be able to appreciate and empathize with the unique circumstances that shape your life—whether it’s how you grew up, your family dynamics, the socio-economic conditions you’ve navigated, your mental health diagnosis, etc. If they cannot, that is fine, but they probably are not your ideal mentor. For example, someone who grew up privileged in the suburbs might not fully understand the struggles of someone who was raised in an underprivileged inner-city environment. However, a mentor who listens, understands, and respects these differences will be better equipped to offer relevant and compassionate guidance.

Additionally, the mentor should have expertise in the specific area you’re seeking guidance on, whether professional, spiritual, or personal. Their advice should be grounded in knowledge and experience relevant to your situation. At the same time, they must have the humility to admit when they don’t know something. This was exemplified by the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ when he was asked about date farming—he acknowledged his lack of expertise and refrained from giving uninformed advice.6 A good mentor will do the same, guiding you to other resources when necessary and showing that true wisdom includes knowing the limits of one’s knowledge.

3. Accessible

Abdullah b. Umar (d. 73/610), famously known as “IbnUmar,” was from the younger Sahaba and was blessed to grow up in the presence of the Prophet ﷺ. According to Aisha (radiAllahu ‘anha—Allah be pleased with her), there was no one more adherent to the ways of the Prophet.8 He (radiAllahu ‘anhu—Allah be pleased with him) used to trace the footsteps of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ going to every place he prayed. “The place where the Prophet ﷺ took rest under a tree once, was a place Ibn ‘Umar used to maintain later on, watering the tree so it would not dry up.”9 

IbnUmar’s connection with the Prophet ﷺ transcended a mere typical teacher-student or mentor-mentee relationship; the Prophet ﷺ was not mentioned except he would cry.10 This only happens when the relationship with the teacher’s available for his student.  The best mentors in the world cannot help you if they are inaccessible.

We all seek the very best mentor, but sometimes, in our zeal and pursuit of Ihsan (spiritual excellence), we associate best with popularity or social status. Your mentor does not have to be the most knowledgeable of the Shariah, or the most versed in your precise social reality, but they must be accessible to you. Often, for that very reason, the most popular Shaykh is the worst person to mentor you. That may require a bit of out-of-the-box thinking, too. One of my most influential mentors never had permanent residence in the same state as me for the first 10 years of our relationship; we lived on two different continents and in two different time zones. I had to over-communicate my circumstances and needs—predominantly via text as we communicated via Facebook Messenger and then WhatsApp—and then wait for his response. Although not ideal, it was what I had, and I am grateful for it.

Nevertheless, it is important to consider the following:

a. Clear Channel of Communication

Your mentor should provide a clear and consistent way to communicate. This doesn’t mean they have to be available 24/7. Still, a mutually understood structure should exist for when and how to seek their advice. Everyone will have different preferences—some through scheduled meetings, emails, phone calls, or chat messages—which should be respected. But, if the method of communication has been communicated and it does not work for you, you can either request another way or perhaps find a different mentor. A mentor who makes themselves available demonstrates that they prioritize and value the relationship, and you cannot force a mentorship.

b. Disposition That Gels with You

Once accepted to Umm al-Qura University everyone told me I just HAD to study with a particular shaykh (scholar). Having read some translations of his works, and my teachers at the time always referred to his knowledge and status in the scholarly community, I was excited. But when I learned the shaykh was known to never smile, I was immediately turned off. His disposition’s reputation is almost the polar opposite of mine, and in the near-decade that I lived in Makkah (with him coming almost yearly and me going to his city multiple times), I never once sat in his halaqa (lessons).

Not everyone clicks with everyone, and that is perfectly fine. For a mentor, their personality and disposition should resonate with yours. You should feel comfortable sharing your challenges, knowing that they will listen with empathy and understanding. You should also not feel threatened or unsafe with your mentor. Their job is to help you get to Allah, which is always done lovingly and mercifully. 

That does not mean you will always be comfortable with your mentor either. Inevitably, there will come a time when you both have to have heavy heart-to-heart conversations. There will likely be times when they speak with you in a way that makes you feel guilty or perhaps even reconsider the current course of your life. That is fine, because true love is not always easy. For example, if an infant is about to stick a fork into an electrical socket, no parent would softly request them to stop and them sing love poems about its danger. Most parents would probably raise their voices, maybe even pop the child’s hand, to teach its severity. While all of it is done in the name of love, it is undoubtedly not gentle and will likely scare the child. And that is the point; electric sockets are dangerous and should not be played with. Mentorship is no different. 

Disagreements

Disagreements in life are inevitable, and with a mentor is no different. When you take on a mentor, you accept that they will sometimes challenge you or offer perspectives that differ from yours. However, it’s important to remember why you chose this person as a mentor in the first place—because of their knowledge, experience, and wisdom.

When you find their advice does not seem to apply to your situation, do not walk away or dismiss it outright. Instead, engage with them by asking clarifying questions. Often, miscommunication or missing details can lead to perceived disagreements. Provide more context if necessary, and allow them to re-evaluate their guidance based on this new information.

If their position has not changed after this process, reflect on their insight. They may see something that you have not yet grasped. Trust is key here. By taking their advice, the worst that might happen is that you experience some discomfort or potential loss—but even that can be a learning experience. On the other hand, rejecting their wisdom outright might mean missing out on valuable growth.

This is a moment for introspection. You chose this mentor and spent time nurturing this relationship. Trust that your mentor’s wisdom, developed over years of study and experience, will serve your best interests. Trust that even in moments of disagreement, they have your well-being at heart and mind. And trust that by following their advice, you’re opening yourself up to growth that might not have been visible to you before. If you cannot, and there has been no neglect or abuse from the mentor, perhaps the problem is with you (i.e., arrogance), and it may be time to start looking for another mentor. 

Reality Check

To the uninitiated, mentorship may sound fun and a good time. Despite my fervent belief in it, I want to level-set with you before you sign up.

Mentorship is a serious commitment that requires tremendous investment from both parties, the mentor and the mentee. Typically, before any growth happens, especially for the young and new, the mentee spends the early part of their relationship unlearning much of their preconceptions so they can be rebuilt anew. It necessitates figuratively emptying themselves of their inhibitions (i.e., bad adab (characteristic), ego, and meta ignorance) to receive whatever the mentor offers. This process cannot progress without humility and muhasaba (introspective self-evaluation) and is often emotionally painful. Because of profound vulnerability, there must first be trust in (and respect for) the mentor.

On the other hand, the mentor must be gracious and forbearing. It is easy for us to forget how we once were—young, zealous, and ignorant. Ironically, we may even find it frustrating when faced with younger versions of ourselves. A mentor’s job is to serve the mentee, intending nothing more than their growth and well-being, with the goal of the mentee someday being better than themselves. Therefore, mentors must remember that Rome was not built in a day and, regardless of where we think we have arrived, we are far from perfect. As we still have deficiencies and our mentors and elders were patient with us, we must embody that ethic for those we serve. Furthermore, an additional challenge for mentors is to recognize the unique needs of mentees today. The specific tarbiya we received will not work on today’s youth, just as our mentor’s tarbiya would not have worked on us.

Conclusion

Mentorship is a relationship built on mutual respect, wisdom, and trust. As we seek guidance, remember that we are like “dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants.”13 This imagery reminds us that the clarity we gain is not due to our own height or insight, but because of the stature of those who lift us. The wisdom of a mentor allows us to see farther, drawing on their years of experience and knowledge.

By choosing a mentor based on the qualities of knowledge, experience, and availability, you place yourself in the position to gain invaluable insights that may not be accessible otherwise. Their wisdom, forged through trials and learning, becomes your platform to grow. Trust that even in moments of disagreement, your mentor has your best interests at heart. By standing on their shoulders, you not only benefit from their perspective but contribute to a legacy of growth, adding your own modest efforts to their great work.

Allah bless and protect our mentors, teachers, and big brothers for their years of patient and gracious service despite our annoying arrogance and compounded ignorance. Without them, we would be utterly lost. Ultimately, with Allah is all success! Ameen!

Embarking on the path of community service is a profound and rewarding journey, akin to the role of a shepherd guiding their flock with unwavering care and dedication. Mustafa Davis told me in 2015, "True leaders are the shepherds who never abandon their flock. They protect and care for their flock, never ridiculing, condemning, or exploiting them. That is the work of wolves. Wolves are dangerous, as they are only concerned with themselves. They aren't true leaders." 

In this spirit, the following twenty pieces of advice are a compilation of what I have surmised from my teachers and mentors for my own service. These insights encompass the essential aspects of service: personal commitment, balancing family life, understanding one's vocation, seeking mentorship, and fostering spiritual and educational growth. It is not exhaustive, but perhaps the start of a larger conversation and (I pray is) of service to you.

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Personal Commitment

1. Why: Reflect on your motivation for serving. Understanding your intentions and reasons behind your commitment to service will give you direction and can sustain you through challenges.

2. Fard Kifayya (Communal Obligation):

   • Recognize that community service is a collective duty. Consider to what extent you want to dedicate yourself to community service (unless your participation is irreplaceable).

   • Take initiative and do not assume the responsibility is someone else’s. Do not be a bystander if you see something that needs to be done, big or small.

3. Understand the Commitment:

   • Realize the depth of your commitment and its impact on your life and the community.

   • Learn an ethical framework and strive to uphold it to the best of your ability, even at your own expense.

Family Life

4. If Single:

   • Ideally, get married before taking on significant community roles to ensure personal stability.

   • Consider the benefits of marrying someone who shares your community values and, at least, understands the extent of your commitments.

   • Be vigilant about marrying from within the community, especially from those you directly serve.

5. Prioritize Your Family:

   • Remember that serving your family is an obligation uniquely yours (fard ‘ayn).

   • Devise a hierarchy of priorities (e.g., Allah → family → community → everything else) to ensure a healthy balance between your family’s needs and community responsibilities.

Career + Vocation

6. Volunteer, Job, or Vocation:

   • Understand the distinction between volunteering, a job, and a vocation.

   • Approach your service with the dedication of a vocation, the professionalism of a job, and the sincerity of a volunteer.

   • Take what you need to sustain yourself, but find a balance to avoid becoming wealthy at the community's expense. Ideally, albeit increasingly impractical, you financially support your family by means other than your community service.

7. Recognize Your Gift:

   • Identify your unique skills and strengths. Everyone has something valuable to contribute; find your orbit and stay in it.

   • Strive to constantly hone your skills and strengths to serve better and more excellently, particularly in your niche.

Mentorship and Growth

8. Find Mentors: Seek out experienced individuals in every domain of life (e.g., spiritual, social, intellectual, professional, etc.) who can guide you in your service journey. Mentors provide invaluable advice and support, both practically and spiritually.

9. Continued Growth:

   • Spiritually: Engage in regular and consistent spiritual practices to nourish your soul. Despite all towfiq (success) is from and by Allah’s mercy, we must not forget that hurt people hurt people.

   • Emotionally: Invest in your emotional well-being, seek support when needed, and develop resilience to navigate the emotional challenges of community service.

   • Educationally: Pursue continuous learning, both religious and secular, to stay informed and effective.

Spiritual Development

10. Tarbiya via Service: View your service as part of your personal and spiritual development (tarbiya). Remain spiritually aware and open to what Allah is teaching you via your service.

11. Mistakes Will Happen: Accept that mistakes, yours and others’, are part of the learning process. Learn from them and move forward.

12. Difficulties and Burnout: Prepare for challenges and emotional difficulties. Perseverance is critical, but know where and how to rest and recuperate. 

13. Set Realistic Expectations: Manage your expectations to avoid frustration and disappointment. When you find service untenable, don’t quit, pivot.

Organizational Structure

14. Start with the Contract: Establish clear agreements and expectations from the beginning. Ensure you have Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and accountability measures to track progress and ensure transparency.

15. Build Trust: Do not overlook those within the organization, especially your colleagues, in your attempt to service the community. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

16. Delegation: Learn to delegate tasks so you can focus on serving the community effectively and not protecting your position. This also teaches humility and the ability to step down when necessary.

Community Engagement

17. Humility: Approach your service with humility. Your position in the community does not define your worth.

18. Collaboration: Foster a sense of community by involving others in your service efforts. This creates a supportive and collaborative environment.

19. Integrity and Discretion: Uphold integrity in all your actions and decisions. Exercise discretion when dealing with sensitive information and situations, maintaining the trust and confidence of those you serve.

20. Love: Love the community. Allah blessed you with them to worship and draw nearer to him.

Be a shepherd to your community, serving with grace and care, regardless of how big or small the role. Balance your life like one tending a flock, nurturing with love and sincerity. Embrace challenges as growth, lead humbly, and weave a tapestry of support and unity. In this sacred service, you will find the true beauty and worth. Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said, “The most beloved people to Allah are those most beneficial to others.”

And, ultimately, with Allah is all success!

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Here are some other papers that touch on community and service:

• Advice to Community Servants (Part 2)

  Struggling to stay consistent in your service? Learn how trust in Allah, sincerity, and embracing challenges can transform your journey and strengthen your connection with Him.

• Dawah Mercenaries, OnlyImams, and the Structural Genocide of the American Muslim Community
  A criterion for our organizations, communities, and clergy.

• The Masjid: Kids + Uncles
  With the masjid at the center of the American Muslim community, we must identify and adopt masjid etiquettes rooted in our tradition that applies to each demographic.

• Khutbah: A How-To Manual
  After a group of brothers asked me to give a khutbah (sermon) training workshop, I decided to write this paper to serve as a record of one method for my community and beyond.

There are potentially endless ways to deliver a khutbah, and my masjid (mosque), the ADAMS Center, oversees 32 khutbahs (sermons) in 13 different locations every Friday. So, after a group of brothers asked me to give a khutbah (sermon) training workshop, I decided to write this paper to serve as a record of one method for my community and beyond.

Introduction

In the 10th year after the Hijra, standing on Mt. Arafah, the Prophet ﷺ gave his famous Khutbah Al-Wadaa’ (Farewell Sermon). For a khutbah of this magnitude, given by anyone else, especially in today’s era, it is almost expected it to be full of complex rhetorical tricks, quotable soundbites, and used as a tool for personal political gain. Not for the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. “He does not speak of his desires; rather, it is revelation revealed.”1 In his iconic, concise but comprehensive style,2 roughly four-fifths of his khutbah addressed the social ills relevant to the 7th-century Arabian peninsula—injustice and inequality, division and discrimination, misogyny and disrespect towards women, disregard towards life and property, embracing interest and exploitation, and neglecting faith and responsibility. With this captivated audience, the Prophet ﷺ spoke directly to the needs of his congregation and figuratively pulled no punches. 

Imagine being present for this khutbah. How powerful would it be—standing with 40,000 Sahaba (companions),3 everyone in Ihram (a state of consecration assumed on pilgrimage to Makkah)4—listening to the khatib (preacher), who also happens to be the Prophet ﷺ? Also, how spiritually transformative (internally and externally) of a khutbah would it be? While we are not the Prophet ﷺ and do not have the same spiritual gravitas, our responsibility, as khatibs, is to remember that atop the member (pulpit), we are representing the Prophet ﷺ. The goal of our khutbah is to serve others in hopes it draws them closer to Allah.

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Ideological Perspective

Unfortunately, only twenty-five percent of American Muslims attend the Jummah (Friday) khutbah, despite being obligatory for Muslim men to attend, and thirty-two percent only attend the masjid once or twice a month.5 Sixty-nine percent of American Muslims say they pursue their spiritual life primarily outside the mosque.6 The khutbah is likely the only source of religious instruction our congregation will get in real life; therefore, the opportunity costs are so high, and it should be taken with great seriousness.

We all have different experiences and dispositions, and we will never satisfy everyone, nor should that be the goal. I believe we should craft our khutbah specifically directed to address the needs of our own hearts. The community should always be secondary. If we craft our khutbah specifically for our own hearts, building off what we like and dislike from others and what we need to hear, this will (InshaAllah—God-willing) intuitively protect us from arrogance or showing off. As the saying goes, we are but dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants. The benefit we impart is only because Allah made it meaningful for others to hear, and our delivery is only a means to that end. 

Becoming comfortable speaking in front of an audience and developing a delivery style takes time. Also, not every khutbah will be perfect, and we should not expect it to be. As we are trying to find our own voice, we should consider: How were all the horrible khutbahs we attended? What was wrong with the khatib’s delivery? Was it too long or too short? Was his message succinct and easy to follow, or did you find it chaotic? Our experiences should help inform what we give importance to and what we strive to avoid. At the end of the day, we are all striving to serve our community with as much ihsan (spiritual excellence) as possible and that will only be achieved via intentionality and effort.

Practical Application

My khutbahs are unabashedly formulaic, each one structured exactly the same. I use the logistical restraints—that they are divided into two parts—as a structural framework. The first khutbah establishes theoretical concepts, and the second provides instruction inspiring practical application of those theoretical concepts.

First Khutbah

After the praising of Allah, I like to open with a story. Communications professor Lynn Meade said in her book Advanced Public Speaking, “Capturing the audience through the story is one of the most powerful ways to start a speech. A story engages the brain in powerful ways and causes the audience’s brains to sync with the speakers.”7 She also mentioned that stories engage the audience and make a point, help ideas stick, and inspire action.8 But, the opening story cannot be random; it must have some underlying connection to the theme of the khutbah.

An example of this can be found in my previous paper, Gratitude: Thanksgiving + Palestinians, because it was initially a khutbah.9 It starts by recognizing the season of Thanksgiving (since that was the weekend I gave the khutbah) and then transitions into the story of prophet Musa and the Israelites. All of this was to segue to the verse, “And ˹remember˺ when your Lord proclaimed, ‘If you are grateful, I will certainly give you more. But if you are ungrateful, surely My punishment is severe.’”10 

I try to keep the khutbah’s concept simple. I use the opening story as a rhetorical device to connect the audience with one or two, no more than three, main theoretical points. Anything more becomes overwhelming and too much to follow. In the previous example, the theoretical point was only gratitude, culminating in the question, “We have to look at the tremendous level of faith and conviction of the Palestinians and use it as motivation for our test. How can we use those videos we see, not just to numb our senses, another video, another picture, but something to remember Allah?”

Second Khutbah

I will never forget one day after my khutbah when a brother requested a few minutes of my time. We sat down, and he asked if he could give me some nasiha (advice), which I welcomed. He said, “While I love your khutbahs, they leave me without direction. It is essentially a nice speech, but it does nothing for me. What do I do with that information?” I did not realize I was no longer doing that, but I have made it a point to befriend that brother. Also, since then, I have focused my entire second khutbah on the practical application of the first khutbah. 

After invoking Allah’s blessings and salutations upon the Prophet ﷺ, I ask, “How can we achieve [the first khutbah’s goal]?" Then, I try to give two or three simple and practical things everyone can do. If I am honest, every khutbah typically ends up with different versions of the same basic concepts—e.g., taqwa (God-consciousness), tawakkul (God-reliance), sabr (patience), shukr (gratitude), suhba (companionship), etc. These generic concepts are always required for all Muslims, so I am comfortable with the repetition. Furthermore, because the theoretical points of the first khutbah differ every time, the practical application will inevitably have different variations. 

Before concluding, I try to summarize the entire khutbah. I encapsulate the overarching theoretical points of the first khutbah and the practical application advice from the second into a couple of sentences. Psychologist Ludy T. Benjamin said, 

If you do not regularly provide a summary in your lectures, start now. Such a capstone is critical in maximizing learning in the lecture. If students come to expect such regular summaries of key ideas, they will be attentive at the end of the lecture knowing the importance of such integration for their own understanding, not to mention better grades.11

Contrary to teachers, who try to help students achieve good grades, khatibs try to help those in attendance achieve a better spiritual state (internally and externally). 

Considerations

1. The Disenfranchised

We must be considerate of the most disenfranchised of the audience. That is not to say we change the khutbah's overarching meaning or the Shariah (law) to accommodate them, but a level of sensitivity goes a long way. As it is famously said, “You get more bees with honey than vinegar.” Thus, especially when addressing sensitive topics (take marriage, for example), we should keep in mind the disenfranchised who may be present in the audience (i.e., the unmarried, in this example). Ensure you are speaking about it in an inclusive manner wherein everyone can find a place to connect with the message. Even those in contradistinction to what is objectively the Shariah, we must be sure our khutbah does not feel ostracizing and that they know Allah is Al-Ghafoor Al-Rahim (the Oft-Forgiving Most-Merciful).12

2. Language Proficiency

The education level of the audience should be another consideration of ours. Allah told Harun and Musa (Aaron and Moses) before going to address Pharoh (the worst person ever), “Speak to him gently, so perhaps he may be mindful of Me or fearful of My punishment.”13 So what about us speaking to Muslims? Regardless if we have a doctorate-level English vocabulary or Arabic fluency, we must speak in a way people will understand. As newspapers and magazines are written on a high-school level,14 we must translate and provide synonyms for all potentially foreign words. 

3. Time

Lastly, we must consider the length of our khutbahs. Although some of my teachers’ khutbahs are notoriously long (e.g., 45 minutes) and people absolutely love them, I believe, as a general rule, the khutbah should be limited to 20 minutes in an effort to keep the entire prayer within 30 minutes. Jummah occurs during the middle of a workday, and most of the audience has to return to work. Furthermore, if our goal is for the khutbah to inspire transformation, we must maximize the audience’s attention as much as possible.

Conclusion

The opportunity to give the Jummah khutbah is a blessing from Allah, but also a responsibility. Trying to help people connect with their true purpose, we are following in the footsteps of the Prophet ﷺ; hence, we must remain mindful of this and strive to do our best by crafting a khutbah that speaks to the needs of our hearts. “Surely whoever is mindful of Allah and patient, then certainly Allah never discounts the reward of the good-doers.”15 As the Prophet ﷺ would give two khutbahs, sitting in between them,16 I believe this serves as a wonderful structural framework for us to follow. In the first khutbah, we establish two or three theoretical concepts, and in the second khutbah, we provide how to practically apply those theoretical concepts in our daily lives. Everything else, the audience’s reception of the khutbah or its impact, is in Allah’s control. We merely ask Him to accept our efforts and forgive us for our deficiencies. 

This paper was written not just to be theoretical but also as a practical example of a khutbah’s style and structure. Ultimately, with Allah is all success!

Here are other papers I have written addressing community needs:

• The Masjid: Kids + Uncles
  With the masjid at the center of the American Muslim community, we must identify and adopt masjid etiquettes rooted in our tradition that applies to each demographic.

• Dawah Mercenaries, OnlyImams, and the Structural Genocide of the American Muslim Community
  A criterion for our organizations, communities, and clergy.

The Muslim community is one big family, the Ummah of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.1 Our family consists of a wide spectrum of people of different ages, backgrounds, and perspectives. Unfortunately, as Robert Nisbet points out in his book The Quest for Community, “We are told by certain psychologists and sociologists that … the family has progressed from institution to companionship.”2 This modern ideology has influenced our expectations of community; no longer is it an institution wherein we sacrifice our comforts for the sake of building something greater than ourselves. Now we expect the community to satisfy our spiritual and social needs without requiring any substantial sacrifice in return. 

“Community” is not a theoretical concept that is removed from human interaction and engagement, whether in physical or virtual spaces. For us, Western Muslims, the primary place of that work is in the masjid (mosque). While Muslim-majority countries “have that third realm of satisfaction and social cohesion beyond the portals of home and work that for others is an essential element of the good life”3 we are not so blessed. This is partly a Western phenomenon, specifically an American phenomenon, but it is especially an American Muslim problem. I mentioned in a previous article how the vast majority of Muslims in the US post-1965 came as immigrants; they built our intellectual and religious structures completely from scratch, prioritizing the masjid before establishing universities and educational centers. Today, although, Al-Humdulillah (hallelujah), we now have seminaries and community centers, our masjids still serve as the primary epicenter of Muslim life. 

With such an importance on the masjid, the healthy functioning of its members (i.e., our religious family) is integral to its survival—the young and the old, those with children and those without. “To suppose that the present family, or any other group, can perpetually vitalize itself through some indwelling affectional tie, in the absence of concrete perceived functions … is plainly and irrevocably banished.”4 Frankly put, we must identify and adopt etiquettes rooted in our tradition specifically for inside the masjid, that applies to each demographic. If we do not, the Muslim community may someday also suffer a Great Dechurching.5 

Parents and Children

Our children need the masjid and we need them to love the masjid. The Prophet ﷺ told us that two of the seven people who will be under Allah’s shade on the Day of Judgement are a youth who grew up with the worship of Allah and a person whose heart is attached to the masjid.6 But, this only happens via a connection—physically and emotionally—to the masjid. The role of parents, concerning this, is to ensure this happens.

Growing up, my mother (Allah bless and preserve her) clearly defined expectations around not just behavior, but also communication. Whenever we would arrive at our destination there was always a quick 30-second talk she had with us—“Alright now! When we go in there, you’d better act like you got some sense,” she would say; or, particularly if we were invited to a dinner, “Don’t go in there and act like you’ve never seen food before!” But, the opposite would also happen, when we would come home from playing with friends, “Mm Mm! Don’t talk to me like I’m one of your friends.” Later I learned that this was a standard practice in Blackamerican families. Recklessness and poor manners were not a luxury afforded to Black people, particularly during my mother’s childhood (on the heels of post-segregation), especially in the South (where my maternal grandparents were from). For my sister and I, good adab (manners) were not a choice, it was expected—from my mother and all of the other adults in our lives.

As parents, we want nothing more for our children to be healthy and feel loved, in both a secular and religious sense. We want them to be healthily adjusted and loved when engaging in society and we want them to have a healthy appreciation and connection to religion and God. That is precisely why we bring them to the masjid. Unfortunately, neither of those two things will be accomplished via accidental parenting.

In “Parenting: Gardening, not Engineering” I mentioned, “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.” We must be intentional about how we care for them and what adab we teach them. The reason my mother (and her parents before her) emphasized adab so much is because just one generation ago, in my aunt’s lifetime, you could be imprisoned for looking7 (or killed for speaking8) to someone in a socially unacceptable manner. While no longer the case, Al-Humdulillah (hallelujah), it highlights the importance and potential ramifications of adab on a community. The responsibility of parents to equip our children with the social skills to contribute to community life in a way that engenders a positive feedback loop of love—from their good adab people enjoy their company, thus show them love, which subsequently makes them feel love and want to spend more time in the masjid.

Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was both a father and grandfather. As far I know, there are not any hadith (prophetic narrations) of him giving his offspring any pre-masjid speeches. The hadith of him ﷺ interacting with children and youth—like Anas b. Malik (radiAllahu ‘anhu, Allah be pleased with him), who served the Prophet ﷺ for ten years—are always gentle and loving, prioritizing efficacy over expediency. Tarbiya, or the process of cultivating adab, especially with children, is a process that happens over time. We cannot expect that by giving our children one stern speech before entering the masjid, or even after they misbehave in the musalla (prayer hall), our children will miraculously become little angels. Therefore, if we are prioritizing the overall behavior change, we should prioritize a prophetic approach. We pray around our children and teach them the adab to appreciate its sanctity. Furthermore, we should bring our children to the masjid as much as possible. The only way they will learn to distinguish when and where they are allowed to play, and when they cannot, is via time. Lecturing, particularly when something takes place, should function as a reminder more than anything else. 

Fellow Congregants

My childhood masjid growing up (Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center) was predominantly Palestinian and Somali. I vividly remember Amo Samir Abo Issa (the Executive Director) inviting me into his back office to count donations, the late Amo Dr. Mahmoud Abdi Nour (rahimahullah—Allah have mercy on him) defending my right to pray in the front row (despite the contradictions of other elders account of my dirty socks), and Amo Mohammed Elidrissi inviting me to repeatedly into his home to sit at the dinner table with his family like a son. Although I was one of maybe only three to five Blackamerican kids that frequented the masjid, I never felt othered. These men took me in and treated me like their own son and, because of it, even in the absence of my friends, I loved being at the masjid with them. Allah bless them all!

I pray every child in our community has a similar experience, and I believe that this was the experience of children in the masjid of the Prophet ﷺ. Abdullah b. Shaddad narrated, 

The Messenger of Allah ﷺ came out to us for one of the nighttime prayers, and he was carrying Hasan or Husain. The Messenger of Allah ﷺ came forward and put him down, then he said the Takbir and started to pray. He prostrated during his prayer, and made the prostration lengthy." My father said: "I raised my head and saw the child on the back of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ while he was prostrating so I went back to my prostration. When the Messenger of Allah ﷺ finished praying, the people said: "O Messenger of Allah ﷺ, you prostrated during the prayer for so long that we thought that something had happened or that you were receiving a revelation.” He said: “No such thing happened. But my son was riding on my back and I did not like to disturb him until he had enough.”9

From this vignette, we can focus on two different perspectives pertinent to our discussion: the Prophet ﷺ and the companions.

The Prophet ﷺ

He ﷺ was the best of creation and a mercy to all of mankind,10 including children. Anas b. Malik said, “He ﷺ never said to me, ‘Uf’ (a minor harsh word denoting impatience) and never blamed me by saying, ‘Why did you do so or why didn't you do so?’”11—also carried over to his masjid ﷺ. The children were welcome. Not only did they feel comfortable being in the masjid, as he ﷺ carried his grandsons (radiAllahu ‘anhm) to the prayer and placed them on the floor next to him, they felt comfortable playing during the prayer as well. 

In Islam, we believe the speech and actions of the Prophet ﷺ are revelations revealed to him by Allah.12 We are blessed to have this example to learn how to be with Allah and with creation. The Prophetic example, of the merciful loving grandfather, was also manifest in how he was as a leader ﷺ. When the Sahaba questioned him ﷺ about the delayed prayer, the Prophet ﷺ was not embarrassed by his grandchildren’s disrupting prayer; rather, he prioritized the children’s feelings over the community’s. He told the Sahaba, “My son was riding on my back and I did not like to disturb him until he had enough.” 

Our community must be a space for everyone, elders and young. To build healthy institutions, our leadership must guide the community to embrace an intentionally nuanced and holistic approach—holding both perspectives of our community’s interdependence, children (and their parents) as well as congregants without dependents in the masjid. How leadership goes about that is incredibly important, both in language and disposition. Undoubtedly, having khusho’ (tranquility) in prayer is something we all aspire towards, but never at the expense of harming another. Our responsibility, as people entrusted with the community’s spiritual well-being, is to hold the tension between ensuring parents and their children feel comfortable in the masjid while simultaneously ensuring that adab is maintained and those without children in the masjid feel comfortable. Al-Habib ﷺ did not reprimand Hasan and Husain for playing in the musalla, he accommodated them, just as he accommodated parents. He ﷺ said, "Whenever I start the prayer I intend to prolong it, but on hearing the cries of a child, I cut short the prayer because I know that the cries of the child will incite its mother's passions."13

The Sahaba

Leading by example, Prophet Muhammad ﷺ showed his companions how to be in community compassionately. When the Prophet ﷺ prolonged his prayer Shaddad b. Al-Haad was worried. He said, “I raised my head and saw the child on the back of the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) while he was prostrating so I went back to my prostration.” Shaddad’s concern was the Prophet ﷺ—that something had happened or that he ﷺ was receiving revelation—and it was only when he saw the Prophet ﷺ was ok, that he lowered his head and returned to salah. Shaddad followed the Prophet’s lead ﷺ. Neither he nor anyone else left the prayer to remove Hasan and Husain, no one shushed them, and no one spoke disparagingly to their family afterwards. The companions, the best generation, were more concerned about learning from the Prophet ﷺ and not perfection in their khusho’. 

How we think about others, particularly while we are in salah, is extremely important. Allah tells us in the Quran, “You will never achieve righteousness until you donate some of what you cherish. And whatever you give is certainly well known to Allah.”14 The righteousness we are seeking through concentration in our salah cannot be with narcissistic hearts. We must have enough prophetic love and tenderness so that when masjid conditions are less than favorable we can have a positive outlook. Thus, when our concentration is distracted by children crying or playing, how do we think and feel about the children or their parents? Are we annoyed, cursing them for the remainder of the prayer (focusing on everything but Allah), or are we empathic, praying for them? Our internal disposition (i.e., the condition of our hearts, thoughts, and feelings) inevitably manifests in our external disposition (i.e., our actions). The consequence of our disposition and actions, especially if we respond aggressively or insensitively, could draw a family closer to the masjid, as the amos (uncles) did for me, or push them away. Allah protect us all!

Our culture has shifted from being collectivistic to individualistic, prioritizing the pursuit of individual interests or rights rather than common or collective ones,15 and it has infiltrated our masjids. But, this is not the case everywhere. My childhood masjid had a youth gym in the basement and this is something we are seeing more and more. We have to decide what we want for our communities here in America. How will we raise the next generation of our community and to what efforts will we ensure they have a connection with the masjid? Parents, leadership, and fellow congregation members without children in the masjid are all interdependent in establishing a beautiful prophetic community. While I believe that we need to find ways for all demographics to interact together, having specific areas for children or parents with small children is a wonderful start. Nevertheless, our adab with (and empathy for) others affects the community's ability to be an institution of love and service for everyone, including our children. My fear is, as a sign in a Turkish masjid said, “If there are no sounds of children laughing in the back as you are praying, fear for the next generation.”16

Call to Action

Leadership

1. Embrace the complexity of both perspectives, parents and community members, and lead with loving compassion.

2. Educate the community on the masjid during the Prophet’s lifetime ﷺ.

3. Designate an area for parents with small children and one for older children to be supervised.

Parents

1. Establish rules of conduct around salah at home for your children

2. Bring your children to the masjid frequently, but remind them of the established adab surrounding salah and make sure they are with you at all times.

3. Outside of prayer times, give children the freedom to have fun.

Community Members

1. Have love and compassion for children and their parents by making dua for them and interacting with them mercifully.

2. Give nasiha to children—separating unruly children in the prayer row before salah and acknowledging children exhibiting good adab.

Disclaimer: This article is not targeted towards, or about, any community or persons. Rather, it reflects my conversations with Imams and religious leaders from around the country and their experiences. Nevertheless, as the proverb goes, “If the shoe fits, wear it.”

I fear in the next generation, in 10-20 years, we will not have enough Imams to serve in our masjids. That won’t happen by chance or people’s lack of interest in religious work, but rather a structural genocide—“the annihilation of an entire apparatus of knowledge understood as both a system and a particular way of living in the world.”1 With the emergence of Dawah Mercenaries (clergy for hire untethered to the communities they serve) and OnlyImams (content creators that provide direct-to-user engagement, and sometimes pay-per-view subscriptions) the future of our communities, and the tarbiya (spiritual nurturing) of our children, is at risk.

Context

Historically, in pre-Modern societies, the ideals of Islam were supported by independent institutions (primarily waqfs, or trusts) that financed scholarship and religious learning. Within this system, as delineated by Geroge Makdisi in his book The Rise of Colleges,2 the clergy was afforded the autonomy and honor to pursue numerous different occupations within many different institutions—the mu’alim (teacher) provided elementary education for students while the mu’adib privately tutored children of the well-to-do, Imams lead the prayers in the masjids and khatibs delivered sermons, different types of shaykhs taught at a higher level based on their specialty focus (e.g., hadith, grammar, Quranic sciences, tasowwuf, etc.), and muftis (jurisconsults) supported the qadis (judges). Each role buttressed the other and every occupation played a unique role, though some more than others. Then, at the turn of the century, the Ottoman Empire took control of major waqfs and placed them under the newly established Ministry of Endowments.3 This was the first step in how the Muslim world secularized the role of ʿulamāʾ (scholars), shifting from studying shari’a to legal code, from being religious scholars to a “new types of jurists and an unprecedented type of lawyering.”4 This structural genocide spawned a new free market religious economy, wherein anyone could speak in the name of Islam without an official apparatus of checks or accountability, which was sometimes controlled by governments and sometimes by communities.

In the United States, the vast majority of Muslims post-1965 came as immigrants; they built our intellectual and religious structures completely from scratch. Before establishing universities and educational centers the priority was on establishing masjids, serving as the religious and communal center of the community.  Imams5 are the custodians of the community’s ideals and, therefore, generate a centripetal force maintaining the community.6 But, unlike pre-modern societies where there were waqfs funding clergy, our Imams are employees of masjids that are run by a board of directors who often lack a background in Islamic education or experience in community service—at best, they treat the masjid like a non-profit organization or, at worst, like a personal side-project in varying degrees of importance. Imams are expected to be “Super Imams”, a term coined by Dr. Nancy Khalil due to the endless duties and responsibilities,7 at a pay rate far lower than clergy of the other Abrahamic religious traditions.8 While, from my anecdotal experience, Imams enjoy their work, the high expectations set by boards and communities frequently lead to burnout.  

Although professional frustrations persist amongst Imams until today, 9/11 created a demand for a new demographic of Imam—one possessing a strong grasp of the shari’a with a native understanding of English and the American cultural context, prioritizing the youths’ needs.9 This converged with an influx of American-born scholars returning from international seminaries and universities and allowed for the emergence of a previously nonexistent class—“itinerant Imams”, as referred to by Dr. Khalil, or Dawah Mercenaries (DMs). 

Dawah Mercenaries and OnlyImams

“Dawah” (call or invite) is Islamic missionary work, inviting others (Muslims and non-Muslims alike) to the way of God with wisdom and kind advice.10 It is so important that scholars have differed on whether it is wajib al-’ayn or al-kifaya (i.e., obligatory upon every individual or the collective, where the obligation drops if it’s upheld by one person)11 and it epitomizes the work of clergy. 

Since the Prophet ﷺ commissioned Mu’ath b. Jabal to Yemen,12 there is a long tradition of clergy traveling for dawah. Nevertheless, it was never done as a form of mercenary work, hired by a foreign service for wages.13 Sean McFate, former private military contractor and author of the book The Modern Mercenary, said, “The private military industry allows you to fight wars without having your own blood on the gambling table. And that creates a moral hazard, because it lowers the barriers of entry into conflict."14 DMs completely mitigate the challenges of prolonged community-based service, only flying in for the hired mission, leaving the aftermath—ranging from remaining questions to a crisis of faith—for the local Super Imams. This is only magnified by the ability for DMs to work online.

Social media presented an entirely new arena for DMs and burgeoned a new subgenre of online religious content creators, OnlyImams. Similar to the content creators on the adult website OnlyFans, where they sell pornographic content without needing to engage in any physical contact and without having to be directly in the pornographic industry,15 OnlyImams can give dawah and amass a following from the convenience of their home without physically engaging with anyone or needing to prove any credentials. This raises the moral hazard because it further lowers the barriers to entry—at least with DMs there’s a form of peer review and social approval required to function in the business whereas, with OnlyImams, anyone with a basic camera and editing skills can make content for online consumption.  This is only further complicated with virtual organizations. They lack a brick-and-mortar presence and may, in all actuality, be nothing more than a means for social engineering, further pushing an agenda and establishing credibility. 

It is only inevitable that, if the current conditions do not change—within our masjids and how we approach dawah without our communities, the number of DMs will only increase. The use of private military contractors by the US has long been on the rise (tripling between 2009 and 2017). Peter W Singer, author of Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, attributes that to three things: the end of the cold war (decreasing professional armies and increasing the need), the transformation of the nature of warfare (messier with Western Powers more reluctant to intervene and more advanced off-the-shelf technology), and the increase of governments outsourcing functions.16 The exact correlations have happened in the dawah market as well: 9/11 and the increased need for American-born clergy, the burgeoning of social media and online education easily accessible, and masjids bringing in DMs and external organizations for programming. 

To be fair, I do not believe all DMs and OnlyImams are problematic. Not as a justification for my own moonlighting as a DM, but because, as we previously mentioned, traveling for dawah has precedent historically and presently. But, in our modern context, being completely untethered from the commissioning community, it strips the community of resources and lacks accountability.

Industry Problems

Allah tells us in the Quran that He “made you into peoples and tribes so that you may get to know one another.”17 This connection is a large part of our humanity and from these relationships we learn how to be in relationships with others. Ibn Khaldun (d. 808/1406) comments in The Muqaddimah that group feelings result from blood relationships or something close to it; therefore the bonds created in physical community because of close contact is something that should not be overlooked.18 In fact, Allah even commands in the Quran “And hold firmly to the rope of Allah (i.e., Allah’s covenant) and do not be divided. Remember Allah’s favor upon you when you were enemies, then He united your hearts, so you—by His grace—became brothers.” Preserving our physical religious communities, and the subsequent benefits derived from them, should be given the utmost priority. 

The resources spent to bring in DMs—not just honorarium and travel fees, but the logistical costs of hosting (e.g., the venue, AV professionals, volunteer gifts, etc.)—could be allocated to better serve the local community, but this goes back to the board’s vision and mission. What would we like for our centers to be? Are we trying to foster a community whose fruits will serve our grandchildren, or are we shortsightedly focused on the number of people attending our programs? If the latter is the goal, then can we take the financial resources, perhaps ten+ thousand dollars spent on one event, to increase the Super Imam’s salary or hire support staff or give him a budget to give gifts to the community? Can the volunteers who spend their valuable time organizing these events be engaged to participate in other masjid programming? These decisions are very important; they impact the community’s perspective and, more importantly, how those serving feel about themselves in it. 

It’s an inescapable fact, as in any profession, there will be cases where the clergy won’t be a good fit and they will part ways. More common than not though, clergy feel underappreciated and burnout. When expectations are perpetually rising, burnt-out clergy, and DMs are frequently brought in it creates a situation where being a DM starts becoming more and more enticing—it’s far less of a hassle, and potentially easier, to fly into communities, deliver your talk or worship, and then go back home without dealing with any of the politics. I cannot count the number of young brothers and sisters who become completely disillusioned with doing community work simply because their home community, where they grew up, completely ignores their talents and abilities to only bring in someone from outside the community. This squanders the opportunity to cultivate our local talent and invest in the future. Couple that with social media—OnlyImams, where frustrations and insecurities can be avoided and hidden, provides an immediate and direct connection with one’s audience. That is a perfect storm for abuse. 

Equally important, we must protect the community’s physical and emotional resources. The sanctity and honor of the congregants. With DMs, and even more so with OnlyImams, there’s a lack of accountability. What criterion do we use to bring in a DM and what’s our vetting process? How do we ensure that what they are doing before and after the event does not endanger anyone? How do we make sure that what is said is sensitive to, and appropriate for, our community’s needs? Furthermore, if either of these has been transgressed, what will be the system of accountability from the DM and the community?

With the current status quo, we have two inevitable problems on the horizon: 1- our Super Imams will continue to grow disillusioned with IRL community work and look for ulterior options leaving a lack of clergy for our masjids. 2- there will be an increase in charlatans and increased harm and abuse that will lead to some completely losing trust in the community. I proposed that we have both short-term and long-term solutions to this problem. But, in doing so, we must be extremely cautious about the solution we use to ensure we are not creating more problems for future generations.

Potential Solutions

As Muslims, striving to be in community should reflect the spiritual reality of our Ummah (religious nation)—divinely made “an upright (and balanced) community so that you may be witnesses over humanity”19—and not merely for the sake of social interactions. But, to do so requires intentionality. Our communities (and how we think about them), especially our entrusted leaders, must be rooted in virtuousness and piety. Otherwise, if we don’t, the foundation of our already weak community structure (as Muslims, minorities of minorities, in a post 9/11 and post-Trump America) will undergo a genocide, the aftermath of which is completely unknown. We have faith in Allah and His divine providence, but we must do our organizationally, communally, and individually (i.e., clergy) considering both the short and long term.

1. Organizationally

One of the most influential forces in challenging the status quo is in our institutions. Those in positions of authority (i.e., board members) must take this responsibility as an amanah (trust) by Allah and not a hobby project or, worse, merely something to brag about. They determine the strategic mission and vision of our masjids and community centers. But, that isn’t sufficient, especially for our larger centers (who are typically the ones capable of bringing DMs); we must empower people to execute that strategic plan (with autonomy and/or authority).20 They need clear expectations, key performance indicators, and a reporting structure. While this may be standard practice for the non-religious structure, unfortunately from what I’ve been told anecdotally it isn’t the case for our masjids.

Our houses of worship should be run with an objective larger than merely cementing their own presence in mind. They are but one tributary of the larger river, one cog on a larger wheel, of dawah. There needs to be some part of our focus that is zoomed out, macro, that can be regional. No masjid must be an all-in-one shop and do everything. Through mutual cooperation with other masjids in our locality, we can have specialties and share resources, with initiatives and clergy. If there’s one clergyperson who has a passion and gift for youth work, another for education, and another for counseling, all three can be based out of three different organizations and focus on their specialties in the other centers. This will allow for the financial commitment to be lower with each host masjid while allowing the clergyperson to focus on what he/she prefers while having a more comfortable salary. Also, it aids in strengthening the bonds between the local communities and better satisfies our need to look outside of our locality for talent.

An Egyptian idiom goes, “Al-Shaykh Al-Ba’id siruhu batah—the distant scholar’s secrets are hidden” and this very much reflects how our organizations function. Talent from outside the community, because we are unaware of their idiosyncrasies, is on unequal footing. Our organizational focus should be on building and fortifying our communities for the future. This is done through investing in the talent you have. For some reason, our communities often have no problem investing in talent from the outside whereas those from within are looked over. Just because we do not see the faults or idiosyncracies of external clergy people.  

Lastly, after specifying our organizational objectives and evaluating our local talent, we need to have processes in place to handle clout chasers. Our communities will always be places that welcome outside clergy, DMs and OnlyImams included, but we need to have ethics in place that dictate the nature of that relationship. One of the ways I propose protecting the organization’s interests is by watching how and what the clergyperson is posting on social media. Ideally, the posts should be under the organization’s channels, not their own personal accounts. While we cannot determine intention, the alternative (of clergy posting on their individual pages) will have the online attention spent building their notoriety and not the organization, the lifeblood of our community life.

2. Communally

Throughout American history we, particularly minorities and especially religious believers, have always established and built community around our places of worship: before the civil war, antebellum churches, and the schools and communities that spawned from them, were “all elements of the struggle for self-definition, for identity, ultimately for a certain degree of autonomy;”21 in Jim Crow era it was the “center of social life and intercourse; acts as newspaper and intelligence bureau, is the center of amusement” and its reach so far-reaching “that its organization is almost political;”22 and the same remained true post-segregation with proto-Islamic temples (e.g., the Nation of Islam) and Sunni mosques (e.g., the community of Imam Warith Deen Muhammad). In this current age of online community with loneliness at epidemic levels in America,23 we must ensure we commit ourselves to our brick-and-mortar organizations. Virtual organizations come and go, but it is through legacy organizations that we can fortify long-term institutional power. If we don’t, the nobility and prestige felt by the early Muslim communities that dedicated so much for our communities to reach the level that we have inherited today will start to dwindle in the next two to three generations.24 Moreover, we can ensure there are systems of accountability in place.

A real challenge is that change does not happen overnight and it won’t by simply critiquing from the sidelines. Undoubtedly, many of us have prior experiences that may dissuade us from re-engaging in community work but we must do whatever is within our capacity. Community work isn’t limited to front-facing dawah nor is that the most vital component either. We need everyone involved—e.g., volunteering in whatever capacity, program management, being board members, etc.—to ensure the stream of dawah is grounded in a prophetic ethic of love and service. 

3. Individually (Clergy)

We, as clergy, must ensure we have multiple tiers of accountability for ourselves—a consortium of peers, mentors, and scholars that will provide nasiha (advice) when we seek it and monitor our interactions (online and offline). Yes, we all try to strive to have taqwa (mindfulness) of Allah, but we are still human. Furthermore, taqwa is only part of the divine mandate. He told us to “cooperate with one another in goodness and righteousness, and do not cooperate in sin and transgression. And be mindful of Allah. Surely Allah is severe in punishment.”25 As clergy, the consequence of neglecting this can lead to transgression against ourselves, as we all will be accountable for our own actions,26 but also negatively impacting the emotional and religious lives of many others. This is especially dangerous in the age of social media.

Dawah is never easy; sufficient proof for this is found in the prophets’ biographies and scholars’ hagiographies. They surrendered their lives to it and many died for its sake. If they are the spiritual first responders and serve as the ground troops then, to use Saad Yacoob’s metaphor, social media is the airforce. Social media should only be used to support the on-the-ground in-person work and not replace it. It should be engaged with to strategically cast a larger net and awareness, but it shouldn’t be the primary allocation of our resources. Furthermore, ideally if intentionally managed for dawah purposes, it should be managed by multiple people. This limits the chances for improprieties. As, the companion of the Prophet ﷺ, IbnUmar said, “I love to put between the haram (impermissibilities) and myself a barrier of Halal so I don’t fall into the haram.”27

Most importantly, we must never forget that our service as clergy is a blessing from Allah, not a right, and, therefore, a weighty amanah (trust) from Allah. Nothing should be placed in higher importance than our personal connection with Allah and ensuring sincerity in our actions. Allah says in the Quran, “O believers! Why do you say what you do not do? How despicable it is in the sight of Allah that you say what you do not do!”28 But this is of higher importance for people of knowledge and those serving because we are supposed to know better.29

Conclusion

As we are introduced to newer and newer technology and means of communication and as our community continues to grow we must not be shortsighted and rush to embrace things. Our change should be principled and ethical, and consider the greatest long-term impact. Dawah is no different. If we are not thoughtful and careful the American Muslim community of our children may not have clergy to guide it.

And, ultimately, with Allah is all success!

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