Be Ummah Builders

Assalamu alaikum friends and welcome to the first episode of Ummah Builders. I just wanted to do a short introduction here to what we're thinking about with this new podcast.

We live in the midst of so much uncertainty in these times. So our jihad today, really our spiritual transformational struggle, is to look past all the distractions that would blind us and focus on how we respond.

How we rebuild the world, and how we rebuild the Ummah. This isn't just a podcast. This is a call for each of us to be Ummah builders.

I just got off the phone with my good friend, Chris Abdur-Rahman Blauvelt, the CEO and founder of LaunchGood, someone I've been blessed to know now for more than a decade.

We talked about what we have faced is generations of genocide, hundreds of years of genocide that have forced our community to look outside of itself for tradition as if this empty vessel of westernized life could somehow fill up the heart of the Muslims, when only the love of Allah can fill our hearts.

I love to talk with friends like Chris, both the local and the global, because they understand that in these times we need to move from planting trees to planting forests, brothers and sisters, right?

Think about that.

We need to move from planting trees to planting forests. How do we make enough space for all of us to breathe?

How do we make space for all of us to have space to live, to love, to laugh, and to build and grow together?

These are the people who have inspired me on my own journey. People like Malcolm X and Sister Betty Shabazz. May Allah ennoble and bless both of their souls. Who Imam Zaid reminded us powerfully that he passed us the baton with his blood.cSo that we could carry this thing forward, not so we could drop it and fail in the midst of these global wars, but to continue on.

This story is about the faith leaders, the Shaykhs and the Shaykha’s, the imams and the female faith leaders, the entrepreneurs, the movement builders, the creatives, the educators, the technologists, the artists, all of those people for working for more than just themselves.

Those people who are thinking not just about how they plant their individual tree for their family, but how we plant forests so that we can all breathe.

Because we understand that this struggle is a multi-generational struggle. For some of us who are converts, we understand that it was a dua of an ancestor. Then Islam was lost in our families for hundreds of years.

I have ancestry all the way back to Sicily. And Sicily, of course, was filled with the Malikis for 700 years. That ancestry goes also to North Africa. But it could also have been someone who I came across in my life who prayed for us. And it, of course, can be Allah's guidance that guides us to do this work.

But we understand when we take shahada, that we're making a testimony, not just to ourselves, to Allah, but also that we would build and that we would build together because we know the beauty and power of this faith isn't just about ourselves.

And this is the difficulty of these times, that it is such egocentric times where everything is about influence who's an influencer, how much influence you have.

But when in reality, of course, social media is a distraction and it's a tool now of manipulation, especially in the midst of artificial intelligence.

So the goal of this show and this series really is to bring people together, to talk with people who are uniting hearts.

So may Allah guide us and bless us on this journey. May Allah bless us as we all work to rebuild the Ummah every day.

May Allah bless you and your own visioning and thinking about what you want to do in your life how you bring these things into reality because I'm telling you brothers and sisters if you get to work and you focus and you have a good opinion of people right this is part of the difficulty of these times is that there's so much manipulation happening online and in person don't don't respond to these comments online because you don't even know if this person is real or not in many cases, that our communities are being manipulated at every layer.

Government infiltrators, corporate paid infiltrators. Don't let the frustrating nature that comes with community work to get you down.

When there are differences of opinion, when there is difficulty, mend our hearts. We must work to mend our hearts and bring these things together. If you have a disagreement with someone, don't let that hatred foster in your heart. Try to create ways that you can build bridges to each other, between families, so that this Ummah isn't destroyed.

May Allah bless us and guide us all.