Before It Had a Name

At the Islamic School of Irving, Allah placed a car ride in my life that reshaped it. Every morning and every evening, I drove to and from school with Shaykh Hasan Khalil: no classroom, no lecture hall, just two people and a windshield, week after week.

Some teachers instruct from a desk. Some instruct from a minbar. Shaykh Hasan taught from the driver’s seat: how to carry himself in traffic, how to let a silence sit, how a small correction offered gently could reshape a young man faster than a long one delivered sternly. I began to see Islam differently: not a set of rules I had to defend at school, but something that could be lived so naturally it made the people around it want to stand a little straighter.

Within a year I was giving reminders after prayer, helping lead youth service projects, studying privately with anyone willing to take a fifteen-year-old seriously. That seriousness, being treated as though I already carried responsibility, planted something I wouldn’t fully understand for years: it is suhbah, not information, that actually forms a person.

At twenty I hit a fork I hadn’t expected. I’d been pointed toward dental school, then medical school, the way ambitious kids from strong Muslim families often are. But somewhere in that year I realized the question I actually wanted to spend my life answering wasn’t a medical one. It was how faith actually gets transmitted to a young person, not just taught, but made beautiful enough that they’d choose to carry it forward themselves. I chose Islamic studies, and more specifically its educational theory. My family’s confusion was gentle. It was also real.

At the University of Texas at Dallas, the same instinct that had found me on a staircase found me again almost immediately. Zeeshan Parupia, then the MSA president, asked me to join the board and lead outreach. Within two weeks the committee was the most active on campus. We built two of the largest events the MSA had ever run, including the biggest Muslim–Christian dialogue the university had seen: a folding table in the student union with a sign that just asked, plainly, what do you believe? let’s talk. A dozen or so conversions came out of those two years, and I’m grateful for every one by Allah’s grace. But the deeper shift was quieter: students who’d never imagined themselves capable of leading, speaking, or inviting began to see themselves that way.

After graduating with a neuroscience degree, I kept teaching everywhere that would have me, designing and running courses since I was eighteen. Ustadh Isa, one of the mentors I trusted most, told me plainly to go teach full-time at Brighter Horizons Academy, one of the largest Islamic schools in the country. I did, for a season, before the requests outpaced what one school day could hold. So I enrolled at Bayan Islamic Graduate School for a master’s in Islamic education. There, with teachers and peers who shared the same restlessness, we founded The Preservers, built to develop young ambassadors of Islam.

It began as a Qur’an program with a leadership component. It didn’t stay small. What grew alongside it, informally at first and then with structure, was a youth-mentorship model I’d been building since before it had a name: Ihsan Circle. At its peak we were running six circles between three mentors, more than seventy students a week, each one built around the same core: a direct mentor, a real relationship with parents, a tie to the masjid, an education that didn’t end when the class did. The living room had become a structure that could hold weight.