A Decade of Building Together

Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim.

What a blessing it’s been over the last few weeks to be here in Doha, to be with a group of incredible thinkers and builders from around the world at the GEM Summit.

I’ve been working in this space of global Muslim startups and people building together, working together around the world since 2015. It was in 2015 where I went to Dubai for the first time. We went to the Global Islamic Economy Summit and I presented there on stage and interviewed some of the movers and shakers in the world of global Muslim startups—and met some of my now old friends like Chris Blauvelt and Amin Aaser and the founder of Noor Kids and all these organizations. It’s been incredible to see people grow from these baby companies into these big global companies now, where they had imagined that a small group of people working in the United States could do truly transformative work that could reach Muslims around the world.

My friend Chris has this concept that they’re working on—this map that he created talking about what he used to call “Gummies,” Global Urban Muslims, and now calls GEMs: Globally Empowered Muslims. Check out the map he built of this population data on Replit.

The GEM Summit: A Thousand Leaders from Around the World

This conference was about a thousand people from all around the world. It was beautiful and blessed in the way that people came together, because you have a group of leaders that are really trying to push on building a global community and thinking about what that global community looks like—what we can do together to move things to the next level.

I met people from all over the world and I reconnected with friends who I hadn’t seen in a long time. There were cultural producers and filmmakers and institution builders and nonprofit leaders and people from Islamic finance and people from social movements and people from the flotilla and people from here in Doha and people from academia.

One of the brothers here that I met, a Qatari brother, told me that when Iran bombed Qatar a few months ago—as a response to Israel, bombing the American military base here, the largest military base in the Middle East. A group of 56 nations from the OIC, the Organization of Islamic Countries, signed a statement condemning the attack and that’s it. Nothing else happened. He said this group, these types of groups, this is our hope.

Why Doha Is Number One: The 99 Cities of Global Muslim Impact

I think that’s why within our work around the 99 Cities of Global Muslim Impact—looking at the places where Muslims are creating impact around the world—that’s why we chose Doha as the top city outside of the sacred cities.

The top four on the list are first Gaza and then Jerusalem, because these realities are on the top of all of our minds as Muslims. What’s happening not only in Gaza but of course with the expansion of Israeli empire as it continues to expand its influence and now tries to take on its final piece of its long list of countries that Israel wanted the United States to go to war with, as it tries to go to war with Iran over and over again. This is that moment where we’re all thinking about Gaza, we’re all thinking about Jerusalem, as the extreme Zionists talk about building a new temple and of course removing Masjid al-Aqsa. May Allah preserve Masjid al-Aqsa forever.

The third city is Medina—not just because of the Prophet, saw, and what he means for all of us when we make ziyara in visitation to him and when we make pilgrimage to Mecca, which is the fourth city—but also because there are a global group of people who’ve always moved there and are moving there now, who have co-working spaces set up and the ability to set up companies. An obviously very impactful space.

So number five is Doha. But if you think about it, the first four are what I would consider sacred cities and cities at the top of every Muslim’s mind throughout Islamic history. That would make Doha effectively number one in terms of what it’s doing.

This is the second time I’ve been here in the last two months. I was flown out by Northwestern University Qatar for a conference on decolonization with Dr. Zachary Wright in November. You could be in Doha for the entire winter, from October until the end of March, and there’s always something happening. A lot of it is bringing global culture, global sport, and bringing Muslims into those places, not to mention the investments being made here.

From Government Conferences to Grassroots Power

What’s incredible about the GEM Summit compared to what the Global Islamic Economy Summit was that Dubai hosted many years ago is that conference was very much a government conference. It felt like a government conference. It was run by a ministry within the government, and to get invited you had to know someone within that ministry.

Whereas what this was is really grassroots—well, not so grassroots, because these are big companies now. LaunchGood has major operations. I think they have a staff of over 100 people. Ummatics is a big research think tank, and Al Sharq Forum is a large youth focused conference and think tank led by Wadah Kanfar. Yaqeen is a huge company with over 100 employees, their endowment is worth $42 million last time I checked their 990s, mashallah. Huge companies, and then GMW is the LaunchGood side where they do their events around the world, that’s where this started.

To do that with Western-led companies and bring people from all over the world who are doing impactful work is super powerful. It shows really what’s possible for us as a community, what’s possible for us as thinkers, what’s possible for us in these times, and what Allah is manifesting across hearts and across communities.

The Summit’s Themes and Shortcomings

That doesn’t mean it was a perfect gathering by any means. The gathering broke into a number of categories: business, narrative, film and television, media, technology. One of the sessions was about delinking from big tech and building our own tech infrastructure, because we know we have to—we know that our enemies are spying on us constantly, pushing forth narratives about our communities that are lies about us. And we often don’t have the narrative power it takes to respond.

The idea is that there’ll be a group of people working together on these ideas to create impact around the world, to expand these things to other places, beyond the group of people that were here. So how do we take these ideas home?

I would say the shortcomings are how Western Muslim it is, how English-speaking it is. Even the Gummies concept—the idea of Global Urban Muslims—has to do with English-speaking Muslims. LaunchGood’s audience is a great example: a platform that reaches countries all over the world, but the majority of their campaigns are in English. It’s English-speaking people supporting the work there. I think that number globally is 350 million Muslims within that global grouping.

That’s a problem, because it doesn’t represent as diverse of thought or as diverse of opinions as it could. It also has great gaps. Within our research on the Global Cities report, you see that as we look at the population data going into 2100, Africa is 100% the center of global Muslim life. And that was greatly underrepresented. African-American underrepresentation. Some Latino Muslims also underrepresented.

You have to create opportunities where those gaps lie and think intentionally about diversity in terms of who needs to be in a room.

The Promise of Education City and Doha’s Ecosystem

Every time I come to Doha, I’m very hopeful. There’s a lot of people moving here. We’re trying to work here. We’re trying to build here. There are so many opportunities in what this place is—the way they’re supporting work.

What’s happening in Education City to me is so incredible and powerful. You have this multi-billion dollar campus with 12 universities from all over the world, the National Library, all of these things. The thought leadership coming out of there, the people that are—while they’re tied to Western institutions—also thought leaders within the region and amongst the Muslim populations around the world. You have people working very freely there.

The example of Northwestern that I know best: you walk into Northwestern Qatar and it says right on the walls that this is about media. The entire school, with thousands of students, probably a $500–600 million building, is built to focus on media and culture of the Global South. And you have faculty from all over the world working on issues of decolonization, like my dear friend Dr. Zachary Wright, who runs one of the African studies departments on that campus.

The opportunities are huge here. The opportunities for us to build globally are huge.

The Most Critical Question: What Are We Replicating?

But of course the most critical part, as it relates to aspects of decolonization, is really questions of what we’re replicating.

There was a speaker on the last night of the conference, a Qatari scholar, who was saying that although we are Muslim, we don’t truly understand how Westernized we are. That reminds me of course of the work around epistemology and, more prominently, al-Attas talking about how we have to work through the worldview of Islam and understand the future of the world and our existence through the worldview of Islam—understanding that we’re really living our lives through the worldview of the West and through what I would call the algorithm of the nafs, where the West is programming us in forms of neocolonization through big tech and through media and culture.

These are impacting in every way our identity, our children, in huge ways—because they’re not going to understand the layers of colonization that go into this thing, trying to force them into identity buckets that are different than who and what we are as Muslims and against our entire reality.

Replicating Global Hustle Culture or Building Baraka Culture?

Think about even the way these conferences are structured. The next conference here in Doha is Web Summit, which will have 30,000 plus people—global technology companies from all over the world, one of the largest technology conferences in the Middle East annually. And after that is Art Basel, from Miami, for the first time here in Doha.

These things are great, but how much—even like the GEM Summit—are we replicating the structures of global hustle culture, startup culture? My friend Muhammad Faris talks about baraka culture and what the difference with baraka culture really is. What is our true differentiation? Who are we?

The most critical component of that to me has to do with capitalism. More than anything, it’s how we are critical of the current world order and the capitalistic reality that would have us be global consumers—that consumption is at the entire center of our life. We think about what we’re going to be consuming throughout every day. Our consumption has to do with identity and how people perceive us.

And then of course the other part of Westernized life—here in the Middle East obviously as well—has to do with power. Everything is about power, about the powerful and how you relate to the powerful, how you’re connected to power and your ability to do things. There’s no real meritocracy. It’s hustle and hard work of trying to connect to people to get you to those places—especially fundraising for a nonprofit, for any institution, where you’re trying to figure out how to access money, how to access deal flow.

That’s part of our existence here. But at the same time, the evils of this global system and what it’s created is something that we as Muslims have to be very critical of. And then big tech is a part of that as well.

Access to Allah: Decolonizing the Heart

I say this on this beach that I’m walking on in front of the Four Seasons—where I’m not staying, but I came to shoot this video because it’s a nice little beach and a place to be quiet and reflect, outside of the city for a minute, because this city is very busy and there aren’t a lot of quiet places.

What does it look like to be critical of global capitalism, of big tech, of these power structures, the coloniality realities that we face within our lives, the remnants of colonization and neocolonialism that make up every part of our lives? What does it take to be free from these things in our hearts? What does it take to be decolonized in our hearts and actually have access to Allah?

What’s the tech look like for that? We’re very interested in working on something around this. I think people have lost access to dhikr. In my time as a Muslim over 20 plus years now, you don’t really see tasbih anymore. You don’t see people with prayer beads in their hands. We have these plastic counters, which is fine if people like to do that, but there’s something about the prayer beads—running the prayer beads across our fingers—and how that connects to our heart and how we engrave Allah’s names and Allah’s divine realities within our heart.

Cities as the Infrastructure of Change

It also has to do with the systems that we create moving forward. A lot of our cities infrastructure is really about saying that the cities are places that we can work through—that the nation-states, generally speaking, are disasters, and the cities are where power moves. Zaytuna College in the Bay Area is obviously a perfect example of that. New York is the outlier because of the organizing infrastructure that’s in place there—super unique. But it could be replicated, though it’s going to take the 20, 30, 50, 100 years of organizing that went into a city like New York being what it is.

It also takes the unique urban landscape that it is, because that’s not easy to make in a very suburban place like Los Angeles, as an example, where things are very cut up into these different locales and suburban realities and where people are more spread out from each other, don’t live with each other, don’t live on top of each other.

Looking Ahead

So those are my reflections from here, from Doha. Inshallah we still have a few days left, and then I’m going to go, inshallah, on Umrah—to work on my own heart and reflect on what the future holds for me and myself and our organization and for my family, as we move forward in these insane times.

May Allah bless you all.

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