Author: Amina Mirza

The Malaysian entrepreneur turned years of frustration with property and legal transactions into a platform now used by hundreds of law firms. Mohammad Hafiz Hasan did not begin his career as a software engineer, nor did he grow up surrounded by entrepreneurs or technology founders. He grew up as the fifth of seven siblings in a family where both of his parents had no formal education and did not complete primary school. Hafiz would go on to become the first member of his family to attend university, graduating with First Class Honours in Finance from Universiti Teknologi MARA before later…

Amin Aaser once struggled to show his Muslim identity. Through Noor Kids, he is now building the “Sesame Street” for Muslim children—a global education platform the company says served nearly 1.7 million families in 2024.

Mustafa Khan left accounting to build Draper with Sakib Ahmed. The agency now works with more than 50 founders and executives and says its clients have generated over 350 million LinkedIn views.

Sami Sabeeh spent eight years watching busy Muslims abandon every lecture and book he recommended. So the former software engineer built MyDeen — a three-minute-lesson app that is quietly posting engagement figures most consumer education startups never see. The pattern always looked the same. Someone would approach Sami Sabeeh — a student of Islamic knowledge who had taught in his local community and online for eight years — with a question that actually mattered to them. How do you reconcile evolution with the Islamic account of human origins? He would send them a lecture, a book, a series. Weeks later…

Where Financial Inclusion Meets Agriculture When policymakers discuss financial inclusion, the conversation almost always revolves around banking access, digital payments, and microfinance. Billions of dollars have been invested globally to connect underserved populations to the formal financial system. Yet for Mujtaba Khalid, Co-Founder and CEO of Bagh-e, those efforts have often overlooked a more fundamental question: What happens after someone gains access to finance? After spending more than fourteen years working in Islamic finance across multiple jurisdictions, Mujtaba began to notice a recurring pattern. Governments, regulators, financial institutions, NGOs, and development agencies were making remarkable progress in expanding access to…

After moving from Dubai to Dallas, Sheriff found it surprisingly difficult to discover meaningful Muslim events and stay connected to community life in a new city. The events existed, but discovery was fragmented. Organizations were doing important work, but they were often relying on scattered systems to reach people and manage operations. That frustration became the beginning of Qariyb. A Founder Built At The Intersection Of Community And Systems Before launching Qariyb, Sheriff spent years in change management, learning design, and technology strategy, including work at Oracle Health and Accenture across the United States and the Middle East. Across healthcare…

Every two minutes, somewhere in the world, a woman dies from complications related to pregnancy or childbirth. Not because the world does not know how to save her. But because too often, the care does not reach her in time. For Isra Chaker, that reality is not just heartbreaking. It is unacceptable. Through Every Pregnancy, Chaker is building a maternal and newborn health movement focused on one urgent mission: helping mothers and babies survive pregnancy, birth, and the earliest days of life. Since the launch of the For Mama campaign in 2024, Every Pregnancy has mobilized nearly $130 million for…

For Mohammed Yousuf, disability inclusion is not an abstract mission. It is personal. Born in India, Yousuf became a polio survivor at a very young age. Growing up with a disability in an environment where accessibility was extremely limited shaped nearly every part of his early life. Education, mobility, opportunity, and dignity were not always easily accessible—not because of a lack of ability, but because the systems around him were not designed to include people like him. Those experiences could have become barriers. Instead, they became the foundation for his life’s work. Today, as the founder of EquallyAble Foundation, Mohammed…

Consider a simple question: how many times have you ignored a call, or had someone ignore yours? Now consider what happens if that call was an emergency—not the kind where the police or an ambulance is the right answer, but the kind where you need your people around you, immediately. It is the kind of question that tends to get overlooked precisely because existing systems make us feel covered. But for Naeem Noor Mahomed, returning to South Africa after more than a decade abroad, the gap between feeling safe and actually being safe was impossible to ignore. SOSSA was built…

In healthcare, the gap between clinical excellence and operational efficiency is rarely discussed—but it is consistently felt. Providers trained to deliver care spend significant portions of their time navigating billing systems, managing patient follow-up, and addressing administrative gaps that compound quietly in the background. Revenue is lost not through clinical failure, but through operational friction. For Ibraz Shaikh, this was not an abstract observation. It was something he witnessed firsthand, across more than 15 years of working inside hospitals, clinics, and healthcare organizations throughout the United States. MedSync365 and SurgiCore Medical Group were built from that experience. A Career Shaped…