My late father was one of those people who seemed constitutionally incapable of meeting another human without smiling. It didn’t matter who you were or where you came from. He had this ease about him that came with a warmth that made people feel immediately welcome, as if you had already been expected.
Growing up, I was a fairly typical rebellious teenager, though not in any spectacular way. I didn’t burn bridges or push boundaries dramatically. I mostly just carried the quiet arrogance of thinking I had things figured out. In our family, I was “the middle child”, which comes with its own strange mix of independence and insecurity. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I assumed I would grow up to be very different from my father. Not out of resentment or rejection or anything like that, but because that’s what teenagers do I guess. They assume difference is maturity.
One of my father’s more peculiar habits was that he was constantly inviting people over to the house. This wasn’t an occasional thing. It was nearly daily. But to understand why, you have to understand the place we lived.
I grew up in a small university town in the American South. The town itself didn’t have much of a pulse outside of the college. There wasn't any mall or any big attractions really. If you weren’t a student or affiliated with the university, there wasn’t much to do beyond killing time. What the school did have, though, was affordability and a surprisingly strong engineering program. That combination pulled in students from all over the world. Many came alone, others brought their families later, and some never did. They’d arrive to spend a few years earning degrees before returning home or moving on to larger cities.
The local masjid I grew up at was small and modest that was maintained by the handful of families who had settled there long-term. It worked closely with the university’s cultural office, which would notify the community whenever a Muslim student was arriving and needed help. Once I turned sixteen and got my driver’s license, I was often drafted to pick brothers up from the airport, help them move into apartments, and show them around town. There wasn’t much to show, but the gesture definitely mattered.
At the beginning of each academic year, the masjid would host a potluck to welcome new students. The community itself was a mix of undergraduates, graduate students, post-docs, and a few professors who had been around long enough to become fixtures of the community. Growing up, it always felt transient but it never felt cold. There was a real sense of responsibility toward one another.
And then there was my father.
He worked as a local math tutor for college students, which kept him constantly connected to the student population. After Maghrib or Isha, he would make his rounds at the masjid, inviting whoever showed up to come back to our house for dinner or tea. Around a dozen people would show up on a good night. To the students, especially the new ones, this older Palestinian man inviting them into his home felt like a small mercy in an unfamiliar place.
My mother, understandably, was not always thrilled because guests meant cooking and cleaning. My brothers and I were gradually conscripted into helping, sitting with guests, refilling tea, cooking, finally giving her a break. At the time, it felt routine, but looking back at it now, I realize it was something else entirely.
Our living room became this sort of rotating cross-section of the Ummah where we had Pakistanis, Saudis, Jordanians, Egyptians, Malaysians, Nigerians, Indians, Syrians, white and black converts. We had both young students and older academics. People would argue about politics, they'd complain about teachers and advisors, and they'd even occasionally debate about aqeedah and fiqh in person instead of online. That living room had many different cultures and experiences come through, all sharing a space without needing to resolve their differences first.
It took years after I moved away to realize how formative that was. Growing up, I internalized the idea that the Ummah was vast and deeply diverse, yet somehow still capable of sitting together at the end of the day. That Muslims could disagree, argue, even clash, and still share a Majlis. That sense of possibility is probably where my toxic optimism about the Ummah comes from. I had seen it work, even if only at such a small scale in a living room in a forgettable town.
What’s ironic is that I never thought I would become the kind of person who invites people into his home the way my father did. Understand that I’m introverted. Social gatherings drain me quite a bit. Even now, I’m selective about who I spend time with and how often. I avoid most in person gatherings because they exhaust me more than they energize me.
And yet...
About four years ago, my brother and I came to the conclusion that something had to be done to educate Muslims about Bitcoin. Scholars and Islamic finance professionals had either failed outright or sidestepped the Riba money problem entirely. As we talked through what that initiative might look like, we struggled to name it. Eventually my brother suggested “Bitcoin Majlis.” I will readily admit that, at the time, it felt like a convenient label more than a deeply intentional choice.
We started connecting with Muslims across the world through group chats and social media, and long conversations in cyberspace. We weren’t even sure whether Bitcoin Majlis was supposed to be a startup, company, a nonprofit, or something else entirely. At the very least, we did end up buiding a website (thank you Alp!) as a kind of landing point and kept moving forward without fully understanding what the heck we were building.
Then came the Muslim Bitcoin Summit in April 2025.
Seeing over a hundred Muslims gathered in one physical space did something to me man. It snapped something into focus. What we had been building wasn’t even an organization in the conventional sense, rather, we were recreating my father's Majlis.
And that was the structure we had been circling without naming. If the goal was to change how Muslims think about money, Riba, Economics, sovereignty, and Bitcoin, what was needed wasn’t another fiat institution or authority, but a gathering place. A space where relationships could form and ideas could sharpen, and trust could build and compound.
My father’s Majlis had done that for a very small local community. Bitcoin Majlis was doing the same thing, but without the geographic constraints. It was a Majlis in cyberspace.
That realization reframed everything for me. A Majlis was more of a pattern rather than just a room to gather in. It’s an environment that allows useful networks and meaningful relationships to form organically. And if this Majlis exists in cyberspace, then we have to be intentional about what that space looks like, how it’s governed, and what values it enforces.
That’s the part we’re still working through. Not just building a place for Muslims to gather, but shaping the map of that gathering in a way that aligns with the mission. A Majlis that resists riba. A Majlis that isn’t dependent on fiat institutions. A Majlis that is uncompromising in its Bitcoin maximalism and toxic rejection of shitcoins. A Majlis that can adapt, grow, splinter, recombine, synthesize, and persist without asking for permission.
Only now do I see it clearly. I never really become my father in temperament or personality. I inherited something subtler. The instinct to create a space where Muslims, regardless of background or sect, can sit together in both meat and cyber and figure things out. Both the medium and the scale changed, but the pattern didn’t.
And maybe that’s how these things survive and actually get things done. Not through institutions that debase and fossilize, but through Majalis that grow and adapt.