Bilal Asim grew up in the American South, in a world where everybody lived in the same city. He could jump on his bike and ride to his aunties and uncles, open their refrigerators, and lie on their couches. The families around him had come up from Georgia and Alabama. They went to the same church. That was how it was.
It was close, but it was not whole. Families stayed together and still fell apart. Some were on drugs. As a child, Bilal visited relatives in federal prisons and state prisons. People knew their families, but knowing them did not make them strong.
Egypt was the first place he came to when he left the States, and it felt familiar in a way that surprised him. The family structure was the same shape as the one he had grown up with. People lived near each other. Decisions were made together. Elders were part of everything. He fit in easily, and that ease told him something about what he had been missing.
That was more than thirteen years ago. He has been living in the Muslim world ever since, in Egypt and in the Gulf, and the work he does now comes straight out of what he saw in both places.
What struck him first was the difference between knowing the religion and having someone to follow. In the West, he says, people learn the deen but they have no model in front of them. A woman needs a model. A young man needs a model. A student needs a model, and a community leader needs one too. Without that chain of people ahead of you, everyone ends up freestyling, even with good intentions.
The other difference was individualism. Growing up, praise went to the man who showed himself off: the watch, the outfit, the car. "Watch how I come," he says, describing the attitude. In Egypt he found the opposite. Things moved in unison. People worked together and made decisions together. Nobody built a life on their own.
That is the background to the work he does now, helping men and women build healthier families. He spends his time with couples, and the problems he sees repeat themselves. Marriages are entered easily and left easily. A sister often has no Muslim family behind her, so the role of wali falls to a brother or an imam. There is no accountability around the marriage, and no elder checking that the man can take care of her. People choose for the wrong reasons and have nobody to consult, especially when their own father was not in their life.
He tells people to be realistic about what they bring. If your good deeds and your bad deeds were turned into a spouse, he asks them, what would that spouse look like? A young man who has just come into Islam wants a wife, but the father of the girl has spent twenty or thirty years raising his daughter. A woman wants a certain kind of man, but he asks her what she can manage on her own. Being unrealistic, he says, is one of the core problems.
Then there are the harder problems he deals with behind closed doors. Some people show one face to the community and a completely different one at home, and their families live with the other side of them. Some carry trauma they have never dealt with. Some come out of prison and are praised for being released, but there is no structure to help them come back into a normal life, and the same ills follow them out. Some brothers see a sister in distress and rush to rescue her, and he compares it to saving a drowning person: if you grab them the wrong way, they pull you under and you both drown. You need the right tools, the right environment, and the right wisdom before you try to help.
His answer to all of this starts with iman, not as a set of ideas but as something lived. The six pillars of iman, he says, are what let a person be content with their condition and handle their test properly, whether the test is wealth, sickness, or anything else. But iman is not only belief. It is a state of the heart, the tongue, and the limbs, and it is also the environment around you.
That is why he keeps coming back to environment. He asks whether a person can reach high levels of righteousness while staying in the same pollution, and compares it to putting cologne on a body that has not been washed. The seerah of the Prophet shows people moving away from environments that harmed their iman. That move does not always mean another country. Sometimes it means moving from a place of danger to a place of less danger. But the move itself matters, and he says many people are afraid to make it.
He is blunt about what is missing back home. There is no leadership with a vision. He says you do not blame a sheep for being misled, you blame the shepherd, and he asks what the shepherds are actually doing. A teacher is not the same as a leader. A leader has objectives and a plan that stretches years ahead, the way countries have twenty and thirty year visions. He works alongside the ministry of education and sees what a curriculum with long term objectives looks like. He wants the same thing for the community: a clear guide, one through ten, that people can measure themselves against, instead of general reminders that change nothing.
He also wants the elders to step up. Even a word from an elder, "young man, don't do that," plants a seed. And he wants teaching to become training, taking a person from one point to the next until they can actually live what they learned, not just repeat it.
He is clear that the Muslim world is better for a Muslim family. The Eids are there, the mosques are everywhere, people wear hijab and practice in their own way, and the religion moves on its own without anyone having to push it. He knows not everyone can get up and move. But he says everyone can move toward less danger, and everyone can start with what is in front of them.
Thirteen years in, he still puts his energy into the young. Many couples, he says honestly, are too broken to fix. The hope is a new generation that leaves behind the traits their parents carried. That is the work he chose, and it is the reason he stayed.