Abdus Salaam was born in Chicago, on the west side of the city, on a snowy day in January or February. He was born to a Muslim family. His mother and father had been Christians, and they had converted to Islam before he was born. He calls that a gift from Allah.
When he was around twelve, his family moved to Los Angeles. He spent more than twenty years there. For much of that time he was a singer. He sang R and B and he rapped with his brothers, and he wanted a record deal. He lived in Hollywood for a while and met a lot of celebrities. He remembers running into Snoop Dogg when Snoop first came out with his first single. Abdus Salaam wanted to be like them.
As he grew older, and as he started practicing and praying, that life lost its shine. He still says he met some good people there. But the work itself began to feel empty. He would rent studios, buy equipment, and even build a studio of his own, spending hours trying to make it and get known. After a while he felt he was just spinning his wheels, spending money and time and going nowhere.
What changed him was his mother. Her name was Khadijah. She was a businesswoman, and she had restaurants. She was outgoing, and everybody knew her. She had always told her children to pray, especially in Ramadan, and she would take them to the mosque for the last ten nights. At the time he did not take it seriously. He was Muslim, and he believed in Allah, but prayer did not feel urgent to him.
Then his mother got sick. She stayed in hospital for about two weeks. She was calm about it, and she joked that she was finally getting a break from the children. Then came the call to come to the hospital at once. He got there a couple of minutes before she passed away, and he started making dua.
From that point he started praying, and he has not stopped since. Prayer made him see the errors in his ways. He had been living wild in Hollywood, going to clubs and living with his friends, and making excuses for all of it. Now he asked himself how he could go to the club and then pray, and why he kept getting evicted and losing jobs and running into one problem after another.
He started reading the Quran, in English translation. He was about twenty or twenty-one, and he had never read the translation from cover to cover. He knew a few short surahs in Arabic, enough to pray, but he had never read the whole book in a language he understood. When he read it, he felt that this could not have been written by a man. He decided he had to learn Arabic.
Learning took time. He studied Arabic at junior college and at university, and he went to the mosque schools in Egypt later on. He also started taking courses with Bilal Philips, through what was then called the Islamic Online University. His knowledge started to increase, and he began to see how little he had known before.
Life in America still felt hard in practical ways. He wanted to get married, but it was hard to find a wife. The sisters whose families were protecting them were looking for a husband with a profession, and he was working security. He wanted a car and a house, but he knew riba was haram, so he could not take a loan for them. He felt stuck.
It was while he was studying Arabic at USC that he saw a short clip of Egypt on a CD-ROM, late at night in the library. He decided then that he was going to Egypt. He really wanted to go to Saudi Arabia, because of the Haram, but the Saudi visa was a lot harder to get in those days than it is today. The Egyptian visa was easy. So he said he would go to Egypt first, settle there, and travel from there.
He made a plan. He cashed in his 401k, after checking that the investments had done so badly that what was left was less than what he had put in, and he planned to get teaching certificates and more education. A friend of his in Saudi Arabia had taken his whole family there, and talking to him encouraged Abdus Salaam. He believed that if his friend could do it, he could do it too. Still, he could never save enough money. In the end he decided that the next time he got paid, he would buy a ticket and take it from there. That is what he did. He says now that he does not encourage other people to do it that way, and he tells people to do their due diligence and save their money first.
His ticket was for the summer of 2010, through London. That was the year of the volcano in Iceland, and the ash grounded flights in London. He watched the news every day as his travel date came closer, and he prayed at night. A few days before he was due to travel, the wind shifted and the ash went another way. His flight still left about three hours late, and when he landed in Egypt he had to run straight to his plane to Saudi Arabia.
He made Umrah in Makkah, and he calls it a real turning point. He made dua for the things he wanted, and he asked Allah to forgive him for his past. He still wants to make Hajj, although he knows there is no guarantee it will be accepted. He had no one waiting for him in Saudi Arabia, and he had only enough money to last until Ramadan, about two or two and a half months away. Then he lost his BlackBerry and his bank card. He thinks he left the phone on top of a taxi and the card in an ATM machine. He had money in the bank from his 401k, but he could not reach it.
He went down to the Haram, prayed, and made dua. Then he called his sister, and she called his friend in Saudi Arabia. That friend told him about another brother, Muhammad Eli, who lived in Jeddah. Muhammad Eli was a Black American brother, about to get married, teaching English. He took Abdus Salaam in and would not let him pay for anything. He drove him back and forth between Jeddah and Makkah in his small hatchback. Other people were generous too. A brother in a bank gave him about 1,500 riyals, begging him to take it. Another brother saw him walking home barefoot after he lost his sandals at the Haram, gave him his own woven sandals, and then bought him lunch.
He was in Saudi Arabia for about a month. A brother from Yemen, who he thinks was trying to get him married to his sister, took him to meet a prince, a low level member of the royal family, to ask about a visa to stay. Abdus Salaam was given a red head covering to wear, and they prayed together. But he was too nervous to speak to the prince, and the prince's security came over and asked what he wanted. They sent him to an office window to take a number, and nothing came of it. He decided not to play around, and he went back to Egypt.
His family sent him a replacement bank card by FedEx, and he got a phone in Egypt. He came back to Egypt in 2010, and within a few months he met his wife. They got engaged after two or three months, and they got married around 2012. When he arrived, he thought he knew something about Arabic and Islam. He soon found out how little he knew. The children in Egypt knew more than he did, and the mosque schools put him in level one, or below level one. He came back to Egypt after visiting his family in Los Angeles, and he kept studying, and slowly his knowledge grew.
He also found a new direction for his work. When he first planned to come, he had wanted to teach children. He had done a teaching certificate, and for the presentation he had made a song about hats, shirts, and shoes, using a small puppet on a string and a paper hand. The class liked it, and a man from Britain in the class said he could not get the song out of his head. His brother was an audio engineer, so they went into a studio and made a song to teach eyes, nose, and mouth, all in voice only.
After he married, he and his wife had their first child. They looked on YouTube for children's content, and they could not find anything halal that was also fun. So they decided to make their own. They started a show called Animals from the Quran. They could not find the puppets they wanted, so they found tutorials and started making puppets themselves.
Television work followed. He was on Huda TV for Quran shows, and he was asked to sing. It was on air that he found out music was haram, and that changed his work. They then asked him to join a children's show. He had grown up on Reading Rainbow and Sesame Street, and he thought the children's shows could be done better. The producers listened, but they would not let him direct. In the end he was blessed to get funding to produce his own show, and he brought it to Huda. He still had to fight to direct it, but he did, and they made thirty episodes of Happy Ummah. The studio was set up for calligraphy and Quran shows, not for children's shows, and the sound kept distorting. He took a laptop, spent a year learning to edit, and re-edited the work himself. After that he said he could do it himself, and he painted a wall green and a wall blue at home.
He has now released his first short film, Daddy Robot. It is motion capture animation, not puppets, and it is about a girl whose father turns into a robot. Her father goes into a lab because he is unemployed, and he loses his body while controlling the robot. He has to find it before his battery runs out, and he has to choose between saving himself and saving an orphanage. The girl's mother was a reporter in Palestine, and she died, so her father is raising her alone. The film is fun and it is a comedy, but its theme is self sacrifice.
Abdus Salaam says that if someone cannot make hijrah, they should first equip themselves with knowledge and make hijrah internally. He believes people in America now have more access to knowledge than before, although some of what is out there is correct and some of it is not. As for himself, he says coming to Egypt was the best decision he made in his life. He has been there since 2010, and Allah has provided for him.