Idris was born in the UK into a Muslim family. His father is Algerian and his mother is Italian, a revert to Islam. He is the youngest of three boys. His mother kept Islam alive in the house, teaching the boys their prayers and duas and sending them to Arabic school and madrasa.
He grew up in a rough part of the UK, a place he calls the trenches. Crime was through the roof, and his father worried. His father looked at Algeria and Morocco first, then found out about Egypt. The family came for about a month to try it, staying in a big private compound. The masjid was five minutes away, with halal food, good weather and Arabic all around. Idris remembers it as the happiest time of his family's life together.
It did not work out. His two older brothers were fourteen and fifteen and wanted to go back home, and there were complications around making a living in Egypt. The family returned to the UK, and the memory of those Egypt days stayed with them all. Idris believes his parents feel regret about leaving, though they would not admit it. He does not regret it.
Back in the UK, Idris was good at school, naturally book smart, but he hated the environment and felt he did not belong there. He found the gym at fifteen or sixteen, after football did not work out. It taught him discipline and gave him a voice inside him, telling him he could inspire people. He started calling it the voice of Idris.
At seventeen he started a YouTube and Instagram channel under that name, making raw videos about the gym, his life and his hardships. Then he left school. He remembers sitting among classmates revising for exams and deciding he was done. He told the head of the year he was leaving. The teacher was angry and made an example of him, calling him a failure in front of everyone.
Around the same time his brothers came out of prison, and his middle brother had got into fitness and personal training. He had transformed himself and built up a good income, and he invited Idris to come and live with him and build the business together. They trained affluent clients in mansions and large houses. They built the business on social media, running free fitness events where five hundred people worked out with the two of them. From seventeen to twenty, it worked.
Then Covid came, when Idris was twenty. Everything shut down, the business collapsed, and he was back to zero. He moved back in with his mother. In April 2020 he looked at his bank statement and saw minus sixteen pence. One day he went out to eat with friends and could not afford the meal, so his mother sent him twenty pounds. That broke him. He asked her to set a monthly amount for the bills, then sold the things in his bedroom on Facebook Marketplace. That paid his way for two or three months.
Then his other brother came into business too, and together they started a fragrance brand. They found a supplier and had fragrance oils shipped into the UK. Idris knew how to make a business run on social media, so they contacted hundreds of influencers, rappers, footballers and celebrities, and one footballer put them in touch with another. They sold on the streets outside malls and train stations, in rain and cold, getting kicked out and fined, while documenting it online. The brand grew, and they opened a retail store.
Through all of this, Idris prayed his five daily prayers. The fear of Allah kept him grounded, even when he made mistakes. At his lowest point he realised that Islam was the answer. A breakup left him broken, and a couple of months later he booked a trip for Umrah. Standing before the Kaaba, then in the Prophet's mosque in Medina, changed him. In Medina he joined a janaza prayer and carried a body on his shoulder to the graveyard, among thousands of graves. It hit him that this is the reality of life, and that people forget the dead within minutes. That woke him up.
He went back to the UK and started practising more. Two years after that first Umrah, he took his mother and his younger sister. Now he is taking his brothers, his father, and a group of around thirty brothers, and he is running the group himself.
He posted a video about his journey on TikTok and Instagram, and it went viral. People connected with its honesty about where he had come from and where he was heading. He had quit social media when he moved back in with his mother, but posting again reignited everything. He understood his purpose now: to use his voice to inspire people, raw and authentic, showing the good and the bad and the mistakes.
A few months before the interview, he and his brother looked at moving to Dubai. Dubai was impressive and good for entrepreneurs, but it did not sit right with him. By the autumn he felt done with the UK. At his local masjid he helped run a youth club of around a hundred brothers, with wrestling, food and reminders. There he met a brother called Nabil, who had studied in Egypt for a year and a half. Nabil put him in touch with the people he now lives with in Egypt. A month later, Idris was in Egypt.
He has been there for about a month and a half. He says the peace he feels is the one thing he is sure of. He wakes up every day for Fajr at the local mosque, and hearing the adhan and walking there with everyone else is priceless to him. His relationship with the Quran has grown in that short time. He arrived struggling to read it, having forgotten the alphabet, and went back to square one with children's books at twenty five. He left his family, his friends and his business, and came with no plan. Things are falling into place as he goes.
It is a sacrifice. He lives in Nasr City now, a crowded part of Cairo, far from the gated community his family stayed in years ago. He has less than he had, but he feels better. Less is more, he says. The small wins build up brick by brick. He asks Allah to keep him sincere, and he renews his intentions every day. It is a fight, but he means to keep winning the battle.