The Imam Who Learned to Listen
I spent twenty years giving lectures. Then a teenager taught me the ummah needs someone to shut up and listen.
A sixteen-year-old sat in my office and told me he wanted to die. Instead of listening, I quoted hadith. He walked out and didn’t come back for three months.
When he returned, he said, ‘I didn’t need a scholar. I needed a human being.’
I enrolled in counselling. I started a weekly listening circle — no lectures, just men saying honest things. The first session, nobody spoke for twenty minutes. By the tenth, we had a waiting list.
The ummah is drowning in content and starving for connection.