The Power of One
By Kashif Zubair
Irvine, CA

Islamophobia and terrorism are real and the only effective way to fight them is through education.

I am an immigrant from Pakistan, who came to the United States on a work visa six months prior to the September 11th terrorist attacks. As curious strangers started asking me questions about Islam, I quickly realized I had to educate myself on Islam – a religion I grew up with but really did not know much about.

After 9/11, I voluntarily took on the arduous task of learning about various religions. I began to question if Islam was really the faith it was being portrayed – a religion so heinous that innocent people would lose their lives in the name of this faith – than how I could possibly be a Muslim? Even with busy life in corporate America, I found time to study the top 20 faiths of the world and strived to learn the truth within them. I visited various mosques, churches of different denominations, and a host of other religious institutions to gain knowledge. Combining my experience with the information learned from a pile of books on comparative religions, I chose Islam as my religion. After almost three years of expanding my understanding and appreciation of faiths through books, scholarly lectures, and individual discussions, I found answers to questions that I previously could never give. In the end, it was the sheer comprehensiveness of Islam – incomparable to any other religion – and its liberal viewpoints that led me to a faith that transcended time.

Pakistan was my home for the first 29 years of my life. Pakistan, was never a religious country. People did pray, fast during the month of Ramadan, and offered charity to the poor, but there was no compulsion in practicing Islamic rituals. Most took the position of ‘each his/her own’, when it came to religion. I remember that my mother who lived the Islamic values and started her day with an hour long recitation of the Qur’an after offering morning prayers, never imposed praying five times a day on me and kept that religious aspect to herself. My father, on the other hand, though very knowledgeable about Islam, never practiced any rituals because he could not tolerate the bigotry of religious leadership. Both, however, always lived the Islamic values and taught me to do so as well. For me, my father and mother were the best Muslims I could ever meet.

Having been blessed to be raised in an environment rich with both intellect and wealth, I went on to complete my Master’s in Business Administration from the Institute of Business Administration – an elite institution established in collaboration with the Wharton School of Business. I was fortunate to have been provided the opportunity from a very early age to see the world through a global perspective. I was always taught that I have been blessed with more and I have a responsibility to take care of those in need. Having lived through the loss of my parents at a young age in life, I matured quicker into the role of a thought leader. My new chapter in life would take me through roles supporting organizations like the American Heart Association and the Susan G. Komen Foundation through my job at PricewaterhouseCoopers, to leading the Council for the Advancement of Muslim Professionals (one of the oldest community organizations in the country), to my current role with Rotary International where I aim to build community leaders and changing communities. My efforts have always been to strategize for a better tomorrow for the society I live in.

As I began to observe the growing rhetoric against Muslims and Islam, particularly in America but generally throughout the world, I hesitated before taking on the role of providing the real picture of Islam I knew existed and learned through my extensive religious studies. “It’s a huge responsibility”, I always told myself. “Why should I take it upon me and not just live a life of a common person?”, I often argued. But my parents’ lesson of my responsibility to stand up for others, particularly the oppressed, continued to remain in the forefront of my mind. It didn’t matter who the oppressed were, which in this case, was my own community. The most important thing for me was to create a better living environment at home – home being not where my grandparents were buried, but where my grandchildren will live their lives.

A pivotal moment occurred when the Paris shooting happened on November 13, 2015. It was a wake-up call for me. I knew I had to do something to help educate about what Islam is really about. Followed by the San Bernardino terrorists attack on December 2, 2016, I knew it was now or never to act to perpetuate the knowledge I had gained.

There were two main groups of people I wanted to reach out. First and foremost was the Muslim population, so Muslims would not become detracted in the name of following their religion. Second was the non-Muslim population, whose only source of information on Islam was through the media- an often time biased view and interpretation of Islam that was meant to keep the public ignorant and perpetuate Islamophobia. Already rich with the religious knowledge I acquired after 9/11, I created an Islam 101 Facebook page – ‘Kashif Zubair on Islam 101’ – and started blogging every day with initially less than 100 friends ‘liking’ my posts. Being a business strategist by trait and well-conversed with social media, I kept each of my reflections to a bite-size post providing a pertinent and meaningful snapshot of the values Islam represents. To my surprise, my page, ’Kashif Zubair on Islam 101’, rapidly gained traction and within the first two months of active postings, my page amassed more than 25,000 followers from around the world. Currently, ’Kashif Zubair on Islam 101’ is picking up an average of 5,000 new followers every week.

On ‘Kashif Zubair on Islam 101’ (www.facebook.com/Kashif.Zubair.Official), I share my knowledge about Islam with a keen eye towards the real message of Islam that came over 1,400 years ago. In my reflections, I am not a traditional Islamic scholar and do not claim to be one. I consider myself a student of this world and continuously strive to make today better than yesterday. I see things as they appear and provide my perspective on Islam, or religion in general, within the value system I was taught at my early age and furthered through my extensive study of various religions. Interestingly, I found that follower of any religion to the letter from its initial inception is likely to be considered orthodoxy. In my learnings a true follower of Islam as the faith it was revealed as 1,400 years ago makes them possibly just one of the most liberal individuals on the Earth today.

My hope is to share my religious knowledge with as many people as possible, and in doing so, eradicate home-grown terrorism and Islamophobia. Predominantly Muslim societies have been corrupted by man’s desire to control people and the inclusion of local customs or practices in the name of Islam. My mission is to help people differentiate between what Islam is and what it is not, just as they differentiate between night and day. Providing education to the masses through ‘Kashif Zubair on Islam 101’ is an act of following one of the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him – the Prophet of God, through whom Islam was revealed to the world. He instructed Muslims not to die without sharing with others the knowledge they have gained during the course of their lives.

(Kashif Zubair is CEO of Adroit Business Solutions, LLC – a management consulting firm for small to mid-size companies focused on business strategies, branding, marketing, and web development. He currently lives with his wife and son in Orange County, California)