Salam Reader,

I saw a lot of those year-in-review posts last week. As I scrolled through one of the carousels on Instagram, I told my wife I wasn't going to do one.

She disagreed.

“You have a habit of finishing something and moving on before giving it any room to breathe,” she said.

She was right (but don't tell her), and by the end of this email, you'll see what I mean.

So here's a quick chronological rundown, one highlight per month, of what came out of 2025.

Some of these you might already know. Some you might not.

January: Muslim Investing 101, a free video course open to anyone starting their halal investing journey.

February: The Digital Islamic Will Kit, the result of a year of research that yielded the only comprehensive, free, digital Islamic will kit for Canadians, complete with articles, videos, and templates.

March: ZakatView, a zakat calculator built specifically for Canadian accounts, with the ability to learn about and select the scholarly positions that apply to your situation.

April: A Muslim’s Guide to a Market Crash, a guide to understanding the types of risk that matter for Muslim investors, with real scenarios and a framework grounded in patience and trust.

May: Mirathly, an Islamic inheritance calculator that doubles as a teaching tool, tested against every edge case I could find in academic literature.

June: The Physical Islamic Will Kit, a printed, fill-in-the-blank version of the Will Kit, first shared at the Council of Muslims on Aging Gracefully’s seniors fair.

July: The PhD That Birthed a $2 Trillion Islamic Finance Industry, the story of how one researcher’s dissertation in the 1970s connected an obscure medieval ruling to modern banking and unlocked a $2 trillion industry.

August: Servus Halal Mortgage Review: The True Cost & Is It Worth It?, where I used real pre-approval documents to reverse-engineer the implied rate and build a mathematical framework for the rent-vs-buy decision.

September: Are Halal Mortgages Really Halal & Worth It?, a live webinar with Assad Wealth where I walked through that framework with their audience.

October: LastMonth, a spending tracker that doesn’t need your bank login, built around one question: What did I actually spend last month?

November: How Muslim Couples Unintentionally Sidestep Islamic Inheritance, a look at how joint tenancy, a legal structure most couples don’t know they’re using, quietly sidesteps Islamic inheritance.

December: HalalFolio, a tool that brings together halal ETF data, comparisons, and portfolio-building into one place for Canadian investors.

A lot was built in 2025, alhamdulillah. And I’ve come to realize that I find the most energy in that process: solving a problem, pushing a tool to do something I’ve always wanted it to do, finding a new way to think through a concept. That’s what pulls me in. And once the itch is scratched, I want to move on to the next thing.

But there’s another part of the process I tend to skip: taking the time to share what’s been built. Showing how it works. Walking through it with someone. Taking feedback. Seeing how it actually helps in the moment, or learning how it could be better. That part matters just as much (if not more), because that’s where the tool actually starts to serve the person it was made for.

2025 was an incredibly rewarding year of building. But I haven’t done a good enough job of sharing.

So I plan to make 2026 a year of sharing, insha'Allah.

More on social media, but especially more in person: mosques, community centres, universities, schools. Wherever people want to have these conversations. I want to take these tools and put them to use, and see how they can serve our communities.

A year from now, I hope I’m not sharing a list of things I built. I hope I’m sharing a list of places I showed up.

If you’d like me to come speak to your community, whether in person or online, I’d love to hear from you. Just reply to this email.

Wasalam,