But why should you have confidence in Yaqeen?

The most common question I get about working with Yaqeen is, Tesneem, why are your papers so long? And the short answer is, they have to be. They have to be because we’re dealing with really dense topics. We’re talking about theology, law, philosophy, ethics, morality, politics. Very dense topics, if you ask me. And in order to really comprehensively answer these questions, address these topics from as many angles as we can, we have to be able to give it its full context and its full due.

So take, for example, one of our longer papers about stoning and hand-cutting in Islamic law. In order to really thoroughly answer that topic, address that topic, we’ve got to give some context. We’ve got to talk about what is Islamic law. We’ve got to talk about what are punishments, what do they look like throughout history, how the Islamic jurists themselves responded to topics on punishments, how are punishments conceived of today. And we’ve got to put all of these puzzle pieces together to be able to address this big topic.

And so if we don’t answer all of these topics in as many angles as we possibly can, we’re not answering everything. Unfortunately, nothing that can’t be done in one paper. But say, for example, we missed a pretty important question because we want to keep our papers a bit shorter. You might walk away as a reader or anyone who’s approaching these papers and think to themselves, well, maybe they didn’t answer this question or they didn’t engage this perspective because there’s no answer. And maybe Islamic law isn’t right on this.

So in order to be able to really get into these topics and to get into the nitty gritty, we’ve got to address them from multiple perspectives and respond to the questions that you might be thinking before you start thinking them. That way, when you read through our papers, you’re focusing on answering the topic itself to dismantle your doubts and nurture your conviction.

Yes, the papers are long, but let me ask you: many times when people will say, what does Islam say about this? And the way they receive their answer and knowledge about that issue may not be sufficient for one person and may be sufficient for another. For example, someone may say, I want an explanation to honor killings and I want something that’s extensive because I’m an imam of a mosque or I want to explain it to my child. But I love reading. I don’t like watching videos and obtaining knowledge that way. So a research paper is perfect for them.

There may be someone that’s a collegiate and wants to break it down with a group of people. Well, the methodology of your opinion in regard to these long research papers is that we break them down to where it’s palatable for your learning experience. For instance, the paper will be broken down into a conviction circle, as we have the Conviction Circles, where it’s slightly summarized and it gives a teaching method or a way to converse with those. For that particular paper, that may be very extensive.

We also have infographics that you see on our Instagram that summarizes a paper and gives you the gist or the basic ideas that one needs to leave with in order to understand what the paper was generally trying to articulate. There’s even Conversations. It’s a card deck. You can sit with your loved ones and friends at night or during the day to talk about the big question that that paper is trying to answer.

There’s even Yaqeen Academy, which is kind of like Khan Academy, to where one can learn about certain issues on that paper and they can take it at a bite-sized method to where your kid or your young child is able to understand what that general long paper was trying to articulate.

In other words, we want to make this accessible for different types of people with different learning experiences to where they’re able to nurture their conviction and dismantle any doubt. One paper, one truth at a time.

Copy-edited from the video’s transcript for punctuation and paragraphs. Not yet reviewed for transcription accuracy.

Building Confident Muslims Building confident Muslims whose doubts are dismantled, whose convictions nurtured, and who are inspired to contribute, cannot be behind a paid platform. So we have three ways of sustaining our operations. First are our recurring donors. These people, Alhamdulillah, really embody the hadith that the best of actions are those that are regular. Alhamdulillah, we have 2,000 donors who give between $10,000 and $1,000 on a monthly basis. Second are fundraising campaigns. We understand donor fatigue is real. So we have select periods of the year that we fundraise. Ramadan, Dhul Hijjah, end of year campaign, and one other. So to date, Alhamdulillah, 30,000 people have contributed towards the success of the organization. Last but not least is our waqf endowment strategy. From the very beginning, we talked about an endowment. It was not an afterthought. It was going to be the way we functioned. And indeed, a waqf or an endowment is really a long-term plan, a long-term sustainability plan for an organization. So when you think about this, what we do is we take the money that is donated to the endowment, we invest it, we take the returns on the investment, and we are hoping, hoping that over time, sufficient amount of returns from the investment will be able to sustain our operations. Not only will that make us financially stable, but also to lessen the burden on our donors. Long-term stability in the non-profit sector is really key, key to ensuring that the mission and the vision can be achieved over time.