Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. So our first participant today is Brother Mohammed Ayoun, mashallah, who is a Chicago native. He is an entrepreneur, a world traveler, and he is currently working on building Roll With Me, an app to revolutionize accessible travel. So we are very proud to have him. He will be our first participant today. Please give a warm welcome to Brother Mohammed Ayoun. I'm right in the center. I'll bring it. Alhamdulillah. JazakAllah khair. Thank you. Alhamdulillah. Now before I start, I wanted to give a quick shout out to my mom and dad who, you know, because of their motivation, they're motivating me, I'm here today. But... So the topic I wanted to talk about today, and the reason I titled it this, is علمني مما علمك الله.
Okay, that's the title of my topic today, or teach me from that which Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has taught you. Now in order to do that, I want to take you back to the early days of Islam, where the Prophet salallahu alaihi wa sallam just started to preach about it. And what happened, there was one day where all the leaders of Quraysh had agreed to speak to him. So, here the Prophet is, salallahu alaihi wa sallam, speaking to these guys, and you have Abu Jahl, you have Utbah ibn Rabi'a, you have all these leaders. And then suddenly, somebody comes by the name of Abdullah ibn Ummi Maktum, and he says, يا رسول الله, علمني مما علمك الله. Oh Rasulullah, teach me from that which Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has taught you. Now, I want to put this into perspective, especially being like a youth with a disability, how terrifying personally I would find it. In modern terms, if you think about it, it would be like, for example, myself, I'm in the tech industry. Okay, I love technology, I love building apps, that's what I do. Now, imagine if, you know, Mark Zuckerberg was having a talk, a conference, with the founder of Amazon, the founder of Airbnb, all these founders, and I come in and ask a question about business. That to me is terrifying. So, the first lesson, and I'm going to highlight two lessons we can learn from this story, because we all know the story of Abdullah ibn Ummi Maktum, I want to focus on a different aspect. The first thing I want to talk about is the fact that he had confidence.
The fact that despite his disability, his blindness, he still had the courage to walk in front of all these well-known people, all these high-ranking people, and ask the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wa sallam, this question. Despite his disability, and I'm sure even at that time, they had a negative view of people with disabilities, mind you. It wasn't like it was any better back then, just because the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wa sallam, was around. The fact that he had that courage, the fact that he didn't let that disability limit him to what he could achieve, what he could do, and because of that, we have the story of Abasah wa Tawalla. Because of that, he was known as the Mu'adhin of the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wa sallam, second to Bilal. So you can see, this guy has achieved legendary status, forever immoralized in the Qur'an, because of his courage, because of what he didn't allow himself to fall into. And the second thing was that, you know, he was optimistic. That he didn't look at his disability and say, you know what, I have this disability, I'm stuck with it, this is what I can do. No, he pushed his limits. If you look in the books of Tafsir, and the biographies, he's described as somebody, a man who was determined to seek knowledge. He said, you know what, this is what I'm good at. I have a strong voice, I'm able to seek knowledge, so you know what, this is going to be my legacy, this is what I'm going to do.
And we can especially look at it in another aspect, as American Muslims, you know. Right now we're dealing with difficult times, we're dealing with difficult situations, but we should never, ever let those difficult situations push us back. Force us to conform to what people like, force us to conform to what pleases people. And now when it comes to me specifically, like I said, I love technology, I love traveling, it's one of my other favorites. And because of, you know, the inspiration from Abdullah and his story, I decided to start an app called Roll With Me. Now, Roll With Me all started when I was in programming school. When I first started programming, I was given a challenge. They told us, you know what, okay, we're going to put you guys in teams, and there's a lot of public data in Chicago. I want you guys to come with something revolutionary that will help improve the lives of people. So from that, we came up with the idea of Roll With Me, which was actually later published in the Chicago Tribune, built in Chicago. And all these publications started talking about it. And the whole idea stemmed from the fact that I'm sure a lot of you know this, but not a lot of the stations in Chicago are accessible. Not a lot of them, you know, the elevators are always down. And so this became an issue, so much so that one time I was coming home from school at about maybe 12 o'clock in the morning,
I'd have to catch the last train back to my house in the suburbs. So I missed that train because I ended up getting off at a station that was unaccessible. So I had to call my mom, you know, Mama, 12.30 in the morning, I'm stuck here, can you come pick me up? I missed the train. So my mom, mashallah, she wakes up at 1.30, picks me up. And it's a 30-minute drive from my house to downtown. And I told myself, I'm never going to let this happen again. I'm never going to be reliant on somebody else's information. I'm never going to be reliant on what other people tell me to get to where I want to go. So we built the app Roll With Me on the premise that it will show you the best accessible route to get from wherever you are to where you want to go. It'll show you what elevators are currently down so you know ahead of time the changes you need to make. It'll show you that this place has stairs so that you don't have to go there, find out there's stairs, and make your way back. It'll show you all this information ahead of time. And on top of that, I think one of the most fantastic experiences I've had, any Real Madrid fans here, by the way? Anybody? Yeah, so I spent one winter, I went to Madrid, okay? I'm a huge Madrid fan. So obviously I went to go visit the stadium. And we ended up going to the ticket counter to do the stadium tour and whatnot. So they told me, okay, you can go in for free, but all you get to see is the trophy room. I'm like, man, I want to see the locker room. I want to go on the pitch, you know? Trophies are great and all, but I want to go on the pitch.
So I kind of threw this little fit, okay, in front of the ticket counter. And what eventually happened, I ended up going and taking a tour of the trophy room. Then they told me, they directed me toward a back door, okay? They directed me toward a back door where a guy who was on the staff of Real Madrid, he met me. He took us on, it was me and my sister. He took us on a private tour of the Bernabeu. He let us, you know, sit in the chairs, go into the locker room, do all this stuff, which we didn't pay for. But it was such an awesome experience. And I only would have known that because I had gone there, I had experienced it. Now, I'm sure I'm not the only one that wants to do something like that. I'm sure there are so many other people who are in wheelchairs who have harder times traveling, but they're too afraid to take that chance. You know, what if I go out there and it's not accessible? So that's the whole goal, that's the whole concept of Roll With Me, to be able to put all this data into one app so that it's easy at your fingertips. You know, I call it accessibility simplified. Because right now, I was just talking to them every single time I want to travel, I have to spend a long time just planning out my route, making sure it's accessible. If it's not accessible, I have to reroute. So by the time you're done, you're exhausted. But I'm hoping that with time, this app and my project and, you know, all the stuff that we're doing becomes as a source of inspiration to others, to inspire them to do others, just like the story of Abdullah had inspired me to do this. And I guess I'll end with one last thing as a source of encouragement for all of us,
where a couple years ago I was in Dallas, Texas, okay, to study Arabic for the Bayena program, and my apartment was on the other side of the highway. So each day I would go on the overpass of the highway just wheeling back and forth from my apartment to the campus. Okay, and that to me was normal. That to me, if I didn't do it, I couldn't get on with my life. So whatever I was doing, I was doing just because it was part of my life. But I had been there doing that for, I don't know, maybe a couple weeks or so. Then I was coming back into the apartment complex. Some guy pulled up in his car, a red car, a beaten-up car. It was him and his girlfriend. Okay. I didn't know the guy. He didn't know me. But he told me, you know, I've been seeing you, I've been watching you for the past couple days. I've been watching you, and I just wanted to let you know that you inspire me to get up for work every single morning. Watching you go on that overpass, pushing all those miles, pushing all that distance, inspires me to get up in the morning. I'm thinking in my head, yes! Inspiring people to do good things. I'm going to Jenna. But the whole point is I wasn't doing anything extraordinary. I was going on with my life. I was doing my thing. But through doing my thing, through showing that perseverance, through showing that hard work, I was able to inspire somebody, just like all of us have the potential and the ability to inspire others to do good things. I say this and ask Allah's forgiveness for me and you and all Muslims.
Al-Fatiha.
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