 And here I am having begun my initial studies of Damascus. I'm a teenager. I was very young. It's just a teenager And my parents, Jazahumullah al-Fahir, said You know They had a group of family friends like many of you have family friends They would meet with regularly would go each other's houses and so on and so they said well everybody now is a teenager Maybe we should make sure that all this Islamic knowledge We've been telling them and their Islamic schools and their Sunday schools and their Saturday schools as we also went to Saturday school and All of the extra things that you know, we've been teaching them To make sure it's really resonating. How do you make sure that teenagers really understand the Dean that you've been teaching them? So the parents the Ammos and the group Decided that each teenager was going to go ahead and give a lecture to whom to the parents and And before I knew what I was picked to be the first one I went to my father and I said with my mother I said I Have anything to speak about I what am I gonna talk about they said anything anything everything that you've been you know Reading and studying and just anything don't worry about it well Right before that right before that I had been to a conference one of my first and And I'd heard some really amazing speakers speak at this conference and it's your mother outdated himself So I'm gonna outdate myself to inshallah and the speakers were amazing. I'll tell you I'll tell you my very first my very first encounter Was I was that they asked me to volunteer and to give out little note cards to the people who are sitting in the Lecture to collect questions So here I am with a stack of note cards And I'm kind of just going around giving different people and then the speaker gets up on the stage And he starts to speak and I can't and tell I can't even begin to tell you the amount of eloquence and The Arabic and the English and the so on and the put on and I had never heard anything like this I was standing in the middle apparently in the middle of the aisle I was right because I was giving out no cards to where somebody had to tap me on the shoulder and go move The speaker was shehamsa Yusuf. I didn't know who shehamsa was at the time And I remember finishing that lecture and running over and we were in the youth hall when the parents ran the adult hall and Running over and going mama mama looking for my mom frantically going there is this person And he's a convert and he can speak and he can speak Arabic And he and he's and it's amazing and she said so you tell you and then Right after that the next lecture in the Arabic hall Right that was giving me the lectures giving you given an Arabic was the same speaker Shehamsa just finished giving us a talk in English and they gave the parents. They're talking Arabic And then my mother said oh This is very special So I took on that night. I took cassette tapes back home and I also in that conference heard an amazing other speaker Really really taken subhanallah just amazing. You think of the young hearts with what these what these lectures do to young hearts And took on the cassette tape so back to the story of my father when he asked me to prepare the lecture I was looking frantically through the my stuff. I was like, what do I do? I didn't need to prepare I don't know what to pulling books off shelves and figuring out and then I went through my stack of cassette tapes And I pulled out a tape titled whom do you follow? Whom do you follow It was by imam siraj wahaj Which is the other dear speaker that I had spoken that had spoken at that conference and really touched the heart You know what I did? I copied every single line from From his lecture literally And in the lecture, I hope you hear this lecture one day every few sentences He says whom do you follow? And then he would keep going whom do you follow and keep going? Mashallah, so I would write whom do you follow every single time And when it came to my turn that weekend to to to give the lecture I held I sat between the mom's hall the woman where the woman sitting where the men were sitting They put me in the middle And I held the the papers and I gave my very first lecture ever In the words of you damn siraj and hajj Whom do you follow? Letter by letter word by word. I'll let you see I'll try it Especially for those of you've been in my holocaes and you're all giggling right now. Yes. This is how we started Now fast forward a couple more years just a couple more years And suddenly I am responsible for putting together a minute conference. I'm still high schooler at this point minna muslim youth of north america Which was a youth conference that continues to happen and I encourage your children to go And had happened when I was growing up and I really believe the minna's the msa's and these kinds of organizations really Made from our islamic identities So I was in charge of 300 kids 300 teenagers like myself And I have zero previous experience organizing anything but to show you where we got our start safhanallah And the organizer said now mind you this is the before email Before texting before social media before you literally had a landline with the cord Yes That's all there were no cell phones Just the landline with the cord Or you write a letter the handwritten letter those were the only ways you communicate with anybody They gave me a sheet and the sheet literally had the names of different speakers and their phone numbers And it said on there things like sheh hamza yusuf phone number imam saraj wal haj phone number Different era completely different era I picked up the phone here. I am 17. I pick up the phone Asalaamu alaikum. My name is rania. I'm organizing a minna conference. Would you be willing to come imam saraj wal haj? Who picks up the line on the other end And he says minna conference where I say detroit. He says put me down And that was that and imam saraj wal haj shows up to detroit because a high schooler asked him to speak at a high school conference not msa college students not adults High schooler. He's in new york He comes out because a high schooler asked him to speak And if you look at imam saraj wal haj's itinerary you will see that every day For years on end. He has been traveling all of the communities of this country And the impact he has made in every single one of us without fail Each of us has stories to share about this person