Niyyah, Amanah, Ihsan, Rizq
Ramadan Mubarak.
Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, a period of fasting from dawn to sunset focused on reflection, discipline, and generosity. Ramadan is my favourite month of the year. There's a quiet that comes with fasting — not just from food, but from a certain kind of noise. You slow down. You think more deliberately. You remember what you actually care about.
It's a good month to share things.
I want to share four concepts from my faith that have quietly shaped how I work for the past twenty years. Not as a framework. Not as a prescription. Just as the principles I actually navigate by — ones I find myself returning to when I'm making a hard call, leading through ambiguity, or trying to do right by the people depending on me.
They're Islamic in origin. I think they're universal in application.
Niyyah — Intention
"Actions are but by intentions."
That's the full teaching. Simple, and once you really sit with it, quietly radical.
Before any act in Islam, there is intention. The same meeting, the same hire, the same product decision — entirely different acts depending on the why behind them. Work done in genuine service of others becomes, in Islamic understanding, an act of worship — not separate from faith, but an expression of it.
I notice this most clearly in the quiet moment before a difficult decision. Two paths can look identical from the outside — same metrics, same narrative, same apparent success — yet they are driven by entirely different intentions. One serves people. The other serves ego or fear. The difference only becomes visible later, in the consequences you have to live with.
So the real practice is simple but uncomfortable: pausing long enough to ask, honestly, why am I doing this? Not once a year during strategy planning, but before the meeting, before the email, before the hire.
When I look back at decisions I regret, the problem was rarely competence. It was drift — moments where urgency replaced clarity, and I moved forward without re‑examining intention.
Amanah — Stewardship
Amanah means something entrusted to you. You are a steward, not an owner. You hold it responsibly on behalf of others — and one day you'll be asked how you held it.
Everything is framed this way in Islam. Your family. Your health. Your team. Your company.
This single idea reframes leadership entirely.
When you think you own your team, you make decisions about them. When you understand they are an amanah, you make decisions for them. One is power. The other is weight. The weight is correct — and it produces better decisions.
I built X-RAY as an intrapreneur inside EBRAND. Not my company, not my equity — but my full care and effort. Holding it as an amanah, not as a personal empire, shaped every major call. I run PragmaGeeks, my consulting company in Morocco, guided by the same idea: the work exists to create opportunity where it is needed, not to build something centred on me. Distribution, not accumulation.
Think of the best leader you've ever worked with. The one who made hard decisions transparently and treated people's growth as a real obligation. Chances are they thought of their role as a responsibility they'd accepted, not a title they'd earned.
Ihsan — Excellence
"Allah loves that when one of you does something, they do it with ihsan."
Ihsan (إحسان) means excellence — but a specific kind. Not the polish you add to impress a stakeholder. Not the perfectionism that ships nothing. The excellence you owe to the people depending on your work.
The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was a merchant before his prophethood. He was known throughout Mecca for the fairness of his transactions, the quality of what he traded, and his honesty. Excellence was inseparable from integrity.
In practice, this shows up in how we build and work: every system reflects the conditions of the people creating it. When the environment is healthy, quality follows; when it isn't, no process can compensate.
Ihsan asks a harder question: If this endured beyond you, would you still stand behind it? Not "is it shippable?" — but "is it worthy of your name, even without explanation?"
Rizq — Provision
Rizq is provision from Allah — your sustenance, your opportunities, what reaches you in this life. The teaching: what is yours will reach you. What is not yours will not.
I want to be precise here because this is the most easily misread.
Rizq is not fatalism. You work. You strive. You bring full effort. The Prophet ﷺ said: "Tie your camel, then put your trust in God." In other words: secure what is within your control first — take responsibility, prepare, and act with full effort — and only then accept that the final outcome is not entirely yours to command.
The letting go is the hard part.
I've watched good people make decisions I couldn't explain — ethical corners cut, people treated as dispensable, principles traded for a quarterly number. And when I understood the context, it was almost always fear. Fear that without this one compromise, the outcome they needed wouldn't come.
Rizq removes that fear. Not because everything will work out — sometimes it won't. But because your provision doesn't depend on betraying your values. You don't have to do the thing you know is wrong. What is yours will reach you by other means.
The most principled leaders I've known share this quality. They do their best work and then they release the outcome. Not because they don't care — they care deeply. But they're not ruled by fear. That freedom shows up in every decision they make.
Four concepts. The ones I return to most.
They won't appear in any architecture document or sprint review. But they're behind every significant decision I've made for the past twenty years — the ones I'm proud of, and the ones I use to understand where I went wrong when I wasn't.
Ramadan Mubarak to those observing, and warm wishes to everyone reading — wherever you are and whatever you believe. Thank you for spending this moment here. 🌙