Seerath Anwar

I studied computer science, in a city away from home, around people I had never met.

Personal brands did not exist the way they do now. I built things because I enjoyed building them.

In 2020, during the lockdown, I started my first business, selling scrunchies.

I did not know anything about branding yet.

Every batch still sold out, MashaAllah.

I had already thought of myself as someone who builds things. Now I finally had the time to do it properly.

From 2022 to 2024, I worked a corporate job. My clients were outside my country, so I worked on their time zone.

Many nights I did not get home until close to midnight.

One night, driving home from work, I felt something different on that road. I could not explain it. I just felt it.

That night I had a nightmare. Someone was chasing me. I was running, and then I was dying.

The same dream returned, night after night.

After several nights of it, I picked up the Quran and learned Ayat al-Kursi. The dream never came back.

That was the night my deen became the center of my life.

After that, I left my 9-to-5.

I did not have a plan. I only knew I could not keep living the way I had been living before.

Later, I co-founded an academy that taught technical skills like cloud computing.

Teaching there, I started noticing how differently people treated the same opportunity. Some showed up ready to commit. Others treated it as optional.

While we were hiring tutors, I interviewed a woman from Germany, who was not Muslim.

The way she spoke about her own future stayed with me for weeks. She expected more for herself, as a simple default.

I started noticing the same gap in Muslim founders I already knew and admired. Talented people aiming smaller than they needed to.

Since then I have built brands for more than fifteen Muslim founders. I am still working with new ones today.

Across nearly all of that work, I saw the same pattern repeat. People underestimating themselves before anyone else got the chance to.

I built Tijarah because of that pattern. I want to see more Muslim founders build businesses with offers people pay for, systems that run, and customers who stay.