Hernán Guadalupe became Muslim on the morning of September 11th, 2001, in a dorm room, minutes after the towers came down across the water. That's the part people know about him. This conversation is about the twenty-five years since.

He's an engineer who'll tell you he isn't a technical person; what he actually does is find what people are capable of and get them there. He runs a Brazilian jiu-jitsu school. He co-founded Hablamos Islam, building Islamic resources in Spanish. He went to Egypt intending to study at al-Azhar and came home before he started.

What makes this episode unusual is that he doesn't present a practice that worked. He describes a plateau; a stretch where he did the minimum and told himself it was enough, and only in the last two or three years has he started climbing back. Through dhikr. Through a set of prayer beads he'd avoided on principle. Through al-Ghazali, at an age when it finally landed.

An imam told him something that undid him: that he'd learned a little knowledge, but he was actually living it.

Chapters

00:00 What the wird is

01:59 How he defines success

04:40 Ecuador, Jersey City, and his parents' definition

07:52 The zeal of a new convert

10:33 His father's question: "Why now?"

13:13 Why he waited, and what changed that morning

16:26 Altar boy: faith and logic in conflict

20:11 Losing a community

22:51 "I didn't convert for a community"

25:00 Starting Hablamos Islam

28:45 Latino Muslims since the 1930s

30:53 You don't have to change your name

33:01 An imam from Ecuador, and a turning-point Ramadan

36:46 Egypt: what he learned without the language

40:31 Dar Al-Salam, and finding jiu-jitsu

44:16 Roll Star, and a father crying on the phone

46:56 "Whatever you're meant to make, you're gonna make" 4

9:05 Hitting a plateau

50:41 Dhikr, and the beads he avoided

52:49 The sky looks different now

54:26 Al-Ghazali cleaning the floors