Dr. Sayılgan's day starts before most people's. Fajr (morning prayer), then writing while his mind is fresh, then coffee, then ten pages of Quran, three hadiths, a few pages of the Risale-i Nur, and some lines of poetry. He calls it the thing that sets up the day.

He grew up herding cows in a village in eastern Turkey, named by a Naqshbandi shaykh who came to visit when he was born. He went to boarding school in Konya, the city of Rumi. Then Istanbul, Estonia, a Christian seminary in Virginia, and eventually a Jesuit university in Washington, where he teaches a course called The Problem of God.

He teaches that course because of a question he has spent a decade on: why is there suffering? In 2022 the question stopped being academic. His daughter Maryam was killed in a car accident weeks before her fourth birthday, while he was finishing a book on evil and suffering in Islam. He will tell you plainly that he has no answer. What he has is taslim, submission, and a practice that did not stop.

We talk about Bediüzzaman Said Nursi, who wrote his life's work in exile and in prison, sometimes on matchboxes, and produced hope out of it. About what jihad actually means, and why Nursi called for the jihad of the pen. About why he says there is no word in any language for a parent who has lost a child. And about an Ottoman poem in which every single line ends with the word for water, and the water is the Prophet ﷺ.

Man laysa lahu wird, laysa lahu wārid.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction

01:05 Ten pages, three hadiths, and a few lines of poetry

03:19 Why he reads Nursi every day

05:58 A village in eastern Turkey

06:51 Boarding school in Konya, the city of Rumi

07:44 Named by a shaykh

09:47 Istanbul, Estonia, and a Christian seminary

11:33 Why he chose religion

13:37 Said Nursi: writing on matchboxes in prison

15:59 Weakness as a starting point

19:31 What jihad actually means

21:35 The jihad of the pen

24:14 Islam in America: visibility and reaction

26:36 Why a cemetery matters

31:19 Studying Christianity

33:05 The Problem of God

35:26 Maryam

38:05 No word for a parent who lost a child

40:09 Taslim: the call from the hospital

42:30 A community that isn't afraid of death

46:56 Following the Prophet ﷺ

49:35 Imam Suyuti's treatise on losing a child

51:39 "The Prophet is the one who raised me"

53:43 Layla, Majnun, and seeing through another's eyes

57:16 Every line ends in water

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

Khalid Helmi spent 23 years in Tech at the Social Security Administration. Finance was the thing he actually loved, but every path into it ran through something he wasn't comfortable with. So he kept narrowing: out of most stocks, into gold, into real estate, and eventually into a corner of the energy market almost nobody knows exists.

What he found is that the narrowing was the opening. "That restriction on myself made me open up my mind to other opportunities."

In 2025 he took a one-time federal resignation offer, walked away from a stable job in his mid-forties, and went full-time on Date Palm Resources.

But the part we came for is smaller. Every morning: a short du'a, and about five minutes of Quran. He's clear that he can't tell you what it's produced; only that he trusts it has.

We talk about:

— Monopoly money, muscle men, and what childhood play predicts

— Tripling his mother's IRA in the dot-com bubble, then losing all of it

— Why he left traditional finance before he ever entered it

— Mineral rights: how owning what's under the ground pays you when someone drills

— Cold-calling a stranger from a decade-old newspaper article, and where that call led

— The first year of losses, and the one deal that turned it

— Taking the leap at 45, against nearly everyone's advice

— Five minutes of Quran, and calendar reminders for du'a he doesn't want to forget

— Success measured against a Galaga high score

— Why Allah's generosity means you don't have to knock down anyone else's tower

Man laysa lahu wird, laysa lahu wārid.