The Maidah Memo

Preface

There are roughly 3.5 million Muslims living in the United States. The community has produced doctors, engineers, founders, athletes, scholars, artists, and public servants at every level. By most measures, Muslim Americans are among the most educated and highest-earning religious demographics in the country.

And yet the institutional infrastructure available to this community is thin. There are mosques. There are weekend schools. There are a handful of national nonprofits. But there is almost no permanent capital. No compounding base of assets held in perpetuity whose returns fund the things that make a community durable across generations.

Compare this to the infrastructure available to other American faith communities: the LDS Church manages an estimated $100 billion+ in assets across its investment arm. The Jewish community in the US has hundreds of federation endowments, many with nine- and ten-figure balances, funding everything from education to healthcare to cultural production. Catholic institutions hold endowments across thousands of hospitals, universities, and charitable organizations.

Muslims in the West have almost none of this. The gap is not in talent or wealth. It is in structure.

Maidah exists to close that gap.

The problem

The dominant funding model for Muslim institutions in the West is campaign-based philanthropy: Ramadan drives, emergency appeals, and annual galas. These campaigns work. They raise significant capital each year. But they share a structural flaw: the money is spent down. Every dollar raised is a dollar deployed. There is no residual. There is no compounding. Next year, you start again from zero.

This model creates three problems.

First, it produces institutional fragility. Organizations that depend entirely on annual fundraising are one bad year away from contraction. Staff get cut. Programs disappear. Momentum is lost. The community pays for this in ways that are hard to measure but easy to feel.

Second, it makes long-horizon investment nearly impossible. The most important things a community can build (endowed scholarships, permanent media institutions, sustained research programs, generational wealth vehicles) require patient capital deployed over decades. Campaign-based fundraising optimizes for this year’s needs, not the next generation’s.

Third, it creates a reactive posture. The community raises money in response to crises, not in anticipation of opportunities. A refugee crisis triggers a campaign. A natural disaster triggers a campaign. A political crisis triggers a campaign. The fundraising infrastructure is oriented around problems, not around vision. The question is always “what do we need?” and almost never “what should we build?”

The result is a community with enormous human capital and almost no institutional capital. No permanent base from which to fund, create, and sustain the things that make a community whole.

The name

Maidah comes from the fifth chapter of the Quran, Surah Al-Ma’idah. The word means “the table spread” or “the table set with food.”

The surah is named after a passage near its end. The disciples of Isa (Jesus) asked Allah to send down a table of food from the sky. Not because they were hungry. Because they wanted something real. A sign. An experience of divine provision that they could see and touch and share.

Allah granted the request. But the response came with a condition: whoever witnesses this provision and still turns away will face consequences unlike any before.

This is the tension at the center of the name. Provision is not passive. It comes with terms. A table is set, but those who sit at it are expected to serve. Abundance is given, but stewardship is required. The blessing and the obligation are inseparable.

The surah also contains one of the most significant verses in Islam, 5:3: “Today I have perfected your religion for you, completed My favor upon you, and chosen Islam as your way.” This was revealed during the Prophet’s Farewell Pilgrimage. It is the verse of completion. The message is: you have been given everything you need. Now act accordingly.

Maidah is named after this tension. The community has been given talent, wealth, and access. The table is set. The question is whether we build the institutions worthy of what we’ve been given, or continue to react to what we lack.

The framework

The question of what to fund, where to deploy returns from a permanent endowment, requires an organizing principle. Maidah uses one that is over nine hundred years old.

The maqasid al-shariah are the higher objectives of Islamic law. The framework was first articulated by Abu Hamid al-Ghazali in the 11th century and later systematized by Abu Ishaq al-Shatibi in the 14th century. It holds that the entirety of the Shariah, every ruling, prohibition, and encouragement, is ultimately oriented toward preserving five things:

Din:faith and religion. The preservation of the individual’s and community’s ability to practice, experience, and transmit their faith.

Nafs: life and self. The preservation of human life, health, physical safety, and wellbeing.

Aql: intellect and knowledge. The preservation of the capacity to learn, reason, and create. The protection of education and intellectual life.

Nasl: family and lineage. The preservation of the family unit, marriage, children, and the continuity of future generations.

Mal: wealth and dignity. The preservation of economic wellbeing, property, self-sufficiency, and dignified work.

These five objectives are not Maidah’s invention. They are the consensus framework of over nine centuries of Islamic legal scholarship. What Maidah does is apply them as an allocation framework: every dollar of returns disbursed from the endowment must serve at least one of these five objectives. This creates a decision filter that is both ancient in its grounding and practical in its application.

On the Maidah site and in public-facing materials, these five are presented in plain language: faith, health, education, family, and dignity. The scholarly apparatus exists for those who seek it. The framework functions for those who don’t.

The vehicle

A waqf is a permanent Islamic endowment. The donor places assets into trust. The principal (the corpus) is held in perpetuity. It is never spent. Only the returns generated by the invested principal are deployed, and only toward the purposes designated by the endowment’s charter.

The concept dates back over 1,400 years. One of the earliest recorded awqaf was the Well of Ruma in Medina, purchased by Uthman ibn Affan, a companion of the Prophet, so that poor people could access water for free. The well still exists. The date palms around it still generate income. That income still funds charitable projects. Fourteen centuries of uninterrupted return from a single act of endowment.

The waqf model scaled dramatically. During the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, an estimated 60% of public services were funded through waqf institutions: hospitals, schools, libraries, water systems, public fountains, and shelters. The Ottoman Empire’s waqf system sustained civic infrastructure across three continents. Al-Qarawiyyin in Fes, Morocco, founded as a waqf in 859 CE, is the world’s oldest continuously operating university.

The model is not uniquely Islamic in the modern era. Harvard University’s endowment (approximately $50 billion) operates on the same principle: invest the corpus, spend only the returns, fund the mission in perpetuity. The Norwegian Government Pension Fund (over $1.7 trillion) is the sovereign state equivalent. The Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation all hold permanent endowments whose returns fund their programs.

The Muslim community that invented this model over a millennium ago has almost entirely failed to deploy it in the West. Maidah is an attempt to correct that.

The structure

Maidah is organized as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation. The foundation holds the endowment and manages investments across a diversified portfolio. The principal is restricted and permanent. Returns are disbursed according to the maqasid framework.

The foundation also makes direct investments through for-profit LLC subsidiaries. These subsidiaries operate independently in technology, media, and other domains, and generate revenue that flows back to the foundation, growing the endowment. This hybrid structure is well-established in US nonprofit law. Organizations like Mozilla Foundation (which owns Mozilla Corporation), Catholic Charities, and the National Geographic Society all operate with similar parent-subsidiary arrangements.

The separation between the foundation and its subsidiaries is maintained through independent governance, separate books, and arm’s-length transactions, in compliance with IRS requirements and the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act (UPMIFA), which governs endowment spending and investment practices in most US jurisdictions.

Disbursement

Returns from the endowment are deployed through a grant-writing process mapped to the five maqasid.

Each year, the foundation determines its available disbursement based on the endowment’s investment performance and spending policy. That disbursement is then allocated across the five categories (faith, health, education, family, and dignity) according to a methodology set by the foundation’s board and advisory council.

Grants are written against specific programs within each category. Examples of the types of programs Maidah intends to fund:

Faith: Spiritual experiences for converts. Umrah trips, immersive retreats, access to scholars and communities. Programs that let people experience Islam, not just read about it.

Health: Mental health resources for Muslim communities. Wellness programs. Crisis support infrastructure.

Education: Scholarships and research fellowships. Educational tools and platforms. Support for independent scholarship.

Family: Financial support for young families. Marriage assistance. Parenting and family development resources.

Dignity: Entrepreneurship and employment programs. Financial literacy. Pathways to self-sufficiency and economic agency.

The grant-writing process ensures that disbursements are documented, measurable, and aligned with the endowment’s charter. As the endowment grows, the number and scale of grants grows with it. At $10 million in assets with a 5% spending rate, the annual disbursement is $500,000. At $100 million, it is $5 million. At $1 billion, it is $50 million. The math is simple. The discipline is in compounding long enough to reach those numbers.

Distribution

The question of how Maidah grows, how it attracts capital, attention, and participation, is primarily a question of trust.

Endowments grow through donations and investment returns. Donations come from people who believe in the institution’s mission and trust its stewardship. That trust is built through three things: demonstrated competence (shipping real work), transparency (publishing the memo, the financials, the grant reports), and proximity (people knowing the people behind it).

The founder’s personal platform (writing, community relationships, professional network) serves as the initial distribution channel. The first donors to any endowment are people who trust the founder. Over time, as Maidah produces visible work and publishes its results, the institution’s credibility becomes independent of any individual.

Content and media produced under Maidah serve a dual purpose: they are mission-aligned work funded by the endowment, and they increase the visibility and credibility of the institution. A documentary that reaches a wide audience does more for Maidah’s growth than a fundraising gala.

Technology products built under Maidah serve a similar function: they demonstrate competence, generate revenue, and create touchpoints with communities that might later contribute to the endowment.

The growth model is simple: endowment returns compound, visible work builds trust, trust attracts capital, capital grows the endowment. But only if the work is real.

Risks

There are four material risks to Maidah’s success.

Execution risk. Maidah is currently one person. Building a permanent institution requires sustained effort across legal, financial, creative, and operational domains. The risk that the founder cannot execute across all of these simultaneously is real. Mitigation: build an advisory board early, prioritize ruthlessly, and hire as soon as the endowment can support it.

Capital risk.The endowment has no capital yet. An endowment without assets is a charter document, not an institution. The risk that Maidah cannot attract sufficient early capital to reach a meaningful compounding base is the most immediate threat. Mitigation: the founder’s network, the memo as a fundraising artifact, and early visible work that demonstrates seriousness.

Market risk. Endowment returns depend on investment performance. A sustained downturn or a period of poor returns could limit disbursements and slow growth. Mitigation: diversification across asset classes, conservative spending policy, and long time horizon.

Time horizon risk. The waqf model is designed to operate across centuries. The modern attention economy operates in weeks. The risk is that donors, supporters, and the broader community lose patience with an institution that measures progress in decades, not quarters. Mitigation: ship visible work continuously. The endowment compounds in the background. The work ships in the foreground.

Conviction

The waqf model has been tested for over 1,400 years. The maqasid framework has been refined for over 900 years. The need for permanent Muslim institutional infrastructure in the West has never been more obvious.

What has not been tested is whether a single individual, starting from zero, can build an endowment of meaningful scale for this community in this country at this moment. That is what Maidah is attempting.

The math favors patience. A $1 million endowment growing at 8% annually, with $100,000 in new contributions per year and a 5% spending rate, reaches $10 million in approximately 18 years. At $10 million with the same parameters, $100 million is approximately 25 years away. The numbers are long but they are not unreasonable. They require consistency, not miracles.

The institutions that exist today (Harvard, al-Qarawiyyin, the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund) were all, at some point, one person’s decision to start. Maidah is that decision.