Why We Started
Ummah Wide
Ummah Definition — Community (Arabic—أمة), People (Swahili), Family (American Slang)
By Dustin Craun
Ummah Wide is our prayer for humanity. Ummah Wide is a global digital media startup focused on stories and cultures that transcend the global borders and boundaries of the Muslim and Human family. We are building Ummah Wide as a publishing and technology platform to connect people and to tell the stories that are not being told. Stories that may not fit in neatly defined boxes, but merge and live across the realities of faith and identity, politics and history, cultures and everyday life around the world as it is lived on the ground. Ummah Wide is a lifestyle brand with story at its center, built to inspire empathy, care, respect and love for humanity at a time when the world is becoming more deeply divided.
5 months ago we launched Ummah Wide out into the world with the intention of changing the story about Muslims globally.
We knew this wouldn’t happen by creating any publication but instead with a publication focused on excellence in writing, design, journalistic integrity and editorial vision. The response to what we have built has been amazing, our articles have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. We have worked with more than 40 authors from ten countries, and our site has been visited by people all over the planet.
Today we stand at a crossroads that is largely a crisis of image and perception which is controlled by global mainstream media companies. We believe that the wars across the Muslim world and the accompanying media and psychological campaigns that have accompanied them, have had not only a profound impact on how the world sees Islam and Muslims, but also on how Muslims see other Muslims and how we even see ourselves. This is one image primarily because only one set of stories are being told. We launched Ummah Wide to change this story, and with each article and magazine we publish we are changing the narrative with our focus on what is new, next and relevant across the world.
Many people talk about changing the narrative about Islam and Muslims, but we cannot be satisfied with just having our voices appearing once or twice a year in mainstream media publications. For the imbeddedness of these images to be removed from our hearts and minds we believe we must tell our own stories, and train our community in how to effectively tell our own stories.
This is why we are launching our Global Digital Media Fellowship this May:
What we are trying to build is one of the first truly global Muslim brands, a brand rooted in the stories, cultures, and experiences of people throughout the world. A brand rooted in the reality of everyday life, from political and social struggles to art and environmental transformations taking place. While brands like Nike, Facebook, Twitter, and many more are globally recognizable brands across the Muslim world, we have to question why there is no Muslim brand that has transcended the Muslim world that can also make inroads into all global human populations.
Growing Our 2030 Vision
In 2030 Muslims are expected to make up more than 26% of the global population, more than 2.2 billion people, but because Muslims as a group have been fragmented by country, and by languages, global markets have rarely looked at them as one population. What if this group making up more than 1/4 of humanity could be appealed to collectively? What if you could build a global publishing platform tied to global influencers beginning with a target market of the more than 300 million Muslims throughout the world who speak English, as we expand to content in other languages and other markets?
Technology, as it is connecting peoples and populations throughout the world, gives us the ability to do exactly this on a scale that has never been done before. In many ways we are trying to build for these next 20 years. 2030 may be a demographic milestone but with all the change happening in the Muslim world can we build a platform that supports these transformations? In the recent report “State of the Global Islamic Economy” published by Thomsan Reuters Islamic Finance Gateway arm in collaboration with Dinar Standard it is estimated that in aggregate the Muslim consumer and lifestyle sectors were worth $1.6 trillion dollars in 2012, with growth of those markets expected to reach $2.47 trillion dollars by 2018.
The internet makes it possible for companies focused on capturing a part of this global Muslim market to emerge and we are beginning to see these companies being birthed at an ever increasing scale.
In the next 10–20 years digital news organizations will have hundreds of millions of daily users. We believe we can build a global digital news site focused on the emerging generation of global urban Muslims who share many similarities in their cultural and lifestyle tastes. Our major disruption is that there is no news or marketplace doing this, all of our competitors are regionalized and much of the Muslim world is in no way represented in western media — West Africa, South Asia, Eastern Europe as a few examples of this. We have already started creating great digital news content on our MVP, where design and beauty are at the core, as this has been a part of the Muslim aesthetic for more than 1000 years. Using a digital media business model focused on advertising and licensing like Vice News, Business Insider, OZY.com, Policy Mic, Bleacher Report and Buzz Feed we believe we can grow this platform to millions of daily users within 1–2 years.
Ummah Wide Team
In 2002 my spiritual quest came to an end when I read those often quoted verses from the Qur’an, ‘We made you into races and tribes so that you should know one another’ and experienced the power of salah (prayer). Thirteen years later I have been blessed to work with a growing global team of writers, editors and advisors to build this company that has the call of Taarif (to Know One Another) at the core of everything we do. After living, working, and studying in the San Francisco Bay Area for the last nine years I have been blessed to work on some truly visionary projects starting first with Zaytuna College and then with Islamic Networks Group and the PICO National Network. The Bay Area is playing a central role in shaping global Muslim life and culture and I can imagine no greater place to build this company than in this visionary and progressive place we call home.
We have an incredible team of writers, editors, technologists and advisors working with us as we continue to work to build this business. With more than 40 authors from ten countries having already published with us, we are getting ready to grow even quicker with the launch of our Ummah Wide Global Digital Media Fellows program in May. Feel free to tweet me if you have any questions about Ummah Wide @dustincraun
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