Building a Global Diasporic, Muslim Centric Media Company — An Interview with Dustin Craun, the Founder of Ummah Wide
What made you want to start Ummah Wide and what are your goals with the company?
I have a diverse background in terms of my career trajectory having worked across brand development, digital media strategy development for startups and nonprofits and also as a writer with an academic background. I actually wrote the term Ummah Wide in a piece of academic writing talking about the need to develop a “Ummah Wide consciousness,” meaning a community, global consciousness that is across and beyond borders. Then I started thinking about this term Ummah Wide as a brand and as an idea that is very necessary at this point in human history where we must build unity and understanding across racial, national, religious and ideological lines. My own journey to Islam started fifteen years ago when I was deeply influenced by the golden era of Hip Hop in the 90’s that had Islam embedded in the social consciousness of the music. Then I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X and that really sent me searching out Muslim friends and more information about Islam.
As I read the Qur’an the verses where God calls humanity to know one another had a profound impact on me as a young person who was raised by my Mother to be anti-racist from a very young age. Here was a faith that understood the need to address racism and racial arrogance, and for me this is one of the many things that made sense to me about Islam. These ideas of Taarif, the call for humanity to know one another is perhaps the central purpose for Ummah Wide and the other verticals that we are beginning to develop focused on other global youth culture. Reflective of this we believe that media can be used in powerful ways to connect people and that this can also be financially viable as a for-profit high growth technology and digital media company.
As it relates to Ummah Wide our vertical focused on global Muslim communities, our goal is to tell this incredible story about this emerging generation of Muslim youth who live across borders, and who share many cultural, lifestyle and ideological tastes. Our Mission is to disrupt borders by connecting global populations across the world so that they can know one another. The goal of this is to make global populations of Muslims and different faith communities more deeply aware of the lives, similarities and important differences of one another. At the core of our business everything we are doing is about making society more informed, connected, and empowered.
Going through your content, it feels like a “Vice” vibe — is that what you were going for?
I think what we are going for more than anything is a beautiful aesthetic reflective of the global youth who consume content that ties design and writing together. Many websites and blogs don’t understand how important visuals are for young people in consuming information today, it is an enhanced experience that is beyond the static black and white pages of reading a book but many publishers don’t take the time to think about design tied to each piece they publish. We do and that’s one of the things that sets us apart. There are a number of publications that influence our look ranging from Monocle, to Vice, to BrownBook, to Refinery 29, OZY, and Roads & Kingdoms, but the key here is publishing a design heavy publication focused on stories that are about people having impact on their communities around the world.
I feel like ideologically we are fairly opposite of VICE as we believe in positive content with a spiritual or faith-centric outlook on the world, whereas VICE kind of seems like ‘news live from the apocalypse’ at times. Similar to VICE we are moving in a video heavy direction as we want to tell stories from social media, to the web, to television. You can see this in the quality of the first short films we have produced, “Hacking for Peace,” and “Seeking Shade,” by Luqman Sheikh Ghazali. “Hacking for Peace” was shot on Epic Red cameras, these are cameras used to shoot Hollywood films, and we did that for a reason to always set the bar high for ourselves as a company and to set a standard as to where we are going and the quality of work we want to be producing.
This idea of living from social media to television in terms of storytelling also has to do with the mixed set of digital media business models that we are using to develop our company. In 2015 content partnerships (native advertising) sustained us as a publication, but in 2016 we hope to expand beyond this into other business models that include content distribution and licensing around video production, bespoke e-commerce, and we plan on having two large events in 2016 focused on the Global Muslim Startup ecology and creative communities with events in the two cities we operate out of right now, the San Francisco Bay Area and Kuala Lumpur.
Who is your primary readership demographic? Do you feel that you are for everyone?
Our primary readership is amongst a global group of millennials with ages ranging from 15–25 being the largest demographic and 26–35 being the second largest. This is fairly evenly split between women and men and we have good readership across North America, South East Asia, Europe and growing in the Gulf. For us to take the next step in truly being a global publication we are planning on hiring digital media editors and writers in the key regions we want to cover. Our publication is designed to reach broad audiences, whereas many of the Muslim-centric publications focus almost exclusively on faith-centric content, I just don’t think that’s who we are as a people.
Yes have God consciousness all the time, but does that mean that we are thinking about religion all the time? If we are going to live beyond the frames central to Western secularism of the sacred and the profane then we have to understand how sacredness exists in each aspect of our lives and our lifestyles, our politics, our identities. Each of these things have important and profound meaning across borders as one of the largest faith groups and the most diverse religious grouping of people on the earth. Yet Muslims are covered almost exclusively focused on faith, and even by Muslims in a way where either the content is regionalized or even if it is “global,” it often ignores the largest groups of Muslims on the planet in South East Asia and in Africa. Like for instance the New York Times just ran this trash article on the hijab explaining the differences between the hijab, the burqa, the chador… etc. This is the NY Times acting like it’s progressive, when more Muslim women in the world who wear hijab, wear it with jeans than any of the cultural forms of dress mentioned in this article. We need to move beyond covering Islam and Muslims like this is the 1980’s and we just finished reading a dummies guide to Islam. This is reflective of how white American and European news rooms still are today, but still we should expect and push for more.
So many Muslim publications, “Islamic” TV stations, Muslim media in general just seem like people preaching. Even in the writing I feel like I am just reading a sermon, and how many people can relate to that? These publications are also very narrow ideologically, as if there is one Islam, or one idea of Islam and how it is lived globally. We get complaints about some of the content we publish and our response is always, look we never say anywhere we are an “Islamic” publication. We tell the stories of Muslim communities globally while holding to the highest journalistic standards, and that is a big messy story that will push peoples boundaries, especially if they have been raised around a Salafi dominated ideology that would imagine Islam as one thing. Unfortunately a lot of the Muslims in the world are raised like this, I think those of us in places like the Bay Area in Northern California have had access to a much broader understanding of the tradition of Islam. This is the Islam that always had respect of diversity of opinion, and difference at its core and it is beyond the modernist understandings of Islam reflected in Salafi and Wahabi ideology.
What are some of the challenges you’ve faced since inception?
Almost everything with starting a company is a challenge. There have been a lot of Muslim-centric publications who have failed, even some very recently, so part of the original challenge was separating ourselves from those publications and showing that we had a creative vision and clear understanding of media business models that can sustain us. I think the biggest challenge and this relates to raising venture capital funding is that there really hasn’t been a company to really succeed and grow at a global scale focused on the global Muslim market. Of course there is a lot of great data on the “global Islamic economy” from Dinar Standard, Thompson Reuters, and the World Islamic Economic Summit and the Global Islamic Economy Summit, but we believe that to truly build this market it is going to be built from the grassroots by startups that have a global focus. This is part of the reason why I have been traveling non-stop for the last five months as I visited Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and London to build relationships and then I was invited to go on the 500 Startups Geeks on a Plane trip across the Middle East where we traveled to Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Amman, and Cairo meeting with entrepreneurs, and investors.
500 Startups is a really incredible company that is the largest seed stage investment fund in the world who have made over 1300 investments in the last five years. What is most fascinating to me about 500 startups is their focus on developing and supporting regional startup ecologies that can grow companies. I truly believe for the Global Muslim Economy to really come to fruition this is the way we need to be thinking, how do we develop a Global Muslim startup ecology? How do we develop the networks, the mentorship, the investor relationships, the angel investing infrastructure necessary and most importantly the relationships between entrepreneurs to make this happen. This is why we will be rolling out our full series of articles in 2016 focused on these ideas, as well as hosting these two global events to really try and take this global startup ecology to the next level. We saw how much these ideas resonated with people around the world when we published our first article in this series on 50 Global Muslim Startups and it went super viral, then was republished all over the world and translated into Mandarin, Bahasa, Russian, Arabic, and French without us doing any of the translations ourselves.
Some people have asked me why we would want to do this, but it’s not like we are the only community who has supported ourselves along faith lines, the Jewish community in the Bay Area is an incredible example of a faith group that is even smaller than the Muslim community in the Bay Area but yet they have organized themselves in really smart ways. There are three or four Jewish incubators in the Bay Area that support Jewish entrepreneurs and open doors for them, I would go so far as to say that Tel Aviv would not have the tech economy it has without the very real on the ground support of the Jewish community in Silicon Valley consistently connecting SV to Tel Aviv. So for us building our company is deeply tied to working with other startups to build this global startup ecology and following in the footsteps of companies who are really growing and who are really making both a financial and community impact.
What trends do you see in the global Muslim Digital Media space?
In terms of the Global Muslim digital media space I think there is a lot of space for consolidation and partnerships between both publications and social media influencers. If you think about the level of need, there is so much opportunity in the space, but companies would be stronger if they would work together and if there wasn’t so much unnecessary and toxic competition. As far as I see amongst Muslim publications we are one of the only that actually share content if it is high quality from other Muslim content producers, this seems a bit ridiculous to me. The same as we are asking a question about a startup ecology, we have to be thinking about a Global Muslim media ecology, how are journalists, producers, companies, distributors, filmmakers, writers, animators, creatives, designers, etc. connected to each other, and if they aren’t why aren’t they? We have so much work to do to really take media production to the next level in the Muslim community and we have to be humble in the work we are doing and not be so cut throat. It is really unfortunate that I have had people reach out to me and tell me that people will pray against me, wish bad for me and my company in this space, and this is amongst the Muslims. Media is very competitive but it doesn’t have to be this way, everything I work in I think of how do I organize people and how do we grow our community collectively, media should be no different.
There are some really interesting blogs and social media influencers who may not actually want to play a business role related to what they are building so in those cases partnerships make sense. I also think there are opportunities for companies to make deeper partnerships with media companies from an advertising perspective and content partnerships still are not understood nor have they been explored in deep ways by Muslim-centric companies.
As John Lassater the Chief Creative Officer at Pixar stated, “Quality is the best business plan,” and in media I really think high quality, creative, positive content will win out every time.
For Muslims this relates clearly to the idea that Ihsan, or beautifying and perfecting our faith is our highest call and Ihsan in business practices were classically a major way in which Islam-related publicly to the world. In everything we do from the look of our company to how we interact with customers and other brands we pray that Ihsan is central to our business practice and our path forward as we continue to build the vision for Ummah Wide.
This interview was conducted by Maham Rahman from Dinar Standard
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