How to Decolonize Our Muslim Corporate Cultures

I had just wrapped up a training session on a new culture model I'd developed for a large Islamic organization. As people filed out, one person came up to me and said, "Finally, this cultural model speaks to me. This is who we are. Thank you for developing this."

For eighteen months, I'd been consulting with this organization, sitting in countless meetings, running culture assessments and interviews, and debating what their new cultural model should look like. At first, it felt like a classic consulting exercise: you do the work, write a nice report, pass it on to the organization, and hope they implement it. But it was in that moment, hearing that feedback that something clicked.

What I'd helped them build wasn't just a culture model. It was a mirror of who they are.

For the first time, they were seeing a proudly Islamic cultural model that talked about Ihsan, Amanah, Shura, and Shukr, not some fancy corporate vocabulary imported from a management book. I felt like the work I was doing helped bring back the soul of an otherwise faceless org. And the relief on their faces told me they had been waiting a long time for permission to live their spiritual values at work.

That's when I understood what we'd actually been doing all those months. We weren't building a cultural model. We were decolonizing one.

I've been writing and speaking about the importance of integrating spirituality with professional life for close to two decades now. Most of that work has been aimed at individuals, helping Muslim professionals live a spiritually centered life in a Hustle Culture environment. But it's one thing when Muslim professionals are struggling to keep their faith together in a secular organization in a largely non-Muslim country. It's another thing entirely when Muslim professionals have to do the same inside organizations where the leadership is Muslim, the board is Muslim, and 90% of the staff are Muslim.

This is where we need to have a harder conversation. Why is it that even when we share the same faith, we still run our companies as if they were colonized institutions?

What “Decolonize” Actually Means

I use the word decolonize carefully, because it is a serious word.

It was made famous by the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, whose book Decolonising the Mind argued that the deepest form of colonization is not the occupation of land, but the occupation of the imagination. Long after the colonizer leaves, his measures of what counts as "modern" or "professional" stay behind, living inside the minds of the colonized, especially through language.

Our companies are not literally colonized. But the way we run many of them feels like a colonial institution in disguise.

The company may be Muslim-owned. We may have prayer rooms in the building, the athan echoing through the corridors, Qur'an recitation at the start of every event, and Islamic branding on the website. But the deeper operating logic of the organization; how time is structured, what corporate language and words we use, how people are managed, and what "success" means, is often borrowed wholesale from frameworks built in the West or the East, by people who hold a different worldview about life, work, and the human being.

Here's a hard truth that most people would struggle to accept: No management framework is spiritually neutral. Every framework carries the mindsets, values, and psychology of the people who built it. Do they believe in God? Do they follow Divine Guidance or their hawa (desires)? Do they believe their work is an amanah they'll be questioned about on the Day of Judgment? Do they see the human being as a slave of Allah or as a "resource" on a spreadsheet?

And if, as Muslim leaders and organizations, we never stop to ask the deeper questions about our organizational culture and how we operate, then what we end up with is a secular and soulless corporate culture, with a few Islamic symbols bolted on top.

But What Is Culture, Anyway?

Before we go further, let's slow down for a moment and define what we actually mean by "culture", because if we don't agree on what it is, we can't agree on what it means to decolonize it.

Simply put, culture is "the way we do things around here."

Let me share a story to explain what I mean.

Essentially, culture is three things:

1. The mindsets we hold or the way we think about the world. For example, an abundance mindset tells me we can develop a win-win solution for all players in the market. A scarcity mindset tells me that my competition has to lose so I can win.
2. The values we cherish or the things we're willing to sacrifice for. Is it efficiency, at all costs? Is it growth, at all costs? Or is it ihsan, even when it slows us down?
3. The behaviors of people, especially the leadership team, because culture is ultimately set by the leaders of the organization.

And there's another way to think about culture: It's the language and stories we tell ourselves and pass on to others. That senior colleague from my first job had built a story over time that being responsive and high-performing would only get you more work and more burnout, and he was passing it on to me.

Our mindsets, values, and behaviors can be colonized. And so can our stories and our language.

How many of us have quietly internalized the notion that "Muslims are backward and unprofessional"? Or that being professional means wearing a suit and tie? Or that shaking hands with the opposite gender is simply "professional", and that it's somehow unprofessional to do otherwise?

Culture can be colonized so quietly and so completely that the people inside the organization no longer notice. They think this is just "the way we do things around here." They think the alternatives don't exist, or aren't good enough.

How We Got Here

A few years ago, I was sitting at a retreat for CEOs of Muslim charity organizations, and everyone in the room was Muslim. As part of an icebreaker, each CEO was asked to share a book that had shaped their leadership.

One after another, they named the same canon: Jim Collins, Patrick Lencioni, Jack Welch, Simon Sinek, and so on. Not one person mentioned Al-Ghazali, or Ibn Khaldun, or the Seerah.

And I don't blame them. For two reasons:

1. There simply isn't much in the contemporary Muslim world that teaches a faith-based approach to management and organizational culture. If you walk into the business section of any bookstore from Dubai to Kuala Lumpur today, you'll find the same authors and the same books you'd find in London or New York. The canon of "serious" management writing is almost entirely Western. So of course these CEOs reached for it. What else was there to reach for?
2. Second, and more importantly, most of the CEOs and leaders in that room—and across the Muslim world—were educated in the West, or in Western-style business schools inside the Muslim world. Their MBAs, executive programs, and leadership training all drew from the same intellectual reservoir.

This didn't happen overnight.

In the 1950s, as Muslim-majority countries opened up to foreign investment, large multinational firms didn't just bring capital and products. They brought org charts, HR systems, performance review templates, productivity norms, and implicit definitions of what a "professional" company looks like.

Then the brightest sons and daughters of the Muslim world were sent to Western universities and business schools—or attended Western-modeled institutions at home—where they absorbed, often uncritically, a particular worldview about economics, management, leadership, and human beings at work. They are now the CEOs, ministers, founders, and board members of many of the corporations in the Muslim world. And they lead with that Western, secular worldview.

These same CEOs, not fully trusting their local expertise, brought in the McKinseys, BCGs, and Bains of the world, not just to their companies, but to their ministries, their sovereign funds, their family businesses, and yes, even Islamic institutions. These firms arrived with decks, two-by-two matrices, and best-practice playbooks. And whatever was working in New York or Singapore quietly became the template for Riyadh and Kuala Lumpur.

And that is how a century of one-way intellectual traffic settled into the Muslim world, and our corporate cultures got colonized.

Dr. Melis Hafez captures a version of this beautifully in her book Inventing Laziness: The Culture of Productivity in Late Ottoman Society. She traces how, in the 19th century, Ottoman moralists and religious leaders actively worked to convince the public to let go of older ideals like self-sustainability, contentment, and tawakkul (reliance on Allah) and adopt far more aggressive ideas about wealth, profit, and productivity. Why? Because they wanted to "catch up" with Europe.

That catch-up reflex never left us. Especially when coupled with an inferiority complex our Ummah has carried toward the West for over a century.

But Aren’t These Frameworks Useful?

Now, you might ask:

Of course they are.

The issue is not that we learn from others. We are taught as Muslims that wisdom is the lost property of the believer, wherever he finds it, he has the most right to it. The issue is that we learned and imported this worldview of how companies should run without filtering or questioning.

Look at the Golden Age of Islamic civilization and you'll see a very different approach. When Muslims encountered the works of the Greeks, the Persians, and the Indians, they didn't just translate them. They debated them. They challenged them. And eventually, they rewrote them through an Islamic worldview and sent them back out into the world as something new.

How can we do the same in our modern context? Especially our corporate environments?

Let me give you a simple example.

Now, consider another question:

Most of the frameworks imported into the Muslim world were designed to help organizations perform better by the standards of the organization itself: growth, efficiency, market share, customer retention, shareholder value, execution speed, and competitive advantage.

But what is the point of a company that grows while destroying the environment? What is the point of a company that increases shareholder value by burning out the very people who work for it? What is the point of a company whose shareholders "win" in this world and lose in the next?

We like to pretend that organizations are these faceless, soulless entities where anything goes because "it's just business." We forget that the company, the people inside it, the tools it builds, and the impact it has on society, all of it will be brought before Allah on the Day of Judgment.

So no, I am not against learning from the best management tools humanity has to offer. I am against inheriting our corporate culture wholesale from people who hold a different worldview. I am against importing their management practices without challenging them through the Islamic worldview.

And this means we have to define our corporate culture ourselves first, based on the final Divine message to mankind, and the life of the Prophet ﷺ.

What a Decolonized Culture Looks Like

For the last eighteen years, I've been writing and speaking to Muslim professionals about how to bring Barakah into their work. And for eighteen years, I've been getting versions of the same question:

For a long time, my answer focused on what the individual could do: Set good intentions, organize your day around Salah, adopt the gardener mindset, and find like-hearted people who can help you live the Barakah way.

That advice is still true. But let's be honest: Our environments shape how we think and what we value, far more than we like to admit. You can be the most spiritually grounded Muslim professional in the world, and still be poisoned by Hustle Culture.

What I have come to believe is that we have been treating a system-level problem with personal-level solutions. We have been asking individual Muslims to swim upstream against a current that was built, deliberately, to flow in the opposite direction.

What if the current itself needed to change? Especially in our Muslim organizations and corporations?

And what if Muslim leaders, founders, and CEOs are the ones who have to change it?

That is what I mean by a decolonized corporate culture. A culture rebuilt from the ground up on our own mindsets, values, and rituals. A culture that would be recognizably Islamic whether you walked into the office in Jakarta, Lagos, Casablanca, Istanbul, or an Islamic institution in Dallas, because it is rooted in something older and deeper than any of the places it operates in.

The ideas below are still in their early days. I'm sharing them not as a finished blueprint, but as an invitation to a conversation the Ummah needs to be having. Take what resonates. Push back on what doesn't. And if you have thoughts, I would love to hear them below as part of this article’s discussion.

Here is what I picture.

I might be dreaming. I might be an idealist. But I believe we can make the above happen if we have leaders willing to seriously discuss it and bring this culture to life. This, in essence, is what we call Barakah Culture.

Introducing Barakah Culture Company

I never imagined I'd start a consulting company. I always believed in the power of working with individuals, helping Muslim professionals become spiritually grounded in their own daily lives. But as I started getting invited into Muslim organizations to help them rebuild their cultures from the ground up, I realized the need for a B2B arm of our work.

Barakah Culture Company exists to help Muslim leaders, founders, and CEOs decolonize their corporate cultures, and replace what they inherited with a culture rooted in their own faith.

This is slow, unglamorous work. It's also where most cultural transformations die, and where we've learned to be patient, practical, and persistent.

If this is work you believe your organization needs, we would love to start a conversation with you. You can take our free Culture Assessment today. It takes ten minutes and it costs nothing.

If, after that, you feel you want to go further, with a deep-dive assessment, a Culture Code workshop, or a full cultural transformation, reach out to us at barakahculture.com and we'll take it from there.

We won't take on every organization that approaches us. This work is slow, serious, and demanding, and it only works when the leadership is genuinely committed. But if you are ready, we would be honored to walk this journey with you insha’Allah.

One Last Thought: Towards an Ummatic Corporate Cultural Model

The word Ummatic has been floating around a lot these days, thanks to the wonderful work of the Ummatics Institute, a research think-tank cultivating scholarship and discourse aimed at reviving a unified Islamic civilization.

They describe ummatics as being to the Umma what politics is to the polis. It is how we, as one Ummah, think about, feel, and manage our collective affairs—our intellectual life, our political life, our economic life, our social life—on our own terms, grounded in the Qur'an, the Prophetic model, and the Islamic tradition.

I believe the same move needs to happen for our corporate life.

Barakah Culture Company is one small attempt at this. But one company cannot build a civilizational corporate cultural model. That requires scholars, researchers, CEOs, founders, HR leaders, Islamic psychologists, management thinkers, and the next generation of Muslim MBAs to come together and ask, seriously, and over many years: What does a corporate culture look like when it is truly grounded in the Islamic worldview?

I firmly believe we, as an Ummah, have something to offer to the corporate world. A unique way of organizing human life and human institutions. A way of seeing work, wealth, time, people, and purpose from a God-centered, akhira-focused perspective.

We just need to roll up our sleeves and develop, codify, and implement what this worldview looks like inside our own corporate institutions first, and then teach it to the world with real case studies, real data, and a living example of what happens when Muslim institutions rebuild themselves on the foundation that Allah and His Messenger ﷺ gave us.

May Allah grant us the sincerity, the himmah, and the courage to rebuild what the last century has quietly asked us to forget. Ameen.