t is a very difficult thing to change one's religion – the very truth that one’s belief system is founded on. I was a serious believer and I had had some results with Christianity. By this time it was April, 2002 and JUS was several weeks past its original debut date but close to launch and I was now faced with a faith dilemma. I initially wanted to delay doing anything about Islam until after the launch but I couldn’t. I have searched for truth all my life and I had just been presented with a profound one. I could back up the proven claim that God had no partners because of his direct intervention into my life years earlier, long before I embraced Christianity. It had also been proven to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that Christ could not be God. I knew that God was Allah because of a host of proofs including the early translations of the Bible. I believed that Mohammed (PBUH) was indeed a messenger of God because of the completeness of the Qur’an and because his message mirrored the same message of the previous Prophets. And with that I knew there was no decision to be made – I had already made it.

On April 12, 2002 high in the mountains of British Columbia I took Shahadah on the Youth of Islam board and declared my submission to Allah, the one true God. Lâ ilâha illallâh!

Embracing Islam changed everything. There were some things on the portal that had to be changed to comply with my new religion and changed quickly. We added more Muslim content and although I maintained the overall marketing approach, this meant of course redoing some sections. I was still dealing with our web business, which meant delays daily while we juggled JUS with client work and of course it meant that the costs were going up. I finally decided that we had to just put everything else on hold and do whatever it took to complete. Everything was cleared out of the way; client commitments, friends, occasions, all of it. In the final weeks of the pre-launch, we hired extra coding hands and worked 18 hours days, without any break at all in the final ten and logged a backbreaking 24 ½ hours straight when we finally flicked the switch and JUS went live April 21, 2002. Allahu Akbar!

I remember being so tired that my heart was pounding. It had been a long, long road. After all was said and done and I was finally alone in the calm of the mountain office, I looked at our work and I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was absolutely amazed at what we had produced. I am rarely impressed with our own work – it’s my job to see the holes. What had started out in my mind as a relatively small endeavor had evolved into a substantial and impressive portal. This was a work that many heads and hands produced that somehow was knit together intricately to produced what I could only consider an awesome work. All Praise is due to Allah and Him alone.

By the end of our first 30 days of operations, JUS had 40,000 viewers a day. We got an overwhelming amount of positive viewer mail which meant people like the concept and we had the beginnings of an audience. JUS has continued to climb consistently to the 800,000 readers we have today – a number long past my wildest dreams. Our audience is 70 % in the West and the rest in a host of countries around the world and is almost equally split between Muslim and non-Muslim which means we are hitting the initial target market we envisioned. I remain convinced that it is not enough for Muslims to talk to Muslims; we need to be communicating to the world at large, particularly about the truth of this war.

Starting a venture and keeping one going are entirely two different matters. With celebrations short lived, we were now into the business of full scale publishing. The first step was of course to secure ongoing financing so that we could implement our business plan. My initial business model was a paid subscription model, which meant high level, exclusive content that readers couldn’t get anywhere else and that meant large editorial budgets. We had an awesome product as a prototype and I had already had done some ground work with traditional financing channels I had developed over the years so I took my “dog and pony” on the road. The minute prospective financiers were told that we would be carrying Muslim content, they wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole! One by one, every source I had dried up.

I had decided early on not to carry advertising. I have created many ad-driven products and I know first hand that advertisers ultimately dictate content and that could be a recipe for disaster. We may have to reconsider that at some point down the road. It is still early in the game for paid subscriptions on the web and without a substantial editorial budget, there was no way we were going to pull that off. We decided to move up plans to implement a streaming channel as a means of generating revenue to support the portal. This met with only partial success for two reasons. First, without purchasing more hardware and very expensive software we could only successfully stream to half the world. Secondly we discovered that many Muslims expected news, videos and everything else for free. The concept of paying the bills somehow didn’t sink in for them and our streaming channel today continues to have more non-Muslims than Muslims subscribers.

Throughout this time, we were getting a taste of the sentiments of our audience on the war on “terrorism”. In the first months of publishing with emotions still running high, not a day went by without some kind of hate mail from both sides of the fence. The patriots were by far the worst, with fowl language, death threats etc but the Muslims also had difficulty understanding why we were giving ink to both sides of the story. Some thought we were too slick to be run by Muslims, a mindset that is hard to fathom considering Muslims are well educated as a whole and our religion requires us to be the best that we can be. This was thankfully more than outweighed by encouraging viewer mail and was not in any way unexpected.