If the first part was a warning and the second part drew a rough map, this part is simply about the people who are walking that map, the ones trying to carry responsibility while juggling their own hearts, homes, and limits.
Behind every project, there are not “institutions” and “brands” in the abstract. There are tired organisers replying to messages at midnight, imams pulled in ten directions, volunteers trying to balance shifts, studies, and family, trustees worrying about risk, and youth workers going home with other people’s pain still sitting in their chests. When we forget that, we start speaking as if the machine matters more than the people turning the cogs.
The question is not only, “Is the work sound?” but also, “What is this work doing to the people inside it?”
We can spend years “serving the dīn” and find, at the end, that our own īmān has been quietly hollowed out – not by open sin, but by ego, resentment, fatigue, and neglect. The signs are subtle: Qur’an becomes something we quote more than something we tremble at; salah is squeezed into gaps between meetings; we know everyone’s faults but rarely sit with our own; we talk a lot about Allah in public and very little to Allah in private.
No document can fix that. What protects us is a small, stubborn set of private anchors: worship that no one knows about, moments of honest self-accounting, and company that can still tell us, “This is not good for your heart,” and be heard.
The most dangerous idol in all of this is not a logo or a platform – it is the self. Ego doesn’t always arrive as loud arrogance. It shows up as hurt when we were not consulted, jealousy when someone else is invited, quiet resentment when a decision goes another way, the feeling that “they need me; nothing will move without me.” Those thoughts are normal; pretending they don’t exist only makes them stronger. The cure is not a dramatic performance of humility, but small, practical habits: doing work that will never be credited to you, putting someone else forward when you could have taken the slot, accepting being misunderstood sometimes without launching a campaign to clear your image.
Alongside the heart, there are the habits that keep us standing. Most people don’t collapse from one big scandal; they slowly leak. A little less present in salah, a little more bitter after each meeting, a little more sarcastic when someone is sincere, a little more fascinated by numbers and impressions. You wake up one day and realise that you are still doing “good work,” but the sweetness has gone.
To stop that leak, the workload has to have edges. Not every request is fard ʿayn. Some things will have to receive a calm “no,” so that the things you have already said “yes” to can be done with ihsān. There has to be time where you are not “on call” for the project. There has to be at least one space where you are just a student sitting on the floor, not the organiser, not the decision-maker, not the one everyone expects to fix things. And the people closest to you – spouse, children, parents – are part of the amānah, not an acceptable casualty of “activism”.
Even the best people will buckle if the structures around them are unhealthy. You can have a sincere heart trapped inside a confusing, ego-heavy, unaccountable system – eventually something will break. Shūrā has to be real enough that decisions are actually discussed, quieter voices can speak, and no one is treated as untouchable. Roles need to be clear and not assumed to be lifelong thrones; knowing that a responsibility is “mine for now” rather than “mine forever” softens attachment and forces us to think about who will come after. There must be simple, known ways for conflict and concern to be raised without someone being punished just for speaking up.
One of the ugliest side effects of long-term work is a hard heart dressed up as “professionalism”. You start labelling people’s pain as “drama” because it is inconvenient. You throw around words like “fitnah” to silence questions. You call trampling over someone “for the greater good”. That is the opposite of the Prophetic model. The Messenger of Allah ﷺ did not build a community by toughening his heart; he built it by carrying people, listening to them, making room for their weakness while directing them gently to strength.
Softness is not a luxury. It is part of the job. That softness is fed by actually listening when someone says they’ve been hurt, by letting news of yet another shahīd or yet another young person leaving Islam reach the heart and not just bounce off as “more bad news”, by avoiding the kind of humour that makes light of serious things or turns victims into punchlines. A strong worker is not the one who feels nothing; it is the one who still feels and still shows up.
Sometimes, truly carrying responsibility means admitting that you cannot carry this particular piece anymore. There are moments when the most God-conscious choice is to step back from a role: when bitterness has become your default state, when the work is pushing you into repeated compromises, when your family are clearly suffering, or when your presence in a position is now a source of ongoing confusion and division. Stopping is not always failure. It can be tawbah, and it can be mercy – for you, for others, and for the work itself. The dignity is in how you step back: with drama and accusation, or with clarity and calm, trusting that Allah does not tie His dīn to any one of us.
All of this points to a different measure of “success”. The world will keep asking: how many people came, how much was raised, how far did the clip travel? Allah will ask different questions: did you protect your own prayer while building prayer spaces? Did you protect people’s dignity while protecting the project’s name? Did you accept correction when you were wrong? Did you remember Me when people praised you? Did you continue when no one praised you at all?
If our work leaves us with bigger platforms but smaller hearts, more reach but less repentance, more contacts but less khushūʿ, then something has gone wrong, no matter how impressive the annual report looks.
The earlier parts of this series spoke about guarding īmān over image and moving from events to formation. This part is simply an admission: none of that will last unless the people inside the work are tending to their own īmān, checking their own egos, and building cultures that make obedience easier, not harder.
May Allah make us from those whose most valuable project is the one no one sees – the slow construction of a sound heart – and from those whose public efforts are accepted not because they were flawless, but because they were carried with sincerity, tawbah, and fear of standing before Him.
