In every city now, the pattern is the same.
A crisis erupts. Posters appear. A “major event” is announced; speakers are flown in; a trailer is cut with dramatic nasheeds and sharp fonts. The hall fills, the cameras roll, the hashtags trend for a few hours. People leave saying, “Powerful reminder,” “Life-changing talk,” “Needed this.”
And then?
Tomorrow looks like yesterday.
The teenager who clapped the loudest still has no one to text when his īmān dips. The sister who wiped her tears in the back row still goes home to a house quietly cracking. The volunteers who stacked chairs and taped cables still have no teacher, no tarbiyah, no one asking them, “Are you growing, or just serving?”
Events end. What matters is what begins.
We keep thinking the “big night” is the work. It isn’t. At best, it’s the door to the work. When we confuse a moment of emotion with a process of formation, we create a cycle of spiritual sugar highs: loud takbīrs, almost no follow-up, and a community that keeps needing the next “boost” because nothing was built underneath. If we are serious about responsibility, we have to rewire how we think: from events to ecosystems, from impact we can post to formation we may never live to see completed.
An event can still be a mercy. It can wake up someone half asleep, introduce a new idea or revive a forgotten one, connect people who would never otherwise meet, and give a brief sense of collective direction. But by itself it cannot build stable habits of worship, heal deep confusion or doubts, form character and discipline, or replace years of study, mentorship, and tarbiyah. We would never put a single match under a pot and call that “cooking”. Yet we host a single conference and call it “reviving the youth”, “fixing the ummah”, or “transforming the city”.
A match is only useful if it leads to a proper flame and a working kitchen. In the same way, an event is only responsible if we have already thought about where its energy will flow once the lights go off. Otherwise, we are not serving people; we are serving our appetite for momentum.
In Part 1 we said that a talk should lead to a circle, a circle to mentorship, mentorship to service, and service to leadership. That line is not a slogan; it is a rough map.
If someone is moved tonight, where do they go next week? That “where” cannot simply be, “Follow us online.” It has to look like a real space: a weekly tafsīr or sīrah gathering, a reading group with a set text, a basics-of-dīn class with a clear curriculum, a small local halaqah led by someone reliable. At the end of a talk, the call to action should sound less like, “Share this clip,” and more like, “Here are the circles starting next week; pick one and commit for six months.” If we cannot answer the question, “Where do they go?” we have no right to push people’s emotions so hard.
Even then, circles can still leave people anonymous. You can sit in the back for years, and no one knows your name. That is attendance, not formation. At some point, information has to turn into relationship: a teacher who actually knows your situation and history; an older brother or sister who checks on you; a small group that notices when you disappear; a space where you can say, “This is my sin, this is my confusion, this is my fear,” without being shamed out of the room. This is what our elders meant by suhbah: consistent company with people who pull you towards Allah. The books matter, but it is often the eyes that watch you, the message you receive midweek, the hand on your shoulder after ‘Ishā’ that keep you standing.
From there, real growth begins when responsibility lands in your hands. Many young people have been listening for years, taking notes, ticking attendance sheets, but no one has ever asked them to carry anything. When that changes and someone is trusted to teach a small class, help run a youth group, visit the sick regularly, or give their actual time to a local charity rather than just their reposts, īmān thickens. When others are depending on you, it becomes harder to simply drift. Service roots you in a way that passive learning never can. We often hold back from giving responsibility in case people “mess it up”, but if we never give it, they never grow. Our job is not to hoard tasks until we burn out; it is to train others to carry this work beyond us.
Leadership, in a healthy setting, is simply long service that has been shaped and refined. It is not a reward for charisma or follower counts. A responsible project looks for the people who have been consistent for years, who seek correction more than compliments, who can lose a role and still stay in the work, who can hear “no” from shūrā and not storm out. Those are the ones you quietly invest in, giving them access to scholars, training in ethics, and a real seat at the table with real accountability. The message stays the same at each stage: this is an amānah. You are not standing over the community; you are standing between them and harm as best you can.
You can tell what a project truly believes by looking at its budget. If most of the money is being poured into venues, visuals, flights, and glossy trailers, and very little is reserved for teachers, pastoral care, or ongoing circles, then we are not building people; we are building experiences. Honest work redirects the money: away from optics and towards ʿilm, away from hype and towards healing, away from stages and towards structures.
That looks like scholar stipends that actually respect time and sacrifice; support and training for local students of knowledge who will still be there after the guest speaker leaves; pastoral workers who sit with the depressed, the doubting, the divorced, the grieving; counselling partnerships where needed, with proper safeguarding; support for the small makātib and madrasas quietly holding hundreds of children; systems for volunteer training, feedback, and rotation so people do not burn out unseen. We cannot loudly claim, “We are here to save youth,” if our spending quietly says, “We are here to save face.”
Formation without accountability turns into a personality cult. Accountability without mercy turns into a firing squad. We need both. Harm will happen: a careless statement, a poor association, a serious mistake. When it does, a faithful response has to honour three things at the same time.
Those who have been harmed have the right to be listened to properly, not brushed aside, and to receive clarity and, wherever possible, real restoration. The truth itself has the right to be served with an independent assessment rather than internal spin, and honest communication about what happened and how it is being addressed. The one who stumbled has the right to a path of tawbah: space to acknowledge what they did, roles adjusted for as long as is wise, and the possibility of a return that is honest but not automatic, only after trust has genuinely been rebuilt. This is not “cancellation culture”; it is amānah culture. No one should be too big to be corrected, and no one should be written off so completely that a single mistake condemns their entire life’s work.
Alongside all of this, we need to remember the hidden heroes. Every city has them. The uncle who has been teaching qaʿidah for thirty years in a cold classroom with broken blinds. The aunt who quietly organises food parcels and checks on widows. The youth worker who spends more time on “unsuccessful” coffees than on any stage. The admin volunteer who keeps track of safeguarding forms and risk assessments so that children are safe. These people rarely feature in tribute videos, but if you trace the īmān of many “public” figures, you often find one of these unseen workers somewhere in the chain. Our obsession with events and names makes us chase the visible ones and ignore the hidden ones. A responsible ummah honours both and protects both from being crushed by unrealistic expectations.
All of this still has to land in real behaviour. If we walk away from discussions like this without concrete shifts, then Part 2 is just another “nice read”. For organisers, it might mean refusing to plan another big event until there is a clear, resourced follow-up in place, and insisting that budgets ringfence money for teachers, circles, and care before anything is spent on aesthetics. For trustees and shūrā, it might mean making formation and safeguarding a permanent concern rather than an occasional worry and ensuring that no one is beyond being told “no” for the sake of the trust they hold. For volunteers, it might mean picking one circle to attend, one person to learn from, and one lane of service to commit to for a year, letting that commitment shape your schedule rather than filling whatever time is left over. For imams, duʿāt, and teachers, it might mean preaching with the end in mind: asking, “Where will I send these people after tonight?” and investing quietly in a small group of students who will carry the work long after the current wave of attention has passed. For each of us as individuals, it might simply begin with asking, “Who actually knows my struggles for the sake of Allah, and who am I quietly helping to stand?” and then swapping one moment of commentary this week for one practical act of formation: a visit, a message, a promise to meet regularly.
We do not need more noise; we need more nurture. Al-Shām has paid in blood to show us what the stakes look like. Our own cities are paying in slow, quiet apostasy to show us what neglect looks like. Between those two wounds, Allah is asking us whether we will build anything that lasts.
Events will fade. Posters will yellow. Clips will be buried under the next algorithm wave. But if, through something we organised, one person found a teacher, a circle, a mentor, and a lane of service, that person may stand on Qiyāmah with actions we never knew about, and Allah may connect that back to us.
That is why we move from events to formation. Not because we dislike energy or gatherings, but because we love īmān too much to leave it hanging on a single night. If Part 1 exposed the weight of responsibility, then Part 2 is just a small sketch of what carrying it might look like when the crowd has gone home and only Allah is watching.
