Why I Started Araam

A LETTER FROM OUR FOUNDER

Why I started Araam.

In October 2023, everyone I knew was going through a collective trauma. I watched so many of us face consequences for speaking up, and others carry the internal weight of not being able to speak up at all.

I was getting my doctorate in clinical psychology at the time. My friends and family were frozen — stuck ruminating on the horrors of the world. I kept asking myself one question: how do I make the people I love happier when there is so much wrong in the world?

I started with myself. I grew through a mind, body, soul approach — and I noticed something else along the way: the dramatic shift that intentional socializing brought. Healing alone only went so far. Healing together went further.

As an elective in my doctorate, I took a business class and turned my own growth into a business plan — a concept combining wellness, neuroscience, and community. I felt so called to it that I left my program to build it.

The kind of decision that makes every aunty call your mother. Today, those same aunties come to our classes.

Building it for us

With everything our community had been through, I felt no one needed this more than Muslims. I wanted encouraging, unifying spaces. I wanted to teach people how to make themselves happier — without guilt.

I had zero technical background and a clear thesis: Muslim women need physical and digital wellness solutions made for them. When the first dev team I hired spent months going nowhere, I sat in every call, looked up every term I didn’t know, and then taught myself to build. I shipped the app myself — today it’s Araam Mind.

The same stubbornness runs through everything else — pop-up Pilates in city after city, and chapters led by local Muslim women who bring Araam to their own communities.

What Araam is

Our offerings start with the self — created to help you become a happier version of you. Then we branch into local communities, built to help you find and cultivate real connection. And from there, the collective: spaces and tools designed to uplift all of us.

We have so many religious spaces, but fewer spaces to unite with purpose outside of them. Araam’s spaces are non-religious. The only thing our members have in common is a desire to grow.

Araam is designed for those who identify as Muslim. No matter who the Muslim is. What they look like. Which country they’re from. Or how they practice. And anyone non-Muslim is welcome to join what we do.

Intention matters more to us than rushing to make sales. We’re just getting started, and the best is yet to come.

With warmth,
Hiba
Founder, Araam Wellness