I had spent 22 years building a community structure and in doing so had somewhere along the way allowed the structure to become more important than the god the structure was supposed to point toward.

What Amir Khalil was trying to organize was Carlo continued was not a conversion event.

He was trying to say look at how this Catholic teenager used technology to love God.

What would that look like in Islam? What would the Muslim version of this look like? He wasn’t asking to become Catholic.

He was asking a question about his own faith inspired by seeing mine lived out with passion and I punished him for it.

Yes.

No softening just the fact.

What do I do? I asked again.

Tomorrow morning call apologize.

Ask him to come back.

Ask him to show you his ideas.

Carlo looked at me steadily and then this is the important part.

Imm listen.

not for the parts you can manage and direct and fit into your existing framework.

Actually, listen.

The way you listen to Allah tonight, he stood.

The light in the prayer hall had begun to shift again, warming, deepening in a way that was the inverse of how it had changed when he arrived, as though the conversation had reached its natural completion, and the space was gently signaling this.

Carlo, I said before he could leave, why are you here? You are a Catholic saint.

This is a mosque.

Why would Allah Why would God send send you here to me? Carlo Akuta smiled.

It was the smile from the photographs, wide, uncalculated, carrying an astonishing amount of uncomplicated joy for a person who had died at 15 of a painful disease.

because he said you needed to hear this from someone you couldn’t dismiss as a Muslim competitor or a Catholic evangelist.

You needed to hear it from someone who has no interest in whether you stay Muslim or become Catholic or join any particular tradition.

Someone whose only interest is whether you love God more tomorrow than you did today.

He picked up his white sneakers.

I don’t remember him having taken them off, but there they were in his hand and looked at me one final time.

That’s the only category I care about.

It’s the only category that matters.

Then he was gone.

The prayer hall was empty.

The security system was still active.

The doors had not opened.

I was alone in the particular silence of a space that has just stopped containing something extraordinary.

And I sat on the prayer hall floor for a very long time until the predon called to prayer from the minoret above me brought me back to the world.

I called Ami Khalil at 7 in the morning.

His father answered.

There was a weariness in his voice that told me everything about the month we had just spent.

The way a community learns to brace itself around a leader who has become defensive and unpredictable.

I asked if I could speak with Amir.

There was a pause.

Then Amir came to the phone.

Amir, I said, I owe you an apology.

Another pause longer.

I could hear him breathing, recalibrating, trying to determine if this was real or another test.

I was wrong, I said about the ban.

About the punishment, about my reasons for both.

I paused.

I would like you to come to my office today if you’re willing.

Not because I need to manage you, because I want to understand what you are trying to do.

He came that afternoon.

He was tall and careful.

The carefulness of someone who has learned that an imam’s office is not a safe place for honesty.

and he sat across from me with his hands folded and his eyes watchful.

“Tell me about Carlo Hakutis,” I said.

What he told me over the next two hours restructured my understanding of what had been happening in my community more completely than anything I had heard in the previous month of crisis management.

Ami was not had never been interested in converting to Catholicism.

He was interested in a specific question that Carlo Acutis’ life and death had posed to him with startling clarity.

What does it look like to be a young person who is genuinely completely practically in love with God in the 21st century? Not performing religion actually living it in the language of the world as it actually exists with technology with social media with the particular cultural vocabulary of a generation that has grown up online.

He documented miracles on a website.

Amir said he used programming to make the invisible visible.

That’s such a Muslim idea, Imam.

Documenting God’s signs, bearing witness, preserving knowledge.

It’s right there in the Quran.

But I had never seen a young person do it that way.

I had never seen anyone show me that being passionate about tech and being passionate about God were the same thing.

And I told you that was dangerous.

I said, “You told me I was betraying Islam.

” He said it without accusation, as a fact.

I know.

I paused.

What did you want to do with the discussion group? I shut down.

Amir leaned forward.

The weariness began very slowly to recede.

He explained what he had envisioned.

Not a group studying Carlo Akudis’ Catholicism, but a group asking what would the Muslim version of his approach look like.

What would it mean to document Islamic miracles? the stories of the companions, the Sufi saints, the documented cases of divine intervention across 14 centuries of Islamic history with the same precision and technological commitment that Carlo had brought to Eucharistic miracles.

What would it mean to build apps for prayer websites for Islamic scholarship, social media presences for Muslim youth that were genuinely, joyfully, technologically alive? I was trying to ask a question about our own tradition.

Amir said and you told me the question itself was dangerous.

I sat with this for a long time.

Then I said, “Will you help me build what you are trying to build? Not a discussion group, a program, something real with resources and support and my name behind it instead of against it.

” Amir looked at me for a moment, then slowly he smiled.

It was the smile of someone who has been carrying a very heavy thing alone for a long time and has just been offered help.

Yes, he said, “I’ll help.

” The following weeks were among the most difficult and most alive of my professional life.

Difficult because rebuilding trust after a month of fear-driven authoritarianism is slow, patient work.

Families who had pulled back from the mosque did not immediately return when I announced that the prohibition was lifted.

The mothers and fathers of the 23 young people who had converted did not quickly forgive.

Their grief was real and some of their anger at me was legitimate.

I held individual meetings family by family and in each one I said the same thing I had said to air.

I was wronged.

I panicked.

I built walls when I should have built bridges and I am not certain I can undo all the damage.

But I intend to spend however long as required trying.

Most of them came back, not all.

The ones who did not, I have made peace with.

Allah knows what he is doing.

Alive because what Amir began building with my support and resources was extraordinary.

He called the program digital misan.

Does the misan being the Arabic word for balance the scales of justice the principle of divine equilibrium.

The concept was exactly what he had described in my office.

Using modern technology to document, preserve and make accessible the rich tradition of Islamic miracles, saintthood and divine intervention that runs through 14 centuries of Muslim history.

Websites, podcasts, a social media strategy designed specifically for young Muslims who were comfortable online but had never found their faith represented in that space with the same fluency.

The first event was a workshop held in the mosque on a Saturday in late November titled coding for Allah how digital tools can serve spiritual mission.

Amir had expected perhaps 30 attendees.

The core group of young men who had been meeting before the ban.

87 people showed up including 12 young men who had drifted from the mosque and returned specifically for this.

I stood at the back of the room and watched Amir explain to a room full of young Muslims with laptops and phones how a Catholic teenager’s approach to documenting miracles could inspire an Islamic equivalent.

And I felt something I had not felt in my professional life in a very long time.

The specific unmistakable sensation of the community I was supposed to be leading being exactly what it was supposed to be, alive, questioning, reaching.

By January 2025, digital misan had become something none of us had anticipated.

Young Muslims across Europe found the project online and began reaching out.

Imams in Germany, France, and England wrote to ask about the model.

A team in Amsterdam built a companion website documenting the lives of Sufi saints using interactive maps and multimedia documentation.

A group in London launched a podcast about contemporary Islamic miracles.

verified accounts from living Muslims of what they described as divine intervention that had within two months accumulated 40,000 subscribers.

The young people who had left the mosque, those 23 conversions in September that had driven me to panic, some of them returned not as Muslims returning to Islamic practice, but as interested participants in an interfaith dialogue that the digital misan project had created almost inadvertently.

Amir, with his characteristic precision, had built into the project a formal interfaith component, a series of conversations between young Muslims and young Catholics about what spiritual passion looks like in the digital age.

Using Carlo Audis’ example as a shared reference point, these conversations produced in several cases something I had not expected.

Young Catholics who became more deeply Catholic and young Muslims who became more deeply Muslim through the experience of explaining their faith to each other with full seriousness and without the pressure of conversion.

Carlo Akutis, the dead Italian teenager whose name I had banned, had become the unexpected bridge between two communities who lived in the same city and had never properly introduced themselves.

I have thought about this often in the months since.

The specific irony of it that my attempt to protect my community from Kawakudis’ influence resulted by the sequence of events that followed my ban and its lifting in Kakut is becoming more present and more positively transformative in my community than he ever was before.

I have also thought about the conversation in the prayer hall about what Carlo told me and what it cost me to hear it and what it gave me in return.

I want to be honest about something that the people who share this testimony sometimes elied in the interest of a tidier narrative.

The 23 young Muslims who converted to Catholicism in September 2024 have not reconverted to Islam.

Some of them have been back to the mosque for the interfaith events and I have had conversations with them that I value deeply.

But they are Catholic now and they are both thought by their own account and by the evidence of how I see them living genuinely seriously joyfully Catholic.

This is the part of the story that I have had to make my peace with.

Carlo told me that night that some of those young people had been already leaving before they found his story, that they had been sitting in the mosque for years, not finding what they were looking for, and that his website had simply shown them a door that was already open.

I have come to believe this is true.

And I have had to reckon with my role in it.

Not just the ban, but the years before the ban.

The years when I was more concerned with maintaining the form of Muslim community life than with ensuring it was alive.

What I can tell you is this.

The 23 who left were not lost by Carlo Autis.

They were lost much earlier in the gap between what they were looking for and what I was offering.

Carlo showed them a door.

The question I should have been asking, the question that the crisis forced me eventually to ask was, why didn’t my mosque have one? I’m still answering that question answering that.

It is, I have come to believe, the most important question of my ministry.

Today, I am sitting at my desk in the same office where I suspended Amir Khalil 4 months ago, and the mosque outside my window is louder and more chaotic and more genuinely alive than it has been in years.

Digital man is running.

and the youth attendance has recovered and exceeded its previous levels.

Amir is now formerly employed by the mosque as our director of digital community.

A title that did not exist 6 months ago and that several other European mosques have since asked us about creating.

Last month, I did something that I would not have been able to imagine doing in October.

I invited a Catholic priest, Father Dominic Richi from a parish in the Navigi district to speak at a joint event between our mosque and his congregation about the legacy of Carlo Akutis and what his life suggests about the relationship between technology and spiritual practice.

Approximately 200 people attended.

equal numbers of Muslims and Catholics sitting together in the same space listening to a discussion about a dead Italian teenager who managed somehow to be important to both of them.

Father Richie said something during that event that I have thought about every day since.

He said, “Carlo’s life is a provocation.

Not a comfortable testimony about a safe and manageable God, but a provocation, a challenge to every person of faith to ask whether they are using every means available to them to make God visible in the world.

” Carlo used programming.

He used the internet.

He used every tool of his generation.

The question his life poses to all of us, Muslim, Catholic, whatever tradition we inhabit, is what tools are you using? What are you building? I looked around the room as he said this at Amir taking notes on his laptop at the young Muslims with their phones at the Catholic families listening with full attention at the space that was in that moment doing exactly what a sacred space is supposed to do, which is to make the presence of God visible through the quality of the attention people bring to it.

And I thought Carlo knew what he was doing.

He did not come to my prayer hall in the middle of the night to convert me.

He came to ask me a question, the same question his life posed when he was alive and poses still through the 10 years of documented testimonials that have accumulated since his beatification.

Through every website visit and every healing and every interfaith event and every young person who found in the story of a teenager in sneakers the shape of a god worth giving everything to.

The question is not whose god is the right god.

The question is, are you actually genuinely with everything you have reaching toward him? I was not.

I was managing.

I was maintaining.

I was protecting boundaries instead of expanding vision.

That night in the prayer hall, a dead boy who had been born on May 3rd, 1991 in London, who had cataloged miracles on a website because he believed God deserved to be documented with the same precision you’d give anything genuinely important.

That boy sat cross-legged on the floor of my mosque and told me to stop being afraid of God being too big for my categories.

I am trying every day to take his advice.

I do not have a clean resolution to offer you.

I have a community that is more alive than it was.

I have a young man named Amir who is doing extraordinary things.

I have a mosque that is learning slowly and imperfectly to ask better questions.

And I have somewhere in the architecture of my faith a new room that wasn’t there before.

A room that opened the night Carlo Akotis walked into my prayer hall in his white sneakers and refused with complete gentleness to let me keep the door locked.

Allah is arim, the most merciful.

I have been saying that phrase five times a day for 30 years.

For the first time on the morning after that conversation, I think I understood what it means.

His mercy does not wait for permission.

It finds its own doors.

And sometimes if you are very lucky and very in need and have been very wrong in very instructive ways, it sends a 15year-old Italian boy to

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