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Have you always wanted to be a sheikh when you were going up?

No, not at all.

Especially in America, it's kind of rare.

Yeah, I mean, it was rare in my time, for sure.

You know, I grew up, you know, not really knowing much about what I wanted to be or who I wanted to be.

I played a lot of basketball. I was really good at basketball as a teenager.

You know, I can't say that I'm that great right now, but I still play a lot.

I grew up wanting to play basketball. I grew up with a lot of questions, not many answers.

Not much certainty in Islam or anything else when it came to religion or the outward value of the world.

I was just trying to figure out life in the broadest sense of the world, like many teenagers.

But I was forced to ask a lot of serious questions early on in life because my mother had cancer.

May I love mercy on her.

And when you're a child and you grew up in a home with a sick parent who goes to the hospital,

who's in a coma, you know, unresponsive sometimes for weeks, has a stroke, cancer,

and you're constantly kind of on the edge. You lose the sweetness of life very quickly, you know.

So I wasn't an orphan in the full sense of the word. But because my life was abnormal compared to other kids, you know, life was, Hamdala, I had an easy

life in the sense of that. I always had a roof over my head. I always had food. I always had

drink. I had great parents. I didn't struggle with any personal health conditions. But seeing the way

that my mother's life was drained, I had a lot of questions and I wasn't very sure about what I

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