Hernán Guadalupe became Muslim on the morning of September 11th, 2001, in a dorm room, minutes after the towers came down across the water. That's the part people know about him. This conversation is about the twenty-five years since.

He's an engineer who'll tell you he isn't a technical person; what he actually does is find what people are capable of and get them there. He runs a Brazilian jiu-jitsu school. He co-founded Hablamos Islam, building Islamic resources in Spanish. He went to Egypt intending to study at al-Azhar and came home before he started.

What makes this episode unusual is that he doesn't present a practice that worked. He describes a plateau; a stretch where he did the minimum and told himself it was enough, and only in the last two or three years has he started climbing back. Through dhikr. Through a set of prayer b ...