As-salamu alaykum. We're happy to feature inspiring stories of Muslim creatives from around the world. From filmmaking to poetry to news reporting, each of these creatives are putting their unique spin to storytelling and showing the world what it means to own your narrative.
Let's dive in!
Creative of the Week: Aishah Alam and Strange Inc.
Meet Aishah Alam, President of Strange Inc. She leads a New York based non-profit and Muslim creative hub where their focus is cultivating faith-rooted, restorative artistry. As a coach, author, and the founder of Strange Inc., Aishah has built a creative home for Muslim artists and visionaries. She is passionate about cultivating spaces where creatives can use their art as a powerful medium for healing and transformation. Aishah is committed to guiding others in transforming their life experiences into a lasting legacy and living a life that is authentically and spiritually aligned.
What’s the story behind your creative journey? Tell us how you got started, and what moment made you realize this was your calling?
Strange Inc. began on the streets of New York — spoken word poetry and leaflets on Islam, carried out as grassroots da’wah. That was the origin. From there it grew into something more structured, formalising as an organisation in 2017 and eventually as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2023. The calling was never a single moment. It was the accumulation of watching Muslim artists create in isolation, without formation, without community, without a home that understood them. Strange Inc. exists to be that home.
How does your cultural or faith background influence your work? We’d love to hear about the unique perspective you bring to your art.
Everything flows from tawḥīd — the oneness of Allah. We believe creativity is not self-expression. It is the human capacity to perceive patterns and re-order them toward coherence and meaning. That is a God-given faculty, and it carries responsibility. Our faith does not sit alongside our work — it is the foundation beneath it. We draw from the Qur’an, the Sunnah, and the rich tradition of Islamic thought on the soul, the heart, and what it means to make something beautiful.
What’s a project you’re especially proud of, and why? Walk us through the creative process and why it holds a special place in your heart.
The LockDown publication. It was born during the COVID-19 pandemic — a collection capturing the creative and spiritual interior life of Muslims during a time of collective stillness. What made it meaningful was not the final product but the process: writers, artists, and thinkers contributing something honest during an unprecedented moment. That publication is now archived at the New York Public Library. For an institution in service since 2014, that felt like a quiet but significant marker of legacy.
If you could collaborate with any artist (living or historical) from the Muslim or ethnic diaspora, who would it be and why?
We have already been fortunate to collaborate with many — our publication Poetic Justice was built entirely on that spirit, bringing together Muslim artists and writers around a shared conviction. If we dream bigger, we would want to go deeper into the global Muslim creative community — artists from West Africa, Southeast Asia, the Arab world — and create something that reflects the full breadth of what Muslim creativity looks like across cultures and continents.
What’s one misconception about your art form or your community that you’d like to challenge? What do you wish more people understood?
That Muslim creativity is primarily about representation. Representation matters — but it is not the ceiling. The deeper work is formation: helping Muslim creatives develop the inner clarity, discipline, and spiritual grounding to produce work that carries weight. Work that does not simply reflect Muslim identity back to an audience but actually contributes something to the world. We are not here to be seen. We are here to create something worth seeing.
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Until next time,
The Kufi Productions Team
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