Assalamu Alaikum.
I was born in 1964 in West Sonapur, Feni. I studied Accounting at the University of Chittagong, then spent decades building the Chandrika group — businesses spanning IT, real estate and finance. Then I walked away from all of it. Today every company I built is closed, and I work as a full-time, unpaid social worker, leading Masjid.Life from Cary, North Carolina and Feni, Bangladesh.
Assalamu Alaikum.
I was born in 1964 in West Sonapur, Feni. I studied Accounting at the University of Chittagong, then spent decades building the Chandrika group — businesses spanning IT, real estate and finance. Then I walked away from all of it. Today every company I built is closed, and I work as a full-time, unpaid social worker, leading Masjid.Life from Cary, North Carolina and Feni, Bangladesh.
This instinct was inherited. My father, the late Alhaj Abdul Ghafur Bhuyan, was a businessman and social worker who founded the Feni Islamic Center, today a Masjid.Life branch. I named the foundation after my mother, Nurjahan Begum, a homemaker — she is its main inspiration.
An accountant by training, I built the foundation the way an auditor would: open-book software where every taka, every loan, every repayment, every donor, is published live for the whole world — down to this very page you are reading. My wife and co-founder, Nasreen Ahmed, a Chartered Accountant (FCA) and Senior Tax Analyst, helped shape that same open-book culture.
I want to tell you why. The poorest in our country cannot reach a bank or an NGO. Their only door is the village moneylender — at 100% to 200% interest. These are three cases, all reported by national newspapers and television, that I could not look away from:
Nur Ayesha, from Chakaria, borrowed just ৳4,000 from a village moneylender and ended up repaying ৳8,000. When she fell a few weeks behind on a further ৳2,000 the lender demanded, she was tied to a tree and tortured. Months later, we gave her a ৳5,000 interest-free loan instead. She repaid it in full, and is now carrying a second loan of ৳10,000.
In Barisal, Bimal borrowed ৳5,000 and repaid four times that, ৳20,000, but it still wasn't enough. Unable to produce a further ৳5,000 the lender demanded, he was beaten to death.
In Narayanganj, day-labourer Rani Akter and her husband borrowed ৳5,000 from a moneylender charging 80% interest every month. Over two years they paid back more than ৳2,10,000 — Rani working through her pregnancy to keep up — and were still told they owed another ৳1,03,000. Unable to pay, the moneylender sold their newborn baby for thirty thousand taka. Police later arrested three people on trafficking charges.
No law, court or police force will solve this. Only one thing will: an interest-free loan available at every village mosque. That is why I built Masjid.Life — to stand beside the Ayeshas, the Bimals and the Ranis, and rewrite their stories.
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