The Man Building a "Sesame Street" for Muslim Kids

Humraha News

As a boy, Amin Aaser asked his hijabi mother to pick him up 15 minutes after baseball games so his classmates would not see her. Today he runs Noor Kids, which reported serving nearly 1.7 million Muslim families in a single year.

Humraha News is our weekly spotlight on good news from the Muslim community. A culture of good news, one story at a time.

The safe path, then the real one

Aaser grew up the son of Pakistani immigrants in Minnesota, walking the familiar tightrope of second-generation American life: how visibly Muslim was he willing to be? He took the safe path first, building a corporate career in strategy, finance and marketing at companies like 3M, Target and General Mills, while a little side project called Noor Kids lived in his nights and weekends.

Then his mother passed away at 52, and the question he had been postponing became urgent: what did he want to do with whatever time Allah had given him? He left corporate America to build Noor Kids full time.

"When I was young, learning about Islam often felt like drinking cough syrup. It was good for you. Your parents insisted that you take it. But it wasn't necessarily something you looked forward to."Amin Aaser, founder of Noor Kids, to Startup Muslim

A Sesame Street for Muslim children

His answer is a world kids actually want to enter, with recurring characters, humor and stories that look like their lives. The idea won support from Harvard Business School back in 2011. Today the Character-Building Program mails families a new Islamic graphic novel every month, and the Muslim Treehouse runs live weekly classes for a global community of nearly 10,000 children, built around a curriculum of 36 themes.

Why it matters

What moves us most is the why. Aaser says families tell him their kids wait by the mailbox for the next book, and that children who are the only Muslim in their classroom find belonging in characters who pray like they do. "In many ways, Noor Kids is the resource I needed when I was young," he told Startup Muslim. "I wanted Muslim children to grow up feeling comfortable in their own skin, understanding their faith, and knowing that Islam is not something they need to hide."

From a boy hiding his mother's hijab to a man helping 1.7 million families raise kids who hide nothing: that is a story worth telling out loud. If the little ones in your life already wear their identity proudly, our guide to raising confident Muslim kids and our personalized gifts for kids are made in exactly that spirit.