Our Team
Muhammad Afzal
Qari & Islamic Content Researcher
Muhammad Afzal completed Hifz-ul-Qur’an and has remained connected to religious institutions since. For close to twenty years, he has led taraweeh prayers during Ramadan, reciting the Qur’an in full before congregations year after year — a sustained, repeated engagement with the Qur’anic text that comes from memorization and recitation rather than classroom study alone.
At Live Barakah, his role is source verification: checking every Qur’anic citation against the original Arabic, and cross-referencing every hadith against the six major collections — Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Sunan Abu Dawud, Jami’ at-Tirmidhi, Sunan an-Nasa’i, and Sunan Ibn Majah — to confirm the narrator, the exact wording, and the collection it actually comes from, rather than a paraphrase repeated secondhand online. Where a hadith’s authenticity grading is disputed, or where a ruling reflects one school of fiqh rather than agreement across all four, he flags it so the article states that plainly instead of presenting it as settled.
Every article then goes through a second editorial pass before publication, where citations are checked again against primary sources before anything goes live.
Muhammad Usman Awan
Founder
Muhammad Usman Awan also founded Stop Harassment Now, an anti-harassment campaign researching youth harassment, domestic violence, and the pressures facing families and marriages across Pakistan and the wider Muslim world.
That work is what led to Live Barakah. In researching family and marital breakdown, a consistent pattern emerged: Muslim couples increasingly shaped by social media, unrealistic relationship expectations, and a drift away from religious grounding — and struggling with the stress, anxiety, and depression that often follows. Live Barakah began as an attempt to address that gap directly: a resource where Muslim couples can return to what the Qur’an and Sunnah actually teach about marriage, conflict, and emotional wellbeing.
He oversees Live Barakah’s editorial direction, sourcing standards, and content review process.
Why this exists
Through the work on Stop Harassment Now, the same pattern kept showing up — couples weren’t struggling because they didn’t care about each other. They were struggling because they were forming their idea of what marriage should look like from social media and modern relationship fantasies, not from their own deen. That gap was producing real anxiety and depression: expecting marriage to match an online fantasy, then blaming yourself or your spouse when real life didn’t match it. Live Barakah exists to be the place Muslim couples can actually return to for the real answer — a site that takes the Qur’an and Sunnah seriously enough to source them properly, and takes what’s actually happening in people’s marriages seriously too.