Founder Story · Abel · Haqq Nation

How everything
I did before Islam
led me right back to it.

A first-person account of how a peak-performance fasting habit and a friend's offhand comment turned into the first Zamzam mineral blend.

Subject
Abel · Haqq Nation
Role
Co-founder
Read time
~6 min
Abel, co-founder of Zim Zam Labs
Fig. I · Co-founder, photographed in available light
Chapter I

Before.

I have been fasting for most of my adult life. Not for religious reasons — not at first. I was into peak performance. Optimization. I wanted to understand what the human body could do when you stripped away the noise and paid attention to the inputs.

The fasting community has its own science. If you fast regularly, you learn fast that you need minerals — sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium. Your body burns through them. So I started mixing my own electrolyte solutions. Raw salts, specific ratios, no sugar, no flavors. I had been drinking and doing these salts on my own for years. It was just part of how I lived.

I did not know it at the time, but I was building toward something.

Chapter II

Coming to Islam.

When I found out that Muslims fasted as part of their faith, something clicked. I already knew all the benefits — probably even more than a lot of Muslims did. Fasting was not new to me. But fasting as an act of worship, as something bigger than performance — that was new. And it made sense in a way I was not expecting.

I became Muslim. I am an American revert. The practice I had been doing for my body became a practice I now did for my soul. The same discipline. The same hunger. A completely different reason.

Chapter III · The Pivot
That sounds like
Zamzam water.
— A friend, on hearing Abel describe his fasting electrolyte mix
Chapter IV

The rabbit hole.

Zamzam water — the sacred well in Mecca that has flowed since the time of Ibrahim, peace be upon him — is a natural electrolyte blend. I had absolutely no idea. And I do not think most people understand that either.

I pulled up the mineral composition. Calcium. Magnesium. Potassium. Sodium. Bicarbonates. Sulfates. The same minerals I had been mixing by hand for years. The same ratios the fasting community had been using in their DIY electrolyte solutions.

What these guys had been doing to fast was naturally present in the water that Muslims have been fasting with for 1,400 years.

It came full circle. And it absolutely blew my mind.

Chapter V

The gift.

Here is what I need you to understand about the timing.

I was not looking for a product idea. I was not looking for a business. I had been running a business that was debatably haram, and I had been praying for a long time about how to leave it — not quietly, but in a way that actually helped the Ummah. I wanted to do something that mattered.

I was planning to sell t-shirts. That was my next move. T-shirts.

And then somebody mentioned one thing, and it led me down a rabbit hole, and now I am here.

I did not find this idea. It fell into my lap. There is a concept in Islam — if you pray for it, truly pray for it, Allah will provide. I one hundred percent view that this was the case. I view myself as lucky to be in this position, because I view this as a gift from God. That is not marketing language. That is what I believe.

I want to show that it came full circle — from how I was before Islam to who I am now. Everything connected. The fasting, the electrolytes, the minerals, the water, the faith. None of it was wasted.

Chapter VI

The chemist who missed it.

When I met Saif Qasrawi, the story got harder to explain away as coincidence.

Saif is an inorganic research chemist. That is his actual job — studying mineral composition. He had been thinking about Zamzam water and prophetic medicine for ten years. It was one of his most passionate projects. He wanted to build a business around it. He dropped the idea because he thought it required too much money.

And he never once thought of a mineral blend.

“I'm a chemist myself and I should have been thinking minerals first. That's how I was trained. I'm literally a research scientist about composition. And the irony is that I'm not an organic scientist. I'm an inorganic scientist — which is literally this. And I still didn't think about it.”

— Saif Qasrawi, Zim Zam co-founder

The person who specializes in exactly this discipline, who dreamed about exactly this market, who had the training and the desire and the ten-year head start — he did not see it. I am not a scientist. I stumbled into it through a friend's offhand comment.

I do not know how to explain that without acknowledging that it came from somewhere outside both of us.

Chapter VII

Building it.

Saif and I partnered. He brought the chemistry. I brought the years of practical experience mixing and drinking these salts. Between the two of us, we had the science and the street knowledge.

It took about three iterations to get the formula right. Six ingredients. No sugar. No colors. No flavors. Every mineral chosen to deliver a mineral found in Zamzam water, in ratios that mimic the original as closely as we could get.

We are not Zamzam water. Of course we will never be Zamzam water — we are not Allah. But we are the closest electrolyte blend on the market to Zamzam water's mineral profile. And it is not close.

We tested it at mosque events. We gave samples to strangers. We ran side-by-side samplings against the biggest names in the electrolyte market. People consistently preferred ours.

One moment landed harder than the data did. We had a sampling table at a Suhoor fest — the kind of community event where families come through with their kids. A kid we had never met took a sip and his face lit up — "Oh my gosh, that's so good." He did not know us. A kid will not be polite about a flavor — they will spit out anything they do not like. His unprompted reaction was the first time someone with no reason to be polite told us it was real, and the samplings later confirmed what his face had already told us.

Chapter VIII

Where this is going.

For me as a Muslim, one of the most important things is helping other people see it. Not just the product — the sign behind it. Zamzam water has flowed from the same well for at least 1,450 recorded years — and by tradition since the time of Ibrahim, peace be upon him, some 4,000 years ago — with a mineral composition that has stayed consistently mineral-rich across modern analyses, and science is only now beginning to understand why the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, called it the best water on Earth (narrated by al-Tabarani). That is not something I take lightly.

This is an easy conversation to show people a legitimate sign of Allah. I am hand-delivering it.

I want to help the Ummah. I envision this getting all around the world one day — and when things get hard somewhere, this keeps people nourished. It ships for almost nothing. It weighs almost nothing. And it gives your body what Zamzam water gives it.

We are not paying Facebook or Google or Instagram to grow. We are funding mosques. We would rather fund our community than fund an ad.

This is where I am. This is where it is going. And I still cannot believe it started with a friend saying, “That sounds like Zamzam water.”

§ The Beginning

Try the mineral mix that
came from a comment.

Six ingredients. No sugar. From thirty-three cents a serving.

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