21. How Asalatu Groups Can Build Real Income: Four Ideas Worth Taking Seriously - Jack’s Asalatu Empowerment - Empowering Asalatu Members
21. How Asalatu Groups Can Build Real Income: Four Ideas Worth Taking Seriously
Every Sunday, across Lagos, Ibadan, Abeokuta, Ilorin and a hundred towns in between, asalatu groups gather. They sing, they recite, they pray for the Prophet, they collect offerings, and then everyone goes home. The next week, the same thing. It has been this way for decades, and it is one of the most durable community institutions in Yoruba Muslim life.
It is also, financially, one of the most fragile.
Most asalatu groups run on donations and the goodwill of a handful of officials. Rent for the venue, sound equipment, transport for guest clerics, support for bereaved members; all of it comes out of a purse that refills unpredictably. When a big expense lands, the group just passes a collection bowl, and hopes for generous contributions.
Jack Lookman, in a short episode of Curated Business Ideas aimed squarely at asalatu groups and their members, proposed something different, which is, stop treating the asalatu as a cost centre and start treating it as an institution with assets. Not assets in the balance-sheet sense but assets in the sense of knowledge, memory, voice and community.
He offered four income ideas. What follows is each one in full, plus the practical questions he raises and the ethical ones he does not.
Why This Conversation Is Overdue
There is a reflex in religious communities that money and worship should not mix. It is a healthy reflex, and it is also the reason why so many asalatu groups stay small, exhausted and dependent.
The distinction that matters is not between sacred and commercial; it is between monetising the faith and monetising the infrastructure that serves the faith. Selling barakah is corruption. Building a professional training academy for the people who run your organisation is stewardship; and it happens to be a business.
Lookman's ideas all sit on the right side of that line. None of them sells religious merit. All of them package knowledge, memory or craft that the community already possesses and currently gives away for free.
Idea One: An Online Academy for Members and Officials
His first suggestion is the most structural: an online academy that is delivered as a membership site, online courses, or both.
The curriculum he sketches, has two halves. The religious half covers Arabic and Islamic studies, and is genuinely useful supplementary training for members who recite weekly but have never studied the language or the texts formally. The secular half is where it gets interesting: this is how to get the best out of the officials, training officials on what their post actually expects, leadership, conflict management, people management and resource management.
Anyone who has sat on the committee of a community organisation will recognise the need. Asalatu groups routinely appoint a treasurer who has never kept accounts, a welfare officer with no framework for handling disputes, and a president who has to manage strong personalities with nothing but instinct. These are learnable skills, and nobody is teaching them.
Lookman also suggests legal training like GDPR and data protection, plus the other compliance questions that arise when an organisation holds members' personal details. That sounds dry until you consider that most asalatu groups now keep WhatsApp groups with hundreds of phone numbers in them and have never thought about who can see what.
The commercial design matters here. His model is a discounted rate for members and officials, with the option to sell to people outside the asalatu at full price, and crucially, periodic payment. Weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually. Not a one-off fee.
That recurring structure is the whole point. A one-time workshop raises money once. A membership generates income every month, which is precisely what a group with fixed running costs needs.
The honest challenge is that you need someone who can actually teach. Most asalatu groups have scholars in their network such as retired teachers, Arabic instructors, civil servants with management experience. The academy is less a content problem than a curation problem.
liability.
Idea Two: Record the Memory Before It Walks Away
The second idea costs almost nothing and produces something the community cannot otherwise keep.
Lookman suggests recorded Zoom interviews with past officials of the asalatu such as former presidents, secretaries, welfare officers who are invited to share the lessons of their tenure. What went right, what went wrong, how they handled a crisis, what they wished they had known.
Think about what that archive would be worth. Every asalatu in Nigeria has a founding generation that is ageing out. When an elder dies, decades of institutional memory die with them: how the group was formed, why a particular dispute split it, which approach to membership actually worked. Nobody writes it down, because nobody thinks of it as an asset.
Recorded once, that material serves three audiences at once. The asalatu itself gets a governance record. Current officials get a practical handbook. And anyone that is aspiring to leadership who is inside the organisation or entirely outside it, gets genuinely useful leadership knowledge from people who learned it the hard way.
Distribution is cheap; it could be a YouTube channel, or the membership site from idea one. It also becomes the natural top of a funnel like a free interview that leads someone toward a paid course on the same subject. The content could also be repurposed.
Idea Three: The Comprehension Gap — and Why It Is the Best Idea Here
The third idea is the one with real emotional force, and it starts with a question Lookman asks bluntly; how many asalatu members actually know what they are saying?
A group recites dhikr and du'a every week. Many members own a booklet with the Arabic text. But the meaning? He is candid about what usually happens: people go home after asalatu, drop the booklet and get on with their lives. The words were recited, not understood.
Then he sharpens it into the line worth remembering. It is one thing to know what you are saying; it is another to be conscious of what you are reciting. You can recite unconsciously. You can also recite consciously. Those are two different acts of worship.
His proposal is elegantly simple: faceless YouTube videos that teach the recitations.
The format he describes is specific. The thumbnails carry the Arabic text, a transliteration, and Yoruba. Subtitles and translations run in Arabic, Yoruba and English. The recitation repeats in different counts like seven times, eleven, a hundred, a thousand, and which matches how people actually use these recitations in practice. Then, at the end of each video, a short explanation of what the recitation means.
Faceless matters for two reasons. It removes the vanity problem: no scholar needs to be on camera, so nobody competes for prominence. And it makes production repeatable like one voice, one designer, dozens of videos.
The business logic is just as clean. These are evergreen search-driven videos. Somebody searching for a particular du'a at 11pm in London, or in Houston, or in Ibadan, finds your video. YouTube monetises it, and the audience is global rather than local. Every view is simultaneously revenue and da'wah, which is the rare case where the commercial and the spiritual incentives point in the same direction.
If there is one idea in this episode worth pursuing by a group with no capital, it is this one. The cost is a microphone, some design time and patience.
Idea Four: Waka, Properly Handled
The fourth is the most culturally ambitious and the most legally delicate.
Waka: This is Yoruba Islamic poetry, that is chanted rather than sung, call-and-response in form, and is performed at nearly every asalatu. Lookman describes it well: melodic, but not fully music. Music without instruments.
His suggestion is a YouTube channel collecting waka from different asalatus, then monetising it through the platform.
The opportunity is real. Waka is a living oral tradition with almost no organised digital archive. Individual clips exist on social media, scattered and uncredited. A curated channel that is properly recorded, properly attributed that would serve diaspora audiences who cannot attend an asalatu in Ibadan but miss the sound of one.
But Lookman is careful here, and rightly so. He lists three conditions in a single breath: seek permission as necessary, agree a profit-sharing formula with the relevant parties, and carry out due diligence to ensure legal compliance.
That is the whole game. Waka performers are not anonymous content. The chant belongs to a person, often to a lineage of performers, and it is performed within a specific group's gathering. Recording it and monetising it without agreement is not entrepreneurship, rather it is extraction, and it will destroy the relationships that the project depends on.
A workable structure looks like this: written permission from each performer or their family, a named profit-share per video, clear credit in the description, and a single point of contact who can withdraw consent. Do that properly and you have a legitimate cultural archive that pays the people who made it.
The Question He Does Not Answer: Who Owns This?
The four ideas share a structural assumption that deserves examination. Lookman addresses his advice to "asalatus and asalatu members," as though the group and its members are the same economic actor. They are not.
If an individual member builds the YouTube channel, who keeps the revenue? If the group's officials record the interviews, who owns the archive when the executives change? If the academy is run by one ambitious member, what stops it becoming their private business built on the community's name?
Any asalatu pursuing this needs an answer on paper before the first video goes up: a simple agreement naming the owning entity, the revenue split, and what happens if the relationship ends. In a community where trust substitutes for contracts, writing it down feels like an insult. It is not; rather it is what prevents the insult later.
There is also a governance question about the money itself. Funds raised through a group's name are not the officials' personal income. They should flow into accounts the membership can see, and be reported at the same meetings where everything else is reported. The moment members suspect the leadership is monetising them, the asalatu loses the thing that made it worth monetising.
A Realistic Starting Sequence
Groups that try all four at once will finish none of them. A sequence that respects capacity:
Months one to two — record, do not sell. Run three Zoom interviews with past officials. Publish them free on YouTube. Cost: data and someone's afternoon. The point is to test whether your group can produce anything on a schedule at all.
Months two to three — build the dhikr library. Start with ten recitations, each with a meaning explained at the end. Pick the ones your members actually recite every week. This is the smallest unit of value you can ship, and the easiest to keep shipping.
Months four to six — launch the academy as a pilot. One course, one cohort, members only, charged periodically. If nobody renews for the second period, you have learned something valuable at low cost.
Month six onward — approach waka, slowly. By now you have a track record, a channel and a working relationship with performers. The permissions conversation is far easier when you can show what you have already built.
What This Really Requires
None of these ideas needs capital. All of them need something scarcer: consistency and a named owner.
A YouTube channel posting twice a month for two years will outperform a beautifully planned academy that never launches. The groups that succeed at this will not be the wealthiest or the most technologically fluent. They will be the ones where one person is genuinely accountable for the thing happening.
And there is a larger point underneath Lookman's four suggestions. Asalatu groups already possess everything a modern media business needs: a defined audience, a weekly gathering rhythm, deep cultural authority, skilled performers, and knowledge accumulated over decades. What they lack is the habit of treating any of it as an asset.
Start with the recitations. Explain what the words mean. Put it on the internet, properly credited, with the group's name on it. That single act does three things at once, it deepens worship, it reaches people who could never attend in person, and it builds something that can eventually pay for the hall.
The asalatu has been giving value away for so many years. It is not a betrayal of the tradition to finally capture some of it.
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