Meet Mohamed Pazhoor, the inventor who’s tearing down the language barrier for pilgrims

More than two million people visit the holy sites of Mecca and Medina each year to perform the Hajj, one of the required pillars of Islam, but barely 25 per cent of them understand Arabic, the language in which all sermons and services are conducted.

When he performed the Umrah in 2012, Mohamed Salahuddin Pazhoor was among those 75 per cent who were excluded from the full religious experience because of the language barrier. But he decided to actually do something about it.

Salahuddin spent four years creating and implementing his solution: Divine Connect, a revolutionary new technology that won the worldwide Innovation 4 Impact award at the Global Islamic Economy Summit 2016 in Dubai. The award comes with a cash prize of $20,000 and business incubator services worth $10,000.

For Florida-based Salahuddin, the spirit of entrepreneurship has been a lifelong companion. His first enterprise, related to satellite TV antennae, was built when he was in college in his home state of Kerala, India.

Born in an obscure Kerala village named Kummanam, Salahuddin “had no money, only drive and ambition”, as he told MySalaam. This drive and ambition took him on a journey to the US, where he built another business supplying portable voting stations to the Federal Government.

The quest for innovation has led to Salahuddin to register multiple patents in the US. The same quest took him on multiple journeys to Saudi Arabia in an attempt to connect with the right person to offer the Divine Connect solution.

“Divine Connect is the mother of all our projects,” Salahuddin said. “But every trip we made to the [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] to find someone to whom we could demonstrate the prototype was a failure. We had already spent a lot of money building the prototype and on all the travelling, and I was becoming discouraged.”

After two and a half years of trying, however, Salahuddin managed to meet one of the administrators of the Masjid al-Haram, the largest mosque in the world, surrounding Islam’s holiest place, the Kaaba. The administrator introduced him to the Grand Imam, and Salahuddin’s presentation and demonstration proved to be a great success.

Within two months of presenting the Divine Connect language solution, Salahuddin and his team had signed a contract and begun fabricating the hardware required to speak to all Hajj and Umrah pilgrims in their own tongues.

Four different technologies have been developed and deployed to help the Divine Connect program translate all proceedings into seven different languages simultaneously and in real-time, with advanced security that keeps hackers out. The human part of the solution is the team of translators who sit in the background transmitting in these languages.

From the Masjid al-Haram to the rest of the Muslim Ummah is the future track Salahuddin is looking at today. But, as in the past, obstacles continue to slow progress.

“We have designed seven different product lines based on the Divine Connect concept and conservative estimates forecast total revenues of $1 billion by 2020. We want to raise $20 million as angel investment and $200 million after that, but we want to stay true to our Islamic faith [and] raise funds in a halal and Shariah-compliant manner,” Salahuddin said.

However, the tight liquidity and high risk-aversion of today’s global economic climate has made this an uphill task. But Salahuddin is refusing to give up. And that’s the advice he says he would give any young entrepreneur in the Islamic economy: “Never, never give up on your dream.”