Mission:
Open new market and create opportunity for Muslim businesses and enterprises. Help Muslim professionals in advancement of their career and provide opportunities to collaborate in partnership, ventures and new ideas.
theMLink.com offers a unique opportunity to network with like-minded Muslims from a wide variety of disciplines and areas from around the world and help each other grow professionally into a potent force striving for a "Stronger and more Economically Impactful Community".
The Founding Vision of theMLink was to try to connect a few like-minded Muslim Professionals using the powerful connectivity of the Internet to enable them to share knowledge across disciplinary boundaries but motivated by a common objective: relevance to economically empowering the Muslim Community. It was envisioned to be a forum for discussion between qualified people on matters of relevance to economic, political, scientific and social future.
theMLink founders believed that creating a forum for intellectual and responsible exchange could be one way of harnessing our individual energies into joint concerted thought and action. This in turn would enable us to learn from each other, network, and 'think hard' jointly about our common problems, and help each other to cope with the future challenges as we pursue our own professional careers.
Focal to this effort are businesses established by Muslims, theMLink.com will enable a platform for the growth of these businesses and create an environment where more Muslims venture in entrepreneurship.
Team Behind theMLink:
Faisal Masood, Co-Founder, Board of Director, theMLink.com
Faisal currently works for JP Morgan Chase as a Senior Program Manager based in New York, USA. Faisal has more than 15 years of management consulting, business management, entrepreneurship and sales management experience. He has managed various tactical and strategic technology integration projects, productivity initiatives and merger integration programs.
Faisal graduated from The University of Illinois, Chicago with a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1996.
Faisal was one of the founders of pcWonders.com, which merged with Buyitnow.com in June 2000. Faisal worked as Vice President, Operations of the merged entity. As a founder he started the company in January 1999 and grew the company to $8 million monthly sales in eight months of its operation. PcWonders.com was primarily engaged in the sales of technology and electronics products to small businesses and consumers.
Prior to this venture, Faisal worked for the North American Operations of General Motors Corporation where he was a Project Manager in Paint Process automation group for the Truck Platform.
Faisal also teaches Information System and Technology Management Courses in the School of Business at Rutgers University, New Jersey
Faheem Ahmed, Co-Founder, Board of Director, theMLink.com
Faheem founded Beyond 2000 Technologies (BYT) in 1997. He has successfully run verticals in the areas of IT staffing, training and software development. In 1997 BYT became a leading company in training & consulting services for Y2K remediation. In 1998 he partnered with a SAP consulting company (Software Resource House Pvt. Ltd.) based out of Melbourne, Australia. Software Resource House Pvt. Ltd.’s clients included Mercedes Benz and Nissan among others. He went on to form a small team of VLSI engineers providing consulting services to the semi conductor industry. He has managed several IT projects successfully throughout his career. In 2005 BYT invested into online marketing & Search Engine marketing and today they are one of the leading Search Engine Marketing firms in South India. Furthermore, Faheem is passionate about mentoring, marketing & networking.
He holds a Bachelor in Computer Engineering, an MBA, and is also a certified Project Management Professional.
Mohammed Abdullah, Vice President, theMLink.com
Mohammed currently works for Deutsche Bank as an Assistant Vice President in IT Applications Audit focusing on Global Markets. Audit coverage also extends to include Asset Management, Private Wealth Management, Private Client Services, Global Banking, and the Real Estate Group. Prior to Deutsche Bank, Mohammed was with Deloitte & Touche in the Risk Services practice specializing in Sarbanes Oxley compliance and Business and IT processing controls testing, implementation and review. Mohammed graduated with honors from an accelerated BA/MBA program at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA majoring in Economics (BA) and Marketing, MIS and Supply Chain Management (MBA). He is a Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE), Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA), and a Level 2 Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) candidate.
Mohammed also volunteers his time for the Deutsche Bank Social Investment Fund, a $350 million loan and investment portfolio, focusing on Microfinance. Alongside Microfinance, he is also involved in Islamic Finance and professional networking.
Fu’ad Butt, Board of Director, theMLink.com
Fu’ad Butt is a Corporate Vice President at New York Life (NYL) Insurance Company. In his current capacity, he manages two teams: NYL’s Lead Generation efforts to the 10,000 US based NYL Financial Planners and acting as corporate IT liaison to NYL’s affinity marketing groups such as NYL AARP, NYL LTC (long term care) and NYL Group Membership.
Prior to joining NYL, Fu’ad worked for PNC Financial as an Assistance VP in their Consumer Banking Division where he held varying roles in Strategic Planning, Product Management, Marketing and Operations.
Fu’ad graduated from Virginia Tech with a BSc in Finance and a BSc in Economics. He also holds a Masters in International Business from the University of South Carolina and has a Certificate of Professional Development from UPenn’s Wharton School of Business.
Fu’ad is involved in a number of volunteer efforts, including serving as the Chairperson of the Career Advancement Program (CAP) at the Islamic Sociey of Central Jersey.
Shamsa Chaudhary, Board of Director, theMLink.com
Shamsa is a Partner for an international advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide. She graduated (Valedictorian, Summa Cum Laude) from DeVry University in 2002, where she earned the All American Scholar Award, National Dean’s List Award, and was honored Commencement Speaker. Now, she is embarking an Executive MBA at Northwestern University.
Shamsa is dedicated to making a difference at both a local and international level. She is already a leading voice of promoting higher education amongst local minority students, international women’s rights and providing basic necessities to local Muslim refugee families.
Her personal and professional efforts have been recognized by The Daily Herald, The Sun, New York Times, B2B Magazine, and Crain’s Chicago.
Shamsa is based out of Chicago and is also the President of CAMP (Council for advancement of Muslim Professionals), Chicago chapter. Shamsa recently expanded her vision by launching a marketing firm BizInsite.
Wasi Rehman, Board of Director, theMLink.com
Wasi works at CitiBank as a Project Manager and specializes in the area of designing and building large-scale real time transactional and secure web applications. He has expertise in applying the latest technologies in the construction of applications for financial industry where security is paramount. Prior to Citibank, Wasi held various IT positions at Merrill Lynch, AT&T, and SMS. Prior to his IT career, he worked as a Project Engineer in the Chemical Engineering discipline.
Wasi graduated from the Pennsylvania State University with an MS degree in Chemical Engineering and from IIT, Madras, India with a BS degree in Chemical Engineering.
At Citigroup, he has been designing, implementing, and managing CitiDirect product for multinational corporate customers for the last 10 years. He pioneered single signon technologies, designed and implemented several highly secure authentication mechanisms, managed application security and developed critical and innovative middleware.
At Merrill Lynch, Wasi developed TGA TV application for the ML's Financial Consultants and other products that integrated with the TGA platform.
At AT&T, he designed and developed a toolkit for sales force and at SMS, he developed scheduling engine for hospitals.
In the early 1990s, in his role as a Chemical Engineer, he designed and built Nitrogen purification systems, nitrogen production systems, developed GravCalc software for blending precise gaseous mixtures, NO blending system using LON-enable mass flow meters, designed PLC-based automatic scrubbing systems, etc.
His hobbies are Tennis, Table tennis, Chess, Bridge, and gardening. He enjoys reading and discussing astronomy, quantum physics, number theory, and scientific achievements of early Muslims.
Khaled Elraie, Board of Director, theMLink.com
Khaled is a practicing physician and lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. Khaled is also an entrepreneur and has an enormous desire to start and grow a business. He is fascinated by the possibilities and has great admiration for successful business leaders. He has come to experience first hand, several times, how hard things can be for a beginning entrepreneur. His interest mainly lies in e-business and his current projects are www.1PhotoStreet.com and www.globe411.com.
Kashif Zubair, Board of Director, theMLink.com
Kashif is the CEO of Adroit Consulting. Adroit provides services in the areas of financial and operational assurance and systems implementation, including infrastructure. Kashif has vast experience working as information systems auditor and IT strategist with companies like Ernst & Young, Arthur Andersen and PricewaterhouseCoopers in the continents of Asia, Australia, and North America.
Kashif holds an undergraduate in Accounting, an MBA in Management Information Systems, and additionally, has over six certifications in the areas of information systems auditing and infrastructure security.
Kashif also serves the Council for the Advancement of Muslim Professionals (CAMP) International (www.campnet.net) as their Chairperson.
Nazeer Syed, Technology Lead, theMLink.com
Nazeer is currently involved in Research Labs of AT&T. where he leads a development team and participates in decision making for new ways of implementing and enhancing current systems.
He has worked in leading techonolgy companies such as AT&T, IBM, Computer Associates, Lucent Technologies, Medco and Rail Inc and is an expert in managing, designing and developing web applications using WebServices, J2EE, and CMS.
He volunteers his time for non profit organizations to help build their applications on the Web. His latest renovation of hilalsighting.org and MuslimConsumerGroup.com helps the Muslim community in accessing and utilizing these leading information sources.
Nazeer holds a Bachelor in Electronic and Communication Engineering.