What does Islam look like in 2026 — not in the headlines, not in the politics, but in the lives of the people who carry it?

Ihsaan is a long-term documentary photography and film project creating a global portrait of Islam at this precise moment in history. Over several years, photographer Suhayb will travel to 35 countries across six continents — from West Africa to Southeast Asia, from South America to Central Asia, from Europe to the American heartland — to meet the individuals in whom this religion lives, and to document what it has given them.

The project is built on a simple but serious premise: that Islam, practiced across more cultures and geographies than any other religion on earth, is one of the least honestly represented forces in contemporary life. Two billion people organize their days, raise their children, bury their dead, and find their courage through this faith. The project wants to know what that looks like — in a home in Senegal, in a gathering in Indonesia, in a face in Bosnia, in a kitchen in Texas. It wants to find the common threads that connect these lives across language and culture, and the remarkable differences in how the same faith expresses itself across the world.

This is not a project about Islam's politics or its conflicts. It is a project about its force — the particular strength, dignity, and orientation toward goodness that the religion provides to the people who have genuinely absorbed it. It asks what Islam has built in its people, and what those people have built with Islam. It follows the religion to the corners of the earth it has reached, and asks how it got there and what it found.

Photographer Suhayb brings a singular biography to this work. Born to a Jordanian-Palestinian father and a Filipino-American convert mother, raised Muslim in the Pacific Northwest, educated in Islamic theology and history, he stands at the intersection of the religion's most important conversations — Eastern and Western, traditional and modern, immigrant and native. He is a practitioner with critical distance, a believer with an American eye, an insider who has spent his life asking what this religion actually is. This project is his attempt to find out — not through argument or analysis, but through the oldest tools of documentary photography: presence, patience, and honest looking.

The work will move through homes and gatherings, markets and mosques, landscapes and ordinary afternoons. It will produce a major photo book, a feature-length documentary film, and a traveling international exhibition — a body of work that opens the conversation about what Islam is, brings dignity to the full diversity of its practitioners, and makes the case, through images alone, that spiritual health is worth taking seriously.