A teacher wanted Islamic learning to feel like play. So Madiha started a shop for it

Madiha Basheer Al Deen was working in education, and she spent her days around children who learned best through play, stories and things they could hold. Then she came across someone selling subscription boxes. “I remember thinking, why not do something similar with Islamic books and products for Muslim children?” she says.

She went looking for a shop in India that already did it, one place with Islamic books, educational toys, activities and gifts for children. She couldn’t find one. What she could find was scattered.

So she decided to build it herself. She knew business from her studies, but she had never run a shop like this one. Her first customers were four friends. Today Little Muslims Gift Factory, LMGF to its customers, imports books and toys from abroad and has parents who come back to it again and again. Getting there meant learning everything in between.

Madiha has always worked in education, and she still does. She says it gives her a wider view of what children need at different ages. Along the way she has studied commerce, education, interior design and business administration, up to an MBA, and she speaks five languages: English, Arabic, Urdu, Hindi and Korean. When LMGF began she was on a break from work and doing a diploma in interior design.

She had always liked making things and coming up with ways to make learning mean more. Around children every day, she noticed a gap. There were Islamic products that taught, but few that were fun and attractive, or that children would genuinely enjoy.

She didn’t wait until she had it all worked out. A friend helped her get going, and her mother was one of the first people to back the idea. The first stock came from local suppliers, because she was still learning the market and how many kinds of Islamic products were out there.

As she learned the market, she started looking further afield. The internet helped her find other founders and suppliers, and eventually LMGF was bringing in products from Learning Roots and from Malaysia. The shelves today hold picture books, seerah sets, books on manners and learning toys.

Growing meant dealing with the everyday mechanics of the business: taxes, customs and international payments, then shipping, logistics and deliveries.

By then she had finished her MBA, so she knew the theory. Doing it for real was different, and each new task came with its own learning curve. She doesn’t describe it as a crisis. “Alhamdulillah, I wouldn’t say anything went wrong or threatened the business,” she says. “I see those early challenges as part of the journey, and each one taught me something valuable.”

What changed things was her attitude to everything she didn’t know. She stopped being intimidated by it and went after it: more research, more conversations with suppliers, a proper grip on customs and shipping, and order in her payments and deliveries. She started planning ahead instead of sorting things out at the last minute. “There wasn’t one big breakthrough,” she says. It was a run of small improvements.

Most of LMGF’s customers are Muslim parents, and mothers especially, plus relatives and friends shopping for a gift. Madiha describes the typical one with a laugh: the parent who says, “I need to get my child something useful,” and ends up discovering ten more things they didn’t know they needed.

The win she values most is when those parents return and tell her their children enjoy what they bought. “Those messages mean more to me than just making a sale,” she says. Sarah, her manager, has been with her for years and keeps things running.

It changed her too. She says LMGF has made her more confident and resourceful, and more willing to take risks.

Madiha says her faith shapes how she runs the shop: honesty, fairness, quality and keeping her intentions sincere. She hopes the books and toys help children grow up loving Islam. The thing she would count as her biggest achievement is for LMGF to become Sadaqah Jariyah, a charity that keeps giving after she is gone.

In five years she wants LMGF to be a name Muslim families know around the world, with its own original books and products, a proper online store and, she hopes, a physical shop. The milestones matter less to her than one question: whether all the small efforts made a difference in a child’s life.

There is so much more to come, she says, in sha Allah.

This story is based on Madiha’s answers to our story interview and her notes on the draft. Photos are from Little Muslims Gift Factory on Instagram.