Sofiah Jamil

A few years ago, I spent a stretch of time helping revive a Singaporean perfumery. Al Zohri had been founded by my maternal grandfather, Kiyai Haji Ahmad Zuhri bin Mutammim — an Islamic scholar and community leader whose original fragrance recipes had been carried down through generations of our family. The work was to reframe the brand for a contemporary audience without losing what made it Al Zohri in the first place: a story embedded in old Singapore, in a particular religious lineage, in a craft that didn’t quite have a vocabulary in the market we were writing into.

Around the same time, I was finalising a book chapter on water recycling in Muslim-majority contexts. The subject was halal wastewater — whether religious orthodoxy could accommodate the environmental pragmatism that water-scarce countries increasingly need. The chapter was bound for a Routledge volume on religious environmentalism. The audience was academic and policy-facing: scholars, regulators, multilateral readers, the occasional water engineer who’d find their way to the book.

A family perfumery and a Routledge chapter. On paper, two very different jobs. In practice, they were the same one.

The job is translation, not topic

Both projects sat at a seam. Al Zohri sat between heritage and modernity, between Islamic Singapore and a global luxury market that didn’t quite know what to do with it. The chapter sat between religious doctrine and engineering rationality, between communities that needed water and institutions that needed sign-off.

In each case, the work was the same: find the language that lets one world hear the other without losing what made either world worth listening to.

That’s the actual craft. Not writing. Not branding. Not academic argument. Translation across worlds that don’t share a vocabulary.

Most people that I have worked with — executives, foundations, practitioners, founders — think they’re hiring me for the surface task. A white paper. A LinkedIn series. A brand narrative. A community explainer. They almost never describe the job as translation, because translation sounds like something done between languages, and they’re not changing languages. They’re changing audiences — which is harder, because everyone still thinks they’re speaking the same English.

Two senior bankers and two rural elders can sit in the same room, hear the same sentence, and walk away with two completely different ideas of what was said. Most communication failures live in that gap. So does most of my work.

What the perfumery taught me about the chapter

Heritage isn’t preserved by being respectful. It’s preserved by being legible. A century-old fragrance line doesn’t survive on reverence. It survives on whether a contemporary buyer can find a place for it in their own life.

I knew the lineage from the inside. Some afternoons it felt less like working on a brand and more like working on a memory. The temptation, with that kind of inheritance, is to protect it by keeping it whole; to insist anyone who encounters it should arrive on its terms. But that path leads, eventually, to a beautiful object no one outside the family knows how to hold.

So the work was to keep the lineage intact; Kiyai Zohri, his family, the recipes, the Islamic provenance, while building a contemporary entry point. A modern buyer needed to encounter Al Zohri without first having to study Singapore’s religious history.

The same logic shaped the halal wastewater chapter. Religious doctrine is not preserved by being insulated from environmental reality. It’s preserved by being legible inside it. The work wasn’t to argue that halal frameworks should bend to pragmatism, or that environmental urgency should override doctrinal care. It was to find the shared ground where both could speak — and to put that ground into a form that would sit on a library shelf for decades.

In both, the failure mode was identical: assuming the other world would meet you on your terms. The success mode was identical too: meeting the other world on its terms first, then bringing your own.

The through-line

Looking back across the work, most of it has been some version of the same job. A digital infrastructure programme designed for rural communities in Vanuatu. A research finding translated into a minister’s briefing. A CEO’s position reframed without losing the nuance that made it credible. Content shaped for women in addiction recovery, where the tone had to hold clinical truth and emotional safety in the same paragraph.

On the surface, none of these looked like the same work. The craft underneath them was identical.

Knowing what to say. Knowing how to say it. Knowing which world it needed to reach — and being patient enough to meet that world where it actually was, not where I thought it should be.

A family perfumery and a Routledge chapter turn out to be the same job because almost every job worth doing is the same job: moving an idea across a seam without breaking it.

Mentioned in this note: Halal Wastewater Recycling: Environmental solution or religious complication? (Routledge, 2022); Al Zohri Perfumery (2023, a family legacy project). Both can be found in Worlds.