Why Wali Marriage exists

Most apps marketed to Muslims looking for marriage fall into one of two categories. Either they ignore Islamic principles entirely and function as conventional dating platforms with a different name, or they pay lip service to those principles while replicating the exact same mechanics, snap judgements on faces, casual browsing, photo-first interaction, minimal oversight.

Serious, marriage-oriented Muslims, and the families who care about them, are left without a platform actually built for how they want to approach finding a spouse. The wali, the guardian central to Islamic marriage, is treated as an obstacle to work around rather than a relationship to honor. In app after app, family involvement is optional, buried in settings, or missing entirely.

Wali Marriage was created to fill that gap. Not as a marketing angle, but as the actual architecture of the product.

I'm Abe Harbid, the sole founder of Wali Marriage. I'm based in Bridgeview, Illinois, and currently a pre-law student in Chicago. I spent years living in Egypt before returning to the United States, and I'm bilingual in English and Arabic.

What pushed me to build this was watching young Muslims around me, in Chicago, in Cairo, in family group chats, try to find spouses through tools designed for casual dating. The wali isn't an afterthought in Islam; he's foundational. I built Wali Marriage because the people I know deserve a platform where their faith, their families, and their seriousness about marriage are designed in, not worked around.

• Wali Marriage LLC is a registered limited liability company in the State of Illinois.
• Headquartered in Bridgeview, IL.
• "Wali Marriage" is the subject of a US trademark application.
• Operating publicly under the name "Wali Marriage."

Wali Marriage opens across the United States on 15 March 2027, insha'Allah, with a small preview for invited families beforehand. Other countries open in the order people ask for them, so tell us where you are when you join.

You can join by email or by text on the homepage. By email we write about once every two weeks with real news; by text we send one message when the app opens. We never sell your details, and we share them for ads only if your cookie choice allows it.