Ruhan Tahlil
Islam Britto

Ruhan is 17 years old, from Rangpur — a divisional city in northern Bangladesh that doesn't appear in many startup stories. He is, by his own honest admission, a contradiction: innovative and easily distracted, introverted in presence but reportedly louder in person than anyone would expect. He figures things out on his own. He thinks differently from the people around him.

He enjoys learning for the sake of it — science and Islam, in particular, have shaped how he sees the world. Not as separate disciplines, but as part of the same search for truth. He builds between study sessions, from a phone, carrying the weight of an idea that his family doesn't even know about yet.

Ruhan's relationship with Islam is personal — not performative, not surface-level, but also not without its tensions. He describes himself as quite tangled in it. That honesty is rare. Faith, for him, is not a fixed destination but something lived, wrestled with, and genuinely believed.

He hates injustice, wasted potential, and people who dismiss ideas before they've tried them. He overthinks. He struggles to ask for help. He goes quiet when stressed, then retreats into something creative. These aren't flaws he hides — he names them directly, which is its own form of character.

Taqen came to Ruhan in early Ramadan 2026 — and the name itself reveals the intention. Taqen is derived from taqwa: God-consciousness, the quiet discipline of a life lived with purpose. He didn't just pick a name — he embedded a value into the brand's identity before it had a single product.

What he saw missing in Islamic fashion wasn't just better design — it was depth. He wanted clothing and art that taught something. That made the person wearing it curious about Islamic history, connected to its legacy, and proud of what it represents.

Ruhan's design process starts not with software, but with sitting down and thinking. He searches for a concept — something from the Rashidun Caliphate or the Ottoman era, the two periods of Islamic history he is most drawn to. He researches it. He lets it settle. Then he builds digitally, conceptually, from the inside out.

His aesthetic inspirations are nature and calligraphy. His palette begins with black and white. He doesn't sketch — he conceptualises. The result is clothing and art that carry real intellectual weight, because they began with real intellectual effort.

Being 17 and building from a phone with no PC is sometimes a drawback — he knows it. But he also knows something a lot of older founders don't: he has time. Being young isn't a disadvantage. It's compounding interest on every lesson learned now.