Amber Leibrock: When Defeat Stopped Being the End of the Story

A closed Quran on a carpet in warm light — Malik Shibly / Unsplash — source · license.

Amber Leibrock’s journey did not begin with a sporting triumph or with prior knowledge of Islam. In a long conversation published by MCC East Bay, she said she grew up without a clear religious background, lost her father as a child, and was raised largely by her grandmother. Instability led into difficult years around street life and addiction. Fighting was not merely a career at that point; it became the discipline through which she left drugs and alcohol and rebuilt a more ordered life.

Athletic success, however, did not settle the question of meaning. During the 2023 Professional Fighters League season, she first earned a striking victory and then lost to Larissa Pacheco on 16 June in forty-five seconds. She later described a severe emotional low after that defeat despite the scale of the professional opportunity around her. She did not present the loss as the single cause of her conversion. Rather, she said fighting exposed what achievement alone had not repaired.

Her coach and mentor Mujeeb “MJ” Hamid had been inviting her to learn about Islam and visit a mosque. During that difficult period, he spoke to her about calling on God late at night. Leibrock said she did not know how to pray, yet awoke before dawn on successive days without an alarm. She understood this as a personal experience that moved her to accept the invitation to MCC. It remains part of her testimony, not a universal proof and not a scene for an editor to embellish.

MCC East Bay’s record fixes her shahada at the Pleasanton center on 21 July 2023. This account does not reconstruct the words spoken in the room or the arrangement of those present; the original shahada recording does not provide a complete text transcript. What the institutional record and her later testimony establish is the date and place, and a path involving companionship, introduction, prayer and inquiry—not one fight result by itself.

Later, she spoke candidly about a second challenge: trying to learn everything at once. She absorbed so much information that she began to feel she was doing nothing correctly. She then returned to advice she kept hearing: begin with prayer, learn gradually, and do not make a mistake a reason to abandon the path. In the February 2024 conversation, she said she had learned the prayer step by step, memorized supplications, and was preparing for her first Ramadan. These are dated statements, not a judgment about every later stage of her life.

Islam also changed the place fighting held in her identity. After another loss, she said faith did not guarantee victory; the test could come precisely when expected money or a title disappeared. Fighting was no longer her final definition of herself. It had become a road that led her toward God and toward a community in which she felt welcomed. She also began organizing women-only training events and seeking greater modesty in a sport that does not always give female competitors many clothing choices.

Her family received the news without rejection and asked simply whether she was happy. She described siblings who began asking questions and accommodating some of her new choices. Their response is not made a condition of the decision’s sincerity, but it shows the value of quiet support after shahada and of companions who answer a new Muslim’s questions without haste or harshness.

The most faithful reading of her journey is not that one punch led by itself to Islam. A defeat exposed an older question, companionship opened a door to knowledge, prayer turned need into inquiry, and then came a public decision followed by slow learning. An individual story cannot prove an entire religion, but Leibrock’s account redirects one question: from “How do I control everything again?” to “How do I learn to trust God while continuing to act?”

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