I was struck by Jim Garrison and Banafsheh Sayyad’s article last year for the Huffington Post: “Muhammad was a Feminist”. It touched on some interesting viewpoints and received a lot of positive and negative responses. And while the article didn’t go into much detail, it stayed with me and left me with another interesting thought: while you can argue endlessly about whether Muhammad was or wasn’t a feminist (and get further lost in debates about which definition of Feminism you... Read more
Since I was a 13-year-old spending recesses in the schoolyard composing poems inspired by my turbulent home life, I’ve been passionate about storytelling. My career has centered on telling thousands of stories about the interplay between economics, politics and financial markets in developing countries. I also love blogging about the ways the spiritual tradition of Islam, or the act of surrendering oneself to the Divine, unfolds in my life. Some may say writing comes naturally to me, that it’s my... Read more
Saints were everywhere in my Catholic childhood. Their haloed, beseeching visages appeared in the unlikeliest places, from laminated prayer cards that fell out of books to oblong medals glued on to car dashboards. This suggested to me that saints were holy people pulled down to earth by the concerns of daily life. Their names designated landmarks of fraught emotional territory that we mortals were ill-equipped to navigate alone: schools, churches, hospitals. As patron saints, they even had something like job... Read more
My wife and I were recently invited to lead another service at our local Unitarian chapel and when thinking about what our theme should be, it occurred to us that both Muslims and Unitarians champion the use of reason, firmly insisting that reason should be a bedrock of faith. Yet within Islam, there has always been a mode of knowing which transcends human reason, an intuitive knowledge of the heart which Sufis in particular have attempted to explore. Perhaps here... Read more
One evening a few weeks before my 25th birthday, I alighted from a train in the Heidelberg railway station and took off running. It was a twice-weekly routine at the time. I was taking evening classes at the University of the Frankfurt, and the train returning me to Heidelberg arrived just a few minutes before the last tram of the night departed, leaving it up to me to make the short connection in a burst of sheer personal speed. I... Read more
He could have been someone’s grandfather from Sicily, dressed in a three-piece suit, walking with a cane, the bearer of the mischievous yet innocent smile. But, somehow, contained within this merely earthly form was a powerful generator of heart-melting love — a love free of any sentimentality, sanctimony, or possessiveness. My first encounter with a Sufi Murshid forever changed my idea of what a spiritual master could be. Until that time I had met a number of highly developed human... Read more
Dearest M, Where do we go from here? For the last year I have been writing you these letters like a distant admirer. But I don’t want to stay at a remove any longer. I want to be as close to you as I possibly can. And more than that: I want to know how you and I can be together, forever. Beyond the limits of space and time, and any other ideas of what might be... Read more
The 2010 Hollywood celebrity fest chick-flick Valentine’s Day opens with Reed Bennett, a florist played by Ashton Kutscher, proposing marriage to Morley (Jessica Alba), as she wakes up on Feb. 14. Evidently startled, Morley initially accepts, sending Reed on a joyful mission to let everyone know his sweetheart said “yes”! But his elation is short-lived. A few hours later Reed finds Morley in his apartment packing her bag as she hands back his ring and walks out on the relationship... Read more
One of the aims of our new book The 99 Names of God is to help children, parents, and teachers build a spiritual link to the natural world, making us aware that God communicates to us through nature in the most beautiful, awesome, playful, and sublime manner. Young and old are encouraged to see how we learn spiritual and ethical lessons in the natural world, how we are nourished by it inwardly and outwardly, and that outside of the human... Read more
In the heap of objects strewn across the dining room floor, I spotted a sterling silver sugar bowl that was part of a four-piece tea set my mom bought about three decades ago to entertain guests. I picked up the bowl with one hand, while using the other to rummage through the pile of papers, cloth napkins, tupperware and cutlery scattered beneath my feet. I was curious whether the rest of the silverware was somewhere in the mess left by... Read more
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