My book is about reading critically and constructively against the grain, and claiming a particular space within the Muslim tradition to talk back to… - Sa'diyya Shaikh

I grew up in a Muslim community, particularly with parents and a father that used to tell me the most extraordinary stories and which inspired me. So, I grew up on stories of Shaykh Abdulkad Jaylani Sheikh Rabia, and those were not stories that was told to me as if they were Sufi stories; they were told to me as stories of what good Muslims were, and so my imagination and my heart was fired up.

Sufism is about embodying virtue. That virtue should extend from within oneself to society, an integral part of the spiritual life. Importantly justice is one of the central virtues in this tradition. The challenge to contemporary Muslims is to formulate dynamic and relevant understandings of justice for our times.

While ontology deals with existence in general, its intimate companion, cosmology, provides a map for understanding the universe in its totality—its origin, purpose, and destiny, including the human being’s place within it. Cosmology concerns an understanding of the order and relationships between the various parts of the created universe. Questions that arise in relation to cosmology might include the following: What is the nature of the universe? How was it created? For what purpose and toward what des-tiny was it created? What are a human being’s origin, place, and purpose in this universe? Thus, a cosmological level of inquiry in Islam enables the inquirer to situate notions of human nature and existence within a broader framework of understanding the nature of all creation. In a study of Islamic cosmology, one also finds macrocosmic mappings of gender that resonate in varying ways with understandings of human genderedness.