A lot of my engagements with religion emerged out of those kinds of formative experiences: a deep kind of immersion and a desire and a yearning for t… - Sa'diyya Shaikh

My book is about reading critically and constructively against the grain, and claiming a particular space within the Muslim tradition to talk back to patriarchy. It is about claiming an authority within the tradition not for me, but for a certain voice of radical human equality which resides within the tradition.

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.

Hardly have the words left his lips when a hand softer than silk touches his shoulder. He turns. A young woman of breathtaking beauty gazes intently at him. As if omniscient, she responds to his poetic rumination with a depth of spiritual discernment, subjecting each line of his poem to careful scrutiny, culminating in a reprimand: How can “the great mystic of the time” pos-sibly question God’s knowledge of his state? A true lover is content with the desires of the Beloved even when they entail absence and separation.