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Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction

01:48 Understanding what “othering” means

04:43 Finding another way to see to create a new relational reality

05:22 How the language of healthcare and disease drives exclusion

09:44 How this shows up in counter-extremism efforts

12:10 Finding a better way to see, a better way to aim at the problem

13:30 Looking at the environment that a wound is embedded in

15:15 The wound or disease isn’t bound to a landscape so much as it’s trapped in a TIMESCAPE

18:56 How this all applies to us today

21:00 Why it seems like human rights are a fantasy

22:39 An invitation to see the wound with wonder

What is Othering?

Pushing an individual beyond the pale, and pushing them so beyond the pale that not only do you not see them as human anymore, but you see them as open game, as open season on them. You see them as available targets for whatever aggression or frustration you might have. That other person becomes a target. These are very ancient patterns. We’ve seen them from time immemorial between one clan and another clan, one god and another god. It’s not just that they’re “other” and separated or segregated from society, but that separation becomes weaponized, and the aim becomes the other. Given this crisis, the invitation then becomes, can we find another way to create a new relational reality?

The Language of Disease and Sanitization

When we take real human issues in our culture, and we label them as a disease, we’ve already “othered” them, as something that needs to be eradicated. The language around that is that it needs to be sanitized. When we’re looking to sanitize, we’re looking to ‘cleanse’ a people or a group. We’re seeing that play out in global wars in ethnic cleansing, attempts to cleanse a people of their beliefs through advocacy religiously. There are attempts to sanitize a population to remove people who don’t look like what is believed to be the collective. All of this is done under the guise of a value, but this practice not only otherizes but also divorces us from ourselves. It reinforces a myth that we have to live pristinely, and that becomes policy that treats people who look different as some kind of invasive species.

The reason that kind of rhetoric is unfortunately effective is because who doesn’t want to eradicate a disease? When you take what is well-meaning in healthcare and apply it to people, it becomes a weapon. It becomes something used to inflict tremendous pain on a population, employing very simplistic language.

The Need for Another Way to See

When I worked in counter-extremism, I noticed there’d be a hyper fixation on the disease or what was wrong. Rather than understanding where people were coming from, well-meaning people would stare at the problem; they would fixate on it instead of seeing it as a whole. The problem tends to be stared at, which only amplifies it further.

Why does this happen? There’s a pattern of monetizing a problem for content or exploiting it for an agenda. But we rarely look at a problem with wonder and curiosity.

When I suggest we need to “aim better,” it’s not about aiming a weapon; it’s about our focus, our vision. Not aiming at others as targets, but aiming our focus on the wound with curiosity. Therein lies a critical distinction. When we keep looking at our environment, our culture, our news events, our patterns, as something to be squashed, then that becomes the only language we know. And that is a behavior pattern that is not that different from the disease itself. A disease looks to overtake, to overpower, to conquer. And when we take that same approach toward a problem, we become another kind of disease. So you don’t have a clash of civilizations, you have a clash between disease and disease.

If we change our perspective and see the wound as something to be understood, we can deepen ourselves; we can deepen our own lens.

Looking at the Environment a Wound is Embedded in

The reason we have this pattern of othering, the reason we have this wound essentially is because of the environment. What I mean by that is something very unique. I don’t just mean that we’re in different territories or landscapes that are creating that wound. The issue is that the wound is trapped in a timescape. So not landscapes, but timescapes. Let’s take a closer look at that…

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Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, was murdered in North Carolina last week while riding the subway home. In a horrific, unprovoked attack, Zarutska was fatally stabbed in the neck by a man sitting behind her. Days later, Charlie Kirk, a popular right-wing figure and head of America’s most prominent conservative youth organization, Turning Point USA, was shot in the neck while speaking at a college campus in Utah.

Receiving the news yesterday confirming Kirk died of his wounds, I couldn’t help but shake the attacks on the neck. I couldn’t shake it because over the last few years, I’ve kept hearing the resurrection of calls to violence that threaten the necks of the rich through imagery of the French Revolution, marked by heads rolling at the foot of a guillotine.

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Years ago, during my counterextremism days, I would track the news and report on who did what. Once you see a pattern and you understand extremism, it’s not something you can fully ever turn away from. I still see the patterns, except now I look at what the pattern is singing of; I look to see if the pattern can alchemize chaos and confusion into a song that carries notes of wisdom.

So what is the wisdom here? What is trying to sing to us in this moment across eerily similar attacks on completely unrelated people?

SEVERANCE.

Taschen’s Book of Symbols details the symbology of the neck as a place of high vulnerability, often a target for predators, as seen in phrases like “go for the jugular.”

So the questions I ask myself to find discernment in this moment are: What is being severed? What is being sacrificed? What is the predator?

The entire crux of my upcoming (second) book, The Song of the Mystery: The Foundation for Human Belonging, is the result of a two-year deep dive into this question. [Click here to read the first book]. I’m called to take a break from writing that and return to this specific series of incidents this week, because they very much encapsulate the heart of the disease we’re dealing with.

The story around Charlie Kirk, for example, is that an Etsy witch supposedly cursed him upon request. It’s one of the sub-narratives around the story, but the idea of a curse is very real in the broader reality here. Our shared human reality is tinged by a curse — a curse of perception. We have long been severed from ourselves and from each other through a wheel of misfortune, often referred to as the Buddhist concept of Samsara.

How to even begin to understand that in practical terms is a long and winding road, a labyrinth of mirrors. But this is where the idea of severance makes it very simple by revealing a very clear picture. We have been severed from each other — and worse, from ourselves. In the last week, that image came up THREE times…Iryna, Charlie, and (largely unnoticed in the news cycle) the beheading of a man in Dallas, Texas. When something comes in threes, we’re called to pay attention.

The severances are part of a larger tattered pattern in our human reality.

The “songbooks” I’m writing — The Song of the Human Heart, The Song of the Mystery, and The Song of Childhood — speak to the nodes of severances first within the outer reality, then within the collective, and finally within the self. In writing these stories, which were deeply informed by the times we’re living in, I saw how, within just a few years, our American collective identity shifted from viewing other nations as enemies to seeing others as the enemy, and then quickly to seeing each other as the enemy. Nesting dolls of hate, a nesting doll of disease. That is the curse we’re under.

Layers of severance and always by design of the curse we’re under the influence of, like a thick poppy smoke in a field of forgetting.

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The severance didn’t begin in our outer reality, and most people are thankfully awake to this fact. The conservative political response at this hour is that ‘political violence has no place here.’ I don’t need to tell you about the two-year genocide to which our attention has been held hostage.

Images of politicians signing bombs.

Images of children whose eyes no longer carry the expression of life.

Images of a child with his eye hanging out of its socket like a bulb pulled out of its field.

There’s more…in the last few months, we’ve seen the violent political arrests and deportations of anyone who doesn’t look like the neo-Nazi archetypal villain — blonde, blue-eyed, draped in a flag, speaking in tongues of patriotism laced with toxic naturalism [I wrote about that here].

A few weeks ago, I witnessed my first I.C.E. raid at a local car wash. I cannot begin to describe what a vile experience it was, the horror we felt watching people, especially the elderly, be so casually dehumanized. I’m a writer — and even I don’t have the words for it. Perhaps there are no words for it, no language that can frame a visceral reality.

All this is to say that the guillotine has long since fallen.

The guillotine fell approximately four thousand years ago, when Tiamat, the primordial goddess of chaos, was sacrificed for brute order. The first god of the monotheistic death cult, Marduk, severed Tiamat’s body. Marduk — whose name means to kill / heartbreaking grief in Urdu — severed Tiamat’s body into two and called it the establishment of order.

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When we’re looking at how we got here, when we try to understand the escalating hate and extremism in our world, it’s not enough to look at what happened five minutes ago. We need a much older eye, a much older lens. We need to look at our mythology.

The Babylonian mythology of Marduk and Tiamat isn’t just a story; it is the very foundation for the evolution of the concept of “God” as we understand it in monotheism, the paradigm currently in power. There is God, the Great Eye beyond the Edge of Time, the Wild-Honey Eyed consciousness as I describe it in my second book …and there is the imperial overlord of monotheism, or “Sky Daddy” as defined in popular culture. The idea of our patriarchal world, the hierarchies, a most lethal order that severs us from each other and ourselves, is rooted in the mythology of the first severance.

The question then is, how do we reclaim and repair this severance? How do we even begin to sew repair across time and space? It begins exactly at the point of severance. It begins with the throat chakra, with our voice, with our primal tongue — a mirror for the womb, for the first story, the first cave we called home.

To be continued in a follow-up piece, The Patriarchal Eye.

The Song is the Medicine

In the summer of 2022, I attended Aniwa in the mountains of Big Bear, California. Aniwa is a gathering of wisdom keepers that brings together 40 of the world’s foremost indigenous leaders and elders over several days.

On the fourth day, four members of the Yawanawá hosted a song workshop. Two men and women, not past their early twenties, guided our group through the various sacred songs of the Yawanawá tribe. All members of the tribe ask the forest to teach them song medicine. Every new generation learns these chants in the forest, paired with fasting so that they can be present with the words of the song.

The elders teach that every bird in the Amazon has a song, no matter how melodious or alarming. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a traditionally beautiful singing voice; every singer is welcome. The guides shared with us their belief in how a force comes in when they’re in song and when they’re with plant medicine. If there is a spirit, it is with them when they are in song.

The voices of our guides are youthful, reflecting their young age and even their hesitation to be up on the stage with the usual sort of showmanship we’re used to seeing in TED Talks. This is simpler, a sort of force that is already stirring between the drums, the speakers, and the patterned canopy overhead.

The first song is of the men, a deep bellowing grounded chant of two verses that say: We are here, but we are on our way. It speaks to the beautiful quantum reality that I found Islam also speaks to — that you can be in two places at once. The second song is for the women and expresses a beautiful lament, a remembering as haunting as a wolf’s call.

The songs are simple and learned in their traditional form, after which tribe members are welcomed to innovate the songs through their own musical signature. Each person can create a new version, a new branch of the original song. The song is always renewing itself through the singer. It reminds me of the intention religion carries, offering a template for our understanding of the world but also allowing for the flexibility to adapt and bend — not to our will out of force but through play. Like a swinger of birch trees swaying to and fro on branches that bend to the ground as children play on them, creating new forms and patterns in the silhouette of trees, a new kind of belonging across a landscape that is the unique expression of the artist — the swinger. As poet Robert Frost said, “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”

The traditional men’s song of the Yawanawá is not unlike the Islamic azan. It feels like an instruction, something you stand there and receive. The innovation of the men’s song by one of the young tribesmen was entirely different. He paired the song with drums and guitar, infusing a new rhythm that was joyful, and celebratory. Here now, you’re not just with the traditional song, you’re also hearing the response to the song. The innovation answers the question of the wild, “Where are you?” You’re answered with the spirit of play, through fun and frolic. Faith is the simplicity of a child in play, inflow for the sake of play rather than any end destination — like a song.

Through innovation, you hear the beauty of unique expression. You hear the interpretation of a tradition, a novelty that is entirely his own imprint on a legacy. It is nothing short of masterful, enriching a deeper sense of belonging that is not just present but also inclusive. We all began dancing and singing. The Yawanawá punctuate the song with short random callouts that are part of their cultural practice. They resemble what you hear among Arabs during their celebrations, an ululation that is a high-pitched vocal sound except here it’s much shorter. For the Yawanawá, like the Arabs, it’s an invitation that welcomes reciprocation — something my son Reagan Azan who is on the Autism spectrum also does in moments of elation. Here he would be welcomed, I thought. Here he could belong.

Where the men’s song shifted from stoic to receptive, the women’s song moved from sounding like a prayer in traditional form to sounding like a longing for love in its innovation. Accompanied by a slower tempo in guitar and drum, a voice that carried so much gravity for its tender years, sang of a wisdom and tenderness I hadn’t found in traditional Islam. In some ways, hearing her sing her lament, and the lament that echoed the wail of the Common Loon, unlocked a memory within me of something I didn’t know I had lost and yearned so deeply for. The song I was listening for was in some ways also the lament of my own heart, my heartbreak at never finding belonging any place except in spaces between things.

In all the inquiry into which interpretation in Islam is legitimate, the battles over who did what and when, we lost the sacred (that was uniquely for us as pilgrims of the heart in the journey toward the all-loving God). And yet, here I’m listening to a girl half my age who belongs to a remote culture that on the surface level was completely different from Islam. In her song I found something I couldn’t find in the surface layer of Islam despite 20 years of searching through Islam for what was missing. I was searching for something I couldn’t name, for the song that exists because we existed; for a song that could only ever be because you came into the world. I was searching for the existence of what rises when you feel like your journey has failed you, and is failing you. When it's just you in the spaces of nothingness, what song does your heart sing? What would that song sound like if you had also been taught by the birds? I was in some way long since searching for the song that is cast in the Dark and heard by all that belongs to the wilderness of the heart.

“The song is the medicine of the birds,” we’re told by Rasu, one of the four members of the Yawanawá.

The view of medicine is different in indigenous cultures, seeing medicine as something that offers the nourishment of wisdom, preventing a weakened spiritual state much like the nourishment from food prevents a weakened physical state.

For the Yawanawá, song learning is not complete until singing together, which is how we closed the song workshop. A chorus of people rising to stand, and learning a song for the first time, stretching their voice into new forms that danced to the beat of a heart in elation. By the end of our song, I was holding back tears. I thought of my own life, a blur of ten-hour work day, a son I don’t nearly get to spend enough time with in a way that really matters, in a way that we both deserve. This could be life, I thought. This is the life we all deserve — a life of song and elation and gathering. Instead, we’ve accepted a placebo devoid of the richness of the ceremony of being in community — a ceremony where we celebrate the signature of our expression, where we cast our song. A life where there is always an answer to, “Where are you?”

The richness of voices of the young Yawanawá doesn’t mirror their age. The young men sound as if they are decades older, and the young women sang with a wisdom you hear in the voice of women far more mature who have suffered the sting of loss. The songs have been sung for a very long time and everyone’s song is different. How many times have I heard the Islamic call to prayer, the azan, recited but unsung? How many times has it been recited but never made our own? What could we learn from the Yawanawá to enrich our own experience with faith?

There are so many ways to worship in the world, so many ways to call out in the darkness. But there’s also another calling, a calling that says, “I am listening.” In between all the noise, where is the absence of sound? Where is the silence? What is the silence singing? Can you stay with that song of silence, and listen for it for as long as it takes?

We have scripture and prayers in Islam, as with most other faiths, but no song. There is the Azan, a recited announcement letting the community know it’s time for the first of five prayers of the day — or now with the tech age, through the shrill metallic cry of the prayer app on your phone. The fajr (dawn) prayer is not a song; it's a call to attention. And yet there are those of us whose hearts are of the wild, who resist submission to an obligation. The call of the Wild cannot be summoned. Presence cannot be drummed up through a duty to be present without losing what is sacred in that arrival.

There is a richness to the song when it is of free will. When a free heart recites the Quran, it is not a recitation — it becomes a song. It is no longer a verse, it is music. It is religion made sacred in that moment for that moment. Though there are beautiful recitations that are song- like, the Azan is not treated as something to be sung. It’s recited from memory of mind. There are exceptions who when they sing glow radiantly like orbs in the night sky, scattered like seeds upon which we trace lines to create a map of what makes humanity sacred. A song is unique, and a culture that sings carries a different tune, a different frequency that can shape and reshape the world.

Footnotes:

1. The Yawanawá, known as ‘the people of the wild boar’, live in the Indigenous Land of Rio Gregório in the state of Acre, deep in the Brazilian Amazon. (Elms)

2. Greg Budney, Macaulay Library Audio Curator, describes the song of the Common Loon in the North Woods. (Macaulay Library)

3. Common Loons are freshwater birds that produce loud, long, haunting vocalizations during the breeding season, usually at night. The wail often sounds like a wolf's howl. (Beletsky and University)

A book 42 years in the making…
The Song of the Human Heart:
Dawn of the Dark Feminine in Islam

Islam is often called a ‘dark religion’ by those who have misunderstood the faith. The Song of the Human Heart encourages embracing Islam as a ‘dark’ religion. Islam belongs to the realm of the Dark, the primordial feminine aspect of God. The Dark is the other eye of God alongside the Light, across the face of a great divinity that is nebulous and unknowable.

The Song of the Human Heart is a return to belonging and remembering the intimacy of what it means to be human. The book I started feeling for after 9/11, The Song of the Human Heart is crafted storytelling that turns decades of lived experience into a constellation mapping the way back home to The God-Heart.

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Sheer and utter exhaustion. That’s how I stumbled into the most beautiful stretch of prayer I’ve ever experienced — through sheer and utter exhaustion.

It was around 4 pm, and I had spent the entire day swept up in the tide of domestic duties, peppered with the perennial caretaking that comes with being a mother to an Autistic child. Hour after hour, something needed sorting, cleaning, organizing, and putting away. The cooking needed doing, and mouths required feeding. The kitchen now needed tidying up. A small meltdown. More laundry. At this point, my nerves and body felt like taut, tired wires on a dilapidated guitar. If anyone or anything else plucked at me for my attention, I would surely snap…like an instrument that no longer holds the memory of music, where any touch feels like noise.

And so I sank into my seat at the kitchen table. “Just for a moment,” I thought. “I’ll just sit here for a moment,” perching my elbows on the table and covering my face with my hands. I couldn’t tell you why I did that. There was nothing and no one to hide from. I suppose I just needed the darkness for a moment. Maybe, subconsciously, it was a practice I picked up from my 13-year-old, who has spent most of the last year with his eyes closed, shutting out the outer world.

And that’s when it began — the most beautiful prayer…

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In Islamic prayer — the kind of prayer ritual I grew up with — worship begins with sobriety. You wash up, cover your hair, and step on the prayer mat with intention. You repeat prescribed prayers before casting your prayer wishes. This was nothing like that.

I felt grimy, my body sticky with the sweat of labor. Wavy wisps of hair sprouted out of my head like tufts of wild nasturtiums. Nothing was rehearsed. This was raw submission, and it began with the place where traditional prayer ended: the asking.

“Show me what I need,” I asked into the dark.

Connecting with the Dark — what I call the other eye of God — while in shambles with no regard for the orchestration of clocks and prayer times…does, at large, make me a pretty terrible Muslim (if other people’s standards measure terribleness). And yet, I have learned more about the heart of Islam — its message of submission — through the badlands of what it means to be a woman. Or at least — what my experience of being a woman has been like so far: devoid of authentic community and saturated in isolation through circumstance.

Many times over the years, you have to figure things out on your own. When you’re often on your own, and there’s no one coming to help, when asking usually falls on deaf ears, sooner or later, you realize that it’s all just too much. You get tired of trying to figure things out, of holding on to it all. You can’t mentally maneuver your way out of every situation; some things just are. And over the years, you get tired. So tired — the tired only a parent fully caretaking for an Autistic child can ever know. And so you surrender. You submit your will and wiles at the threshold of prayer. “Here, I give this to you. I can’t do this anymore.”

Through the experience of writing The Song of the Human Heart, I genuinely believe that Islam is an invitation to let go. Everything else around it, the distortions, have become noise that makes what was harmonic, now taut and strained, ready to snap.

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On my altar space is a wooden bowl in the shape of two open hands. It’s a divine reciprocity, a symbolic giving and a receiving with the sacred, where that language of flow can take shape. Within the open palms, I place what I am offering and what I am asking. There’s a statue of a storyteller; I am asking for wisdom to be able to tell the stories I am writing and to be able to hold the vibrational note like an instrument in harmony. There’s a pair of stone eyes, one of moonstone and one of obsidian, symbolizing the two eyes of God; I am asking for divine sight. There’s a puzzle piece symbolizing both Autism and the Mystery I find myself in; I am placing both in Her trust. There are tiny pink roses and rose oil; an offering of feminine beauty, a symbol of layers of reality, and a nod to the oldest religious talisman, the rosary. And there is a gold coin; I am asking for abundance and enrichment for a smoother journey.

The stranger life gets — as I think we’re all finding in recent times with compounding heartbreak over world events — the easier it becomes to surrender if we have been in the practice of surrender. I recently learned that I may have my own heart-break. The other night, I felt a sudden movement in my heart, like a baby in the womb stretching for space. An EKG showed there may be an issue with electrical signals getting through. A few days later, I placed a rose quartz stone in the shape of a heart; I am offering my heart. There’s nothing more I can do lifestyle-wise; it’s in God’s hands now.

There’s wisdom in surrender. I wouldn’t have understood the practice of surrender if the first half of life had come easily, if it had been a charmed life. There’s a profound blessing in that. At least, that is the story of the first 44 years of life. Maybe things were hard by design; perhaps that’s what it took to get me to surrender. Maybe The Song of the Human Heart — re-imagining Islam as a seed faith to be buried in the mythological Dark — an exquisitely revolutionary idea, would never have been possible until I became an instrument attuned to the hand of God. (Actually, that’s not a question of maybe. If life had been charmed and easy early on, I know I would have been lost in the material. Like so many others, the only thing I would have ever mastered worshipping is myself.)

So I sat there at the kitchen table. The kitchen table — the phrase you often only hear during presidential election cycles where the out-of-touch rehearse anecdotes to appear relatable to the masses. That’s the only time in America you hear of the “kitchen table.”

And what exactly is the story of the kitchen table? Aren’t the stories we’re told all stories of woe, of counting our beans, of trying to study our fate across a deck of bills and receipts like novices stumbling through a tarot of misery, of seeing if we can survive into next month? The opposite of surrender. The opposite of mastery.

What was once a place of gathering commons — a place of tending — has become a place of complexity and calculation. And when it’s not that, it’s the stage for the rehearsal of being a family. Funny, isn't it, how the rehearsal of prayer, of people bobbing up and down on a prayer mat, isn’t that different from other kinds of rehearsed behaviors replicating the sacred, replicating gathering? Isn’t it noteworthy to observe how a space reserved for a special gathering is something we have to get through now, disconnected from each other just as much as we’re disconnected from ourselves — whether that is communal prayer or the proverbial awkward family dinner? Maybe I’m not as isolated as it may appear; perhaps we all are.

While things are slowly changing for me, and the story of hardship seems over, I still cling to the peace I found during those days in isolation. In isolation, I found solitude. In solitude, I found my voice. Through my voice, I found God.

Show me what I need, I ask….. sitting, elbows propped on the table, palms covering my eyes. Before me, on the round wood table, lay a few belongings: glasses, yellow tapered candles, and a cup of tea. Behind me, the walls held images of an array of Paleolithic goddesses — a 40,000-year history of when worship was rooted in a regenerative vision of life rather than hierarchy. And all around me was a silver silence… an unspoken, unbroken quiet. This space became a temple, and I was entering holy terrain where something needed to be covered, but it was not my hair — it was my eyes. (The dark and holy eye is the central theme of my upcoming book, The Song of the Mystery, and I dive deeper into how Islamic culture and theology have misunderstood the message of the veil.)

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With a veil of palms, I entered a holyscape that came alive in the darkness behind my eyes. I saw a rhythmic wave of images, one becoming another. A sunlit stained glass with figures coming to life, Mother Mary (revered in Islam) in a stream of illustrious movement that peels away from the stoicism she is usually framed in. The visions continued for twenty minutes, maybe more, and I was lost in them. At some point, the pain in my body, the tightness in my back and hips, eased into a dripping golden honey warming my body. The tension in my shoulders lifted into a lightness I hadn’t felt in decades. And suddenly, I wasn’t tired or over-stimulated by the day-to-day chaos. It was as if I had been restored, made whole…brought back into my senses.

Maybe that’s what I needed—to come back to my senses, not only in that moment but also in what it means to be whole and holy within the mundane. Maybe I needed a restoration of the sacred at the lost temple of the divine feminine through a soft heart and a wild-honey eye rich with visions of the Mother. Maybe something else I haven’t quite found the language for yet. All I know is that I remember what it felt like to surrender in prayer, and now I’m ruined for any other charade of ritual prayer.

If “all the world is a stage and we are its actors,” as the phrase goes, then let me exit the stage. Let me be neither actor nor audience. Let my eyes gaze into the darkness to see what it dreams of.

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My first experience of the outer world, of the shared reality and systems we build, was in Kindergarten. It was 1984, and I attended a grammar school down the street from our home in Karachi, Pakistan. I was not a willing participant in this charade of civilization. As a four-year-old, I thought the lessons were dull, the classmates were animals, and the environment was too rigid. I got through it by treating the whole experience like a kind of experiment — an experiment that created the foundational theory behind what would later become my legacy in this world: Dark Islam.

The grammar school I went to had no end of rules: a grey uniform, minimal accessories, and an expectation of submission to authority that is nothing short of a psychological wound from centuries of colonization. I made it a ritual to come to school with arms draped in glass bangles. No one else did; no one else tried. But then I’d find ways to push the boundary a litte more. One morning, I snapped on a ridiculous, absurd amount of barettes. Twenty or thirty plastic clips were scattered all over my head like a cultural landmine, an obvious provocation for the day.

That morning the principal, a patient and elderly woman, sought me out on the school playground during break. She walked over in the way older South Asian women often do, with a gait brought on by unleveled hips, a sign of centuries of epigenetic trauma. Coiled around her soft frame were the layers of saree cloth. I perched there draped like a wild cat across a jungle gym, awaiting her arrival and knowing there wasn’t anything she really could do.

I remember my attitude as she worked her way through her speech, gentle as it was. I saw that attitude mirrored in American films years later in the characters played by James Dean and Steve McQueen. Cool as a cucumber. Disinterested. Unaffected. But because I liked my principal, because she didn’t hinge her identity on shows of force, I submitted to her request to follow the rule. She wasn’t part of the experiment. In fact, I wasn’t exactly sure what the experiment was at the time other than to poke and prod at the world.

Little else stands out from my earliest school days, other than a lesson that was so painfully boring that I thought I would surely die unless I found something novel to focus on. It was just then, hinging on the verge of spontoneous combustion that would have been a welcomed exit “poofing” me out of that classroom, that I noticed a trail of black ants. Marching in unison at the foot of the blackboard, the ants became a living wall between the disciplinarian and the disciplined, between teacher and the student, between rule and the unruly. And so I made them the center of my focus for the rest of that class. I would look only to that formation, to that stream of ants. I studied their movement, the slight undulations their bodies made as one tried to follow another. I wondered where they were going and what I’d find if I followed them. I made them my entire world as a game of attention to ward off the misery of confinement.

Isn’t that what prisoners do in every movie when they’re in captivity? They turn their attention to some sign of life in a cell block of stone — an insect, a secret note, a crack of light? They find something small, something real to latch onto. In all the ways I spoke to this in my first book, The Song of the Human Heart, the world around me begged to be tested and teased for signs of permeability. Whether it was class hierarchies, religion, or socialization, I felt from my earliest days that brick by brick, I was being suffocated into a mausoleum of memory, a pattern on repeat, a template for human belonging.

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Stranger still are the many lives we share this prison cell called civilization with. A prison made out of uniformity of codes of behavior and set to a distortion pattern that is almost invisible to the naked eye. A prison where we are each other’s jailors.

A cage can take so many forms. Even at a tender age of four, I knew my cage: submission to eldership that hadn’t been earned, submission to social cues, deference to those who had more wealth, and appreciation for external validation.

There were plenty of opportunities for external validation. Every season, I’d be given a trophy for proving I could rub two brain cells together to complete a task. The award shape and scope never changed. It was always a tin cup. It had been a tin cup last month. It was a tin cup this month. It would be a tin cup again next month.

“What is the point of this?” I thought to myself, deeply frustrated and without an ounce of agency to change any of it.

The small fountains of agency I did try to drink from often soured. I drank too much cherry cough syrup once when no one was looking, only to find myself in the hospital getting my stomach pumped. I tried to go to school without wearing any underwear, only to be dragged back into the house and get a verbal lashing from my mother who knew better. I tried talking back to my mother one time, only to have my father threaten to kick me out of the house.

“If you’re going to act that way, you can leave,” he roared as titans would, opening our apartment door and pointing to the stairs that descended into the pitch black of night. I thought about it for a moment. With the wisdom of hindsight, I know that a descent into the dark was still decades away.

“What’s the point of this” is a question I still ask, far more boldly now. Forty years later, I may finally have an answer to it.

For a long time, I reflected on these moments as vignettes of childhood. As I work my way through the sequel to The Song of the Human Heart, I realize there was more at play here: I was unhooking my eye from the world around me. I was finding small ways to practice seeing differently.

What that looked like any given day varied. As the star student, I would sometimes purposely make a mistake in my lessons so I could see what it felt like to have my hands whipped by a ruler. And when that happened just the once, I remember studying my hands to see if it felt different — not the pain, but something within. Did the lashing somehow snap into place my hand’s wayward way of writing in that moment? Did it align something in me? Did force change anything?

It didn’t. It only aligned my vision that I disliked this teacher even more — not so much because she hit me, but because she thought her system worked. One teacher was just like another. They all demanded devotion to the system because they believed themselves to be prime authority — but they were nothing more than keepers of a mausaleum, a tomb of a dying culture. The demands then are the same demands I see in the world now: to bend the will, to bend the knee, to see the world as they do. A distorted kind of submission.

“Falling into line” is what they call it no matter what part of the world you’re in or what generation you’re from. Manipulation of organic life formed into prim little rows, pruned of authenticity, to lend our bodies and minds toward uniformity, linearity, and compliance. I was lost to that long before I clumsily rebelled as a young adult, and long before the feral self I am evolving into now, a jungle cat draped across the linear mind as if it were a play thing. Long ago, I was a lost to the gaze of the undulating walk of ants across a cold floor, to the crooked and zig-zagged lines of clips across my head, and to the forbidden crunch of glass bangles that became my secret rite at the temple of my headboard. Linearity wasn’t my experience of things — and in the sandbox of ideas, experience matters more than rule.

It’s the biggest story of 2024 in terms of engagement: UnitedHealthcare CEO Assassinated on Manhattan Sidewalk.

And sure, most people are getting a good laugh from the comments to this story. Most people find their well of sympathy is completely parched from years of exhaustion in navigating a broken healthcare system, among other epic systemic failures. The peak of these domestic failures is the horror of watching our government send billions to the war chest of foreign states like Israel and Ukraine, while Americans suffering from natural disasters get a poxy $750. The financial guillotine that Americans are placed under is underscored by the madness of shifting morality, like a compass that decides where north is based on what is most convenient for it at the time. It’s nothing short of schizophrenic.

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And yet, that is the status quo for leadership, whether we’re talking about the public or private sector. That is what we are being force-fed like a tortured prisoner in a gulag whose inquisitor believes his delusions because he speaks politely. It is the more egregious vile erosion of collective reality, an abomination of human dignity. It is also the note I end my first book on, The Song of the Human Heart — a complex story I’m mapping out in detail as I piece together the sequel, The Song of the Mystery. The latter takes a sharp aim at the festering wound of human misery.

In an earlier substack titled A Most Lethal Order, I shared how we’re locked into a mechanical frame of mind where the value of life is based on its utility. I called the inability to see the individual as a cataract of the human heart. It’s a description that fits systems that claim they exist to improve the quality of human life, including the healthcare system.

So, can you blame anyone for not caring that a greedy executive in a blood-sucking industry that feeds off people’s misery — an executive who was being investigated for insider trading of 15 million dollars ahead of his DOJ investigation — is anyone going to shed a tear that this guy got taken out Punisher-style? Not really.

And you can’t blame them. We’ve spent the last year being collectively gaslit over the war in Gaza and the ruling class's authoritarian response to domestic protests over it. We’ve seen children and seniors beaten up over protesting a brutal annihilation campaign against Palestinians that extended to anyone who dared to express their alliance. I remember Republicans jesting that Americans couldn’t have free health care because we had to bomb the Houthis in Yemen for daring to place pressure on international trade in response to Israel’s genocide.

And we’ve been subject to the ridiculous spectacle of the 2024 election. There was Biden’s blatant cognitive decline, Kamala Harris’ “I am speaking” moment, paired with Donald Trump’s rhetoric of “the enemy within” that feasts on the right-wing’s fever dreams of a coming second civil war. And, of course, Donald Trump won his re-election. The same Donald Trump who said, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters.” He was celebrated for it.

So, finally, someone did. With impeccable planning and focus, an unknown man decided it was time for the American people to have their “I am speaking” moment. Deviating from the pattern of other shooter incidents, there was no manifesto, nothing that points to an egoic need to be seen. Instead — and this is significant — his manifesto was written on the bullet he used to kill the UnitedHealthCare CEO: “deny, defend, depose.”

When the compass points north in different directions at any hour of the day, and the only one with the power to move the needle is an agent of distortion, someone will inevitably do something.

I can’t help but notice that the same people condemning the shooter were happy to celebrate the politicians and celebrities writing messages on Israeli weapons aimed broadly at a neighboring Arab population. Remember Nikki Haley writing “finish them!” on IDF artillery shells just this year? Writer Omar D. Foda noted the irony, pointing out that, “The Day the UHC CEO was shot, a quadcopter filled a boy in a wheelchair full, of bullet-holes and all those concerned with cold-blooded murder said nothing.”

There is no discernment among the ruling class in the rule of law and morality, something longtime human rights advocate Jeffrey Imm spoke to me about in 2018. A rare voice of temperance with the long-range vision needed for restoring dignity in civic society, Imm shared that there could be no rule of law without a shared reality. Since 2016, hasn’t that rule of law been steadily breaking down like a winning game of Tetris, block by block, row by row? Except this isn’t a game, and no one is winning.

Deny, Defend, Depose. Three words mirror the insurance giant's common phrase to skirt around coverage. As one social media user shared, “Deny, Defend, Depose,” is about to become the “Live, Love, Laugh” of the revolution.

Since my formal entry into the counter-extremism space in 2018, I’ve been studying the escalating rate of language that anticipates or even calls for a second civil war. Pundits and political influencers first warned of it, only to later jump on the tribal bandwagon calling for it, determining that we need to finish this tug-of-war between the political right and the political left, divide the United States and be done with it. There was even a movie recently called Civil War (worth watching, by the way) that portrayed a possible future scenario where we do turn on each other. Some of these pundits are pretty big players in the political game, working behind the scenes advising policy and politicians. The theme of us vs. them is amplified in every election, making the CEO assassination response much more significant than what we’ve been told for years.

For years, we’ve been told that the enemy is the other — a person with another ideology, skin color, faith, or political party. This pattern of othering is as old as the ongoing wars in the Holy Land. As I map out in my second book, The Song of the Mystery: The Foundation for Human Belonging, it is a primordial battle.

The flood of support and cheers for the UnitedHealthCare CEO shooter collapses the narrative that our neighbors are our enemies. We’re not. The enemy is much more concentrated.

Growing up in a post-9/11 world, the word cave was a pejorative. After all, the most wanted man in the world at that time, Osama bin Laden, was believed to be fighting the empire from a cave. Long before the current context of war fixed our eye on only one perspective on how to see ‘cavemen,’ there was a long, rich legacy of human orientation toward caves. Caves were often sanctuaries against persecution. The practice dates far back to the Paleolithic age and continued through the evolution of belief systems. Europe, for example, hosts complex underground Jesuit caves with Egyptian, Islamic, Buddhist, Christian, and pagan art. Mary Magdalene, a revered Abrahamic matriarch, is said to have been a cave dweller, living the last 30 years in a cave in the Sainte-Baume mountains in the South of France. Across the world, caves and tunnels protected people and the ideas that maybe weren’t yet ready to be mainstreamed — a theme that runs through Islam as well.

On a journey from Medina to Mecca, Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and Abu Bakr sought refuge in a cave. The story goes that as they hid in the cave, outside, a tree rose from the ground, a pair of doves began nesting in it, and a spider spun a web between the tree and the cave’s entrance. The prophet retreated into the dark earth, escaping his persecutors through a camouflage of wilderness. This journey, taken in 622 AD, later marked the beginning of the Islamic calendar. It’s called Hijrah, an Arabic word that means migration or a space between two points. Yet, the real migration is within that cave, that space between two points. The arrival is in the void space of that cave where the destination is marked by moving out of time.

An invitation toward timelessness is extended to humanity through Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH) first revelations in the cave of Mount Hira. Also known as Islam’s holiest night, on Laylat al-Qadr (Night of Power) the power of God is birthed through the dark velvet womb of the mountain. Laylat al-Qadr is one night believed to hold more power than a thousand months. Laylat al-Qadr is the second sign of the non-linearity of time folding a thousand nights into one, the first being the story of Hijrah where God is moving us beyond human time.

And there is a third sign: the non-linearity of the Quran itself. The out-of-sequence storytelling of the Quran has always been a source of criticism, but the emphasis on non-sequencing is the message. Islam is brimming with non-linearity that, if understood and embraced, would help us break the gridlock of the static world and free us into a rich metaphysical reality.

Each story within Islam centered around a cave is an arrow of God pointing to another clock beyond human time, another eye through which to look at the world. The message of timelessness is a hidden mercy that perhaps wasn’t ready to surface in our consciousness until our time, until we (a broader human collective within and outside of the Islamic faith) feel gridlocked into the madness of the outer world’s perennial thirst for war and domination.

The invitation to look at the world differently is also the message seeded within Surah Al-Kahf. Each of the four stories in the surah is about shifting our perspective so we can see the world through another lens, or another reality that reveals the mysteries of the divine hand of God. The first story in Surah Al-Kahf hyper-winds time again, inviting us into the cave with a group of young men seeking refuge. By retreating into the cave, they each leave behind their families and worldly possessions — their attachment to Dunya, the temporal reality of the outer material world. Dunya is another world for the illusion, the matrix, or the Samsara. In the story, the group of men fall into a deep sleep for 309 years, awakening into an entirely new world. Again, the story breaks the rigidity of chronos (chronological) time and favors kairos time. The latter, kairos time, is the understanding of time as a fluid force. It is time within multi-dimensionality co-current realities beyond fixed systems that define Dunya. We invoke kairos time whenever Muslims say inshallah (meaning if God wills it).

When Islam is submission to God, can we better understand God by looking at our stories with another eye — a wild eye that breaks us out of the prison of terrestrial reality and searches for a celestial belonging? Was this always the invitation awaiting us within the cave of revelation, that we each are offered this experience through our submersion into Islam? If so, this catalyzes the religion. Islam isn’t just a religion then; it’s a portal, a ‘time-machine,’ so to speak.  We are invited to free-fall into the wilderness of God — a lush metaphysical embrace that cracks time to create hyper-realities that can compress a thousand nights into one. At every turn, Islam is speaking to a wondrous multi-dimensional reality. Islam is science futurism, speaking to us in a language that hadn’t yet developed when the faith was revealed. It had to stay hidden for a little while until the right time.

The symbol of the cave is a seed message in Islam that couldn’t find roots until it was planted in the cavity of our hearts. It had to be buried, hidden within stories until our generation, our time, could bring it to the surface. The cave is an allegory for the complex inner world of our being that cannot be colonized, programmed, or otherwise stained by the influence of the outer world. This is what it means to crawl back into the cave, into the sanctum of stone. It means to know the world for ourselves. For me, it means becoming intimate with Islam beyond all that I had been told. It means seeing Islam as an egg of primordial God-consciousness birthed into this world through the womb of a mountain. To get here, I had to crack something within myself using the stories in Islam as instruments of release.

There is more to us as people than the surface-level stories of the world that we’ve been sold.  This is a time of grid-locked realities, with the horns of one ideology locked in with another, increasing the density of this time. The density acts like a gravitational force, pulling humanity from one far end of the pendulum to another. It leads us to forget ourselves and our origins, to become swept into the fixed and imprisoned world that tells us we cannot shake free of it, that we cannot break it. It feels inescapable until we return to our first story as Muslims: the cave.

“Our first identity marker is psycho-spiritual graffiti on the walls of our hearts. A story that says, ‘I am here.’” — Stories as Orphic Mysteries, Part 1

As I shared in The Song of the Human Heart, I feel like my whole life was a murder mystery, and I was the one who was killed. Within that lies a two-part unfolding discovery, which I continue in my upcoming second book, The Song of the Mystery.

First, why did it happen? What is it about the way our lives are mapped that makes it easy to suffocate life?

And second is an examination of that body. What is it telling us? Where is the mark of death? And which instrument was used to take that life?

The story arising from this discovery is about what happens when something else marks us, whether it's an ideology, a human behavior pattern, or a system. It all comes back to a story and an element of possession. When something else marks us, we lose the gift potential dormant within every struggle. We lose our ability to study our story, especially those sacred nooks and crannies that are the reservoirs of grief and loss.

Our story isn’t just what happens to us. It extends to what we see around us, and how that shapes who we become. As I’ve been developing The Song of the Mystery, I’ve wrestled with whether to tell the stories I see around me — stories about other people. Stories about loved ones. I wrestled with self-censorship. I questioned whether I dared to tell those stories and whether it could be done with dignity. And so I practiced a lesson that this entire book project has been teaching me: patience. Through trust in the fruits of patience while we sit by the wellspring of the human soul, the waters of grief eventually clear, and what is for us to know and possibly share eventually comes to the surface.

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Growing up, I often heard my mother reading “Bibi Fatima ki Qahani,” a story about Prophet Muhammad’s daughter attending a wedding. She would read it over and over again… just like she told her own life story over and over again to any new listener.

When you’re born into a family, you don’t just inherit their ideas; you also inherit their stories.  Those stories often become a part of us, informing us who we are and where we came from. In many ways, the stories become a kind of mantra or prayer as they’re repeated over and over again through the arc of our lives.

There was another story my mom would pull as part of her repertoire of recitals. It involved her time as a young bride. Newly married, she left her home country of Pakistan and joined my father in Afghanistan just before the coup and war broke out. The countries may be side by side, but they’re lightyears apart culturally. My mom found herself in an entirely new territory marked by a foreign language and social code she quickly had to learn to navigate. As a new wife in a somewhat arranged marriage, she had to adapt to a husband, the flood of in-laws they were living with, and the circle of guests they entertained almost every day.

That’s the background context of any stories about her time in Afghanistan. The story of the dog begins with how bored she used to get, unable to speak the language, and unable to move freely in society. To pass the time, she would visit a nearby caged dog and find new subtle ways to taunt it to get a reaction. When the dog finally attacked a family member out of the amassed frustrations, it earned a puzzled response from the family, who wondered why such a mild-mannered animal would turn on its owners. My mother stayed quiet, never sharing that she was the culprit behind the attack.

She tells the story with relish, blind to how the listener receives it, blind to how it doesn’t portray her in the best light, blind to what it says about her.

I’ve heard the story about her and the dog far more than I heard of the prophet’s daughter. If repetition signals hierarchy, that would put the dog's story above the prophet's. But was it really about the dog…or was it about something else entirely?

The story of the dog is one of the many Orphic eggs nested in my history that are finally beginning to crack. It’s her story, but it is also mine because she is my mother — a woman with whom I have a very complex and fraught personal relationship. A mother wound, they call it.

Or maybe this story of the dog finally cracked because I was tired of hearing it repeatedly painted in the same dull light. It needed to be buried in the Dark. It needed new life. And so I did. After decades, I pivoted the story and projected it into a new timeline, a new consciousness.

As I shared with her, the dog was a mirror for my mother. She, too, was caged, so to speak. She was caged by a custom that expected young women to marry when all she wanted to do was be a pilot and fly to America to see Elvis Presley. Caged by a new set of social customs. Caged by a language she didn’t know that locked her away from her beloved pastime of endless chatter. And finally, caged in a home she wasn’t allowed to leave by herself. I took a deadened story, flatlined by chronological linearity of “this happened then that happened,” and seeded it in new territory with rolling hills, arcs, and curves that give it dimension.

So many of these stories take the yolk of life and cement rich aspects of us into lifeless stone. That was the egg I had to break out of myself before I felt I had the right to continue telling the story of The Song of the Human Heart. I tried to break her out, too. Sometimes, I could. Most of the time, I failed. And in failing, I learned heartbreaking lessons: your wild eye is a gift, but many will see it as a disease they don’t want to contract.

I’m still learning and working my way through the mother wound. In the cavity of my own heart, I’m tending to the well of my own story, undoing the knots in this family line. I’m trying to understand why my mother held the same relish as the story of the dog, as when she told me years ago that I was too fat to buy a wedding dress. In writing this, I’m realizing that maybe, in some ways, I am a dog to also taunt. A wild thing trapped by the stories of the family — stories that will always see me as some unsightly beast. A disease to be avoided.

So be it.

Within my own heart, I have another secret vision of my mother. I dreamt of the end of the world, of the quiet that falls upon a dystopian landscape when the film ends, and the scene spans to a charred grey world marked by plumes of smoke. And through that, my mother came forward, oblivious to the world around her and lost in her mind to her own chatter. She carried a white satchel filled with apple seeds she tossed thoughtlessly to the ground — a Rhumphius-type character whose seeds grew in hyper-time into apple trees in full bloom, rich with tufts of white blossoms. My mother doesn’t understand me any more than she understood that dog, but her language is in that apple tree. Her language is seeding the ground wildly to see what will grow. It’s feeding people. It’s kindness to strangers. It’s being in service to those in need around her. She spreads that seed so freely to see what will bloom around her but cannot see what is trying to bloom within her.

She told me about a dream she had a few months ago, which I’m sharing with permission.  In her dream, she carried a heavy weight she could no longer manage. The weight grew so burdensome that it became the only thing she could focus on despite her suffering — at which point my father (who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name) returned to her and took her by the hand. She dropped the weight and went with him to a garden of roses growing upon the water. They walked on water, surrounded by the flower he loved tending to most in his life: red roses.

I interpreted the dream for her. There are themes of indentured servitude, service into labor that is depleting. There are ancient Islamic motifs based on the Quran, which says that God’s throne is on water. The rose holds the mysteries of the sacred feminine.

“Ok, I have to vacuum!” she declared as she sprang from the chair like a hot popcorn kernel

“I didn’t just give you ten minutes,” I told her, feeling a little irritated but unsurprised at her slamming the door shut into her own heart. “I gave you twenty years and a week,” I added, tallying how long it took me to arrive where I could offer the gift of a wild eye.

I’ve been playing with the idea of time in my book series, being out of time, breaking time, cracking time as a sort of egg we’re in, opening into a new multidimensional reality… like a kaleidoscope. I’ve been playing with time as a rule we think we’re bound by. Changing how we think about time helped me shift how I feel about people and stories (especially the story of Islam) that, in one way or another, mark or possess all of us.

I think of time as a wild eye looking at everything in wonder through layers of perception. The lesson in the stories I inherited from my mother is what happens when we only see time chronologically; when we lose our wildness, we lose our range of vision. We become the pendulum that crashes against one side and another. The things that vex me about my mother all speak to that in some way: she crashed against things. The way she takes her thick tree stump of a forefinger and crushes it into an eyeshadow pan reminds me of how one puts out a cigarette. The way she wildly sweeps her arms against the wind chimes rattling musical rods as one rattles the bars of a prison. These are the deep, navel-gazing reflections I fall into when tending to the well of grief, a well that only through resonating periods of silence becomes a scrying mirror.

“Maybe she’s crashing against things for a reason. Maybe she’s trying to free herself. But from what?” I wonder.

“No wild eye,” my heart responds quietly.

I don’t fit in with my mother, no more than she fits in with her sisters — like a distorted nesting doll of the dispossessed.

Our yearning for wildness has something to do with it. We both yearn for something we don’t know — at least, I didn’t realize until I started writing The Song of the Human Heart series. Writing it allowed me to finally cut teeth, grow claws, learn to howl, and reclaim a primal language that Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes speaks of in Women Who Run with the Wolves. My mother hadn’t. And I could no more teach her than you can teach a domesticated wild thing kept in captivity to return to the wild. It must find its own way. It must want to leave the perimeter of society desperately enough. It must shed the old story of woe that comes with dispossession and see it as the critical dismantling of its cage. It must yearn for the frontier of wilderness as if it were its next breath. Nothing else will do, and I’ve learned that if you try to force what isn’t ready to be freed, it will bite you.

It will bite you.

The attempt to live a half-life, half-holy and half-civilized, creates an unnatural state … like a werewolf. A werewolf is neither fully wild nor fully human. In its attempt to hide its animal side, it becomes deranged under the whole light of a dark night, pushed into a possessed madness. It falls into a feeding frenzy with no discernment. That’s the mirror for our broken world — we have forgotten our wildness, falling into becoming monsters who feed on each other in blood lust.

To be continued in The Song of the Mystery: The Foundation for Human Belonging

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From the exclusion of disabled bodies in public spaces, to exterminating the unwanted, to a yearlong genocide of a discarded population, the stories my heart trailed this summer all point to the distortion I’m writing about in my second book, The Song of the Mystery: The Foundation of Human Belonging. In this substack, I share some of the research and findings that help shed light on why it feels like we’re spiraling toward an apocalyptic scenario and how this most lethal worldview starts with the small stuff. The apocalypse isn’t some distant future scenario; it is rhetoric that amplifies an ancient story — a story that poisons the heart and singes the unfurling potential of human life.

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In July of 2024, Donald Trump’s nephew spoke of the former president’s hostile reaction to his nephew’s disabled son. He shared how Trump told his nephew that his severely disabled son ‘should just die’ because, among other reasons, he wasn’t able to recognize his father. What I took away from the interview is that the merit of a child’s life depends on how fully they affirm our existence.

You may wonder, “What does this have to do with the apocalypse?”

A lot. I’ve spent almost the last two years reflecting and studying the question of human belonging, working first intuitively and then moving toward finding the research that fleshes out a baseline framework. What I found is that the dysfunctions we see in our society — the kind of gross distortions we’ve been collectively experiencing since 2016, leading to escalated separation, hate, and violence — don’t just appear suddenly as a spotlight in the news. It’s everywhere. It begins…everywhere. It’s in a story about a boy who is spoken of like he can’t hear or feel. Although Trump didn’t confirm his nephew’s account, we saw the broader Republican response to the presence of a differently abled body on the national stage.

In August 2024, Gus Walz made headlines when he celebrated his father (Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz) at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.  His presence was promptly questioned and mocked by many Republicans, particularly those for whom cruelty has become commentary and currency. Right-wing commentator Ann Coulter, for example, tweeted, “Talk about weird,” as Gus broke down in tears as he expressed joy for his father and pride for their familial bond.

The message was clear: what is considered ‘other’ doesn’t belong. But what makes something ‘other,’ and who decides whether it belongs?

Inclusion and belonging in the larger collective are determined by those who hold the most power, and by power, I mean one thing: the ability to exert force. These are the same in-group/out-group dynamics that I would speak to communities about during my time as a preventing violent extremism (PVE) facilitator. Back then, I would sometimes draw parallels between gang culture and extremist ideologies. As I left that sphere to delve deeper into an independent pursuit of belonging, I found the issue far more granular.

Over the next couple of months, that message repeatedly surfaced in headlines through what seemed like seemingly disconnected events—but I knew they weren’t. In September, Vice President (and Democratic presidential nominee) Kamala Harris promoted an anti-immigration bill that included dismantling asylum. The hardline rhetoric that ‘others’ who are literally outside the perimeter of an in-group is not that different from the Trump administration’s far-right rhetoric about immigrants as pollutants.

It’s true, as some say, that our elected leaders are a mirror for our hearts, a reflection of the direction the herd is moving in. I certainly saw this myself over the years on the political right. I saw some of the brightest people devolve into personas no different than the basement-dwelling trolls we point to as the source of our malcontent when it comes to civic dialogue within the online sphere. Because it was the language of the in-group. Because it signaled belonging. One of them is a well-respected attorney for Donald Trump, who has nearly a million Twitter followers. Another was on Ron DeSantis’ election campaign team. There are a lot of names, but none are worth saying. The point here is that a pattern bleeds through all stratospheres of society. The highest echelons of leadership are where it becomes most apparent. The highest echelons are where we point our fingers, but there is a wheel that grinds its curse behind the curtain.

The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election saw the newest crop of hate influencers on the political right skyrocket in visibility and success because they could mirror the behavior and rhetoric of the in-group, which was influenced by the behavior and rhetoric of a new kind of political personality: Donald Trump. Entire industries were built around this — non-profits and media that catered to a new appetite to devour the other. If I shared the names of some organizations and distorted media personalities that became popular over the last several years, I’m sure you’d recognize them. But again, their names aren’t necessary; recognizing the pattern is.

Those distortions across what until recently seemed like separate political parties and ideologies are now blatantly converging, revealing the underlying disease that gives rise to the grander apocalyptic scenarios we feel entrapped by.

For instance, a recently published book UNHUMANS (with a publisher aptly named “War Room Books”), written by far-right personalities with cult following, was endorsed by Republican Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance. It is shared across multiple news sites that Vance and the book support violent dictators. The language of dehumanization is not new; it’s been expanding its territory for centuries. I noticed it when Hillary Clinton, during her 2016 presidential race, referred to some Americans as “deplorables.”

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Again, the message is clear: the in-group with the most social and political clout determines who deserves to be seen as human. The in-group/out-group dynamic has shifted beyond the language of political, national, and religious identity. It’s now about who is human and who is not. What is other, weird, or refuses to reaffirm dominant group values is seen as beyond the fray and unworthy of the protection and dignity of human belonging.

We’re locked into a mechanical frame of mind where the value of life is based on its utility to the group versus where the value of life is as a holistic frame of being. It is no surprise that groups of people are diminishing the right for an Autistic or disabled child to take up space, that broad swathes of people are being unalived, and that those in dire need of asylum are invisible, that only those who can produce for the group are worthy of belonging. It is all connected.

Equally essential to observe is that the nation-state is becoming the arbiter of freedom, not the sovereign individual. Sovereignty as a foundational creative reality, one in which we get to decide what we belong to, is at risk of becoming an extinct practice. Instead, we’re moving toward a model of human belonging in which an external group or entity decides we belong to it… like a kind of possession.

An individual who cannot see the value of human life is a group that cannot see the value of human life. That cataract of the human heart becomes a state and, next, a nation that cannot see the individual. It can only see the monolith of group identity. It only has eyes for its megastructure, turning America (for example) from a beacon on a hill (like a lighthouse) into a (Babylonian) tower at the foot of which is an executioner’s block. Upon its gallows stands the prosecutor president who promises to turn an embodied idea, the American people, into a lethal force. The executive office is now the executioner’s office, with willing henchmen as an extension of the curse happy to violently dispose of any life that does not comply.

“The state is disturbingly comfortable in killing,” writes Prem Thakker, a journalist with Zeteo, adding that “a system with such low regard for life warrants total interruption.”

He’s speaking about Missouri’s willful execution of an innocent man in September of 2024. Marcellus Williams was sentenced to death in 2001 for a murder conviction to which he maintained his innocence. Prem writes:

“Doubts of his [Marcellus’] guilt sprung from everywhere amid concerns of biased jury selection and a lack of DNA evidence connecting him to the crime. His lawyers, the NAACP, even the prosecution and members of the victim’s family, among others, all requested clemency for Williams. Republican Gov. Mike Parson and the Missouri State Supreme Court shunned these efforts; Parson even actively shut down an inquiry board re-examining whether Williams was innocent. In the final minutes before Williams was set to be executed Tuesday, the US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 against staying the execution…the ideological throughline was not about protecting the sacredness of life (in any interpretation), but asserting mortal control.”

Despite online petitions and the trail of people pouring into the Missouri governor’s office in person until the 11th hour, the state refused to recognize anyone it labeled as the out-group.

We’re less and less led by individuals authentically interested in servant leadership; we’re led by sinistership. This observation has haunted me since it became undeniable that Israel is waging a genocide against the Palestinian people — one that America is fully supporting to the detriment of its own existence and one that is undeniably expanding its territorial reach. And everywhere I look, as I share in this substack, the macro outer reality reflects the micro reality like a nesting doll of diseases. Yes, it's pervasive, but how did we get here?

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Summary:

• The union of myth and faith through liturgy on full display, our collective identities have long been shaped by group worship.
  

• Dionysus was the Greek god often associated with intensity or hyper-reality. The arc of Dionysus’ identity — particularly the duality of his nature — is a very significant reflection of our times. His fixture on the global stage is a mirror for our collective state of mind. Sure, we’re not worshipping Dionysus as they would in the old days, but attention is attention. When you hyper-focus on something, you give it the creative attention anything needs to come to life. Times that by a world audience and you’ve got the biggest altar of human attention… all eyes on the god of madness.
  

• Dionysus is an invitation to embrace our own multidimensional identity, while in his shadow form, he is a reflection of the challenges we face as a society in finding solid footing in who we are (causing us to slip into states of our own madness).
  

• Orphic mysteries believed Dionysus was ultimately dismembered and devoured by the Titans. The Titans were pre-Olympian gods who ruled the cosmos. They were essentially rogue and uncultured bandits who turned the promise of civilization into a wasteland — not unlike what we see in our society at this hour.

Those of us who are enthralled by the union of myth and faith — filled with wonder and delight — are usually seen as oddities outside our little interest niche. And yet, just a couple of weeks ago the 2024 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony was rich in mythic symbolism for the whole world to see. From beheaded sovereigns looking out of burning towers, to a silver-ribboned ship navigated by a singing woman, to the fact that ceremony broke the perimeter of traditional territory, there was much to feast on for those of us who still read symbols as another language. And of course, there was that controversial feast itself — the amalgamation of the feast of Dionysus (the heathen god of madness) with the iconic Last Supper of Christ. It was liturgy on full display: external public rituals as worship ceremonies versus private worship.

As Peter Harrison summarizes in his book, Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age, our collective identities have long been shaped by group worship. While traditionally that might be mass, baptism, or even Friday mosque prayers, in a secular age liturgy can take on new forms. In a secular society, we still see a signature of liturgy if we look for it. Some argue that could be a concert, music festivals, and other large-scale gatherings that focus group attention. And the Olympics is about as big as it gets, gathering a world of people together with all eyes on the much-anticipated opening ceremony.

If you remember, there was a sort of possessed madness over what many thought was a poor representation of Dionysian Last Supper — complete with drags queens. Though the opening ceremony’s artistic director, Thomas Jolly, shared there was no intention of invoking Christian iconography, the facts be damned. People believed it was Christianity and that was enough to go grab the proverbial pitchforks.

In an article titled “The Lord’s Supper Meets Dionysus In An Unholy Parody,” Religion Unplugged reported:

The Catholic bishops of France admired the "marvelous display of beauty and joy" in the 2024 Olympics opening rites, but also slammed the blending of Christian sacred art, Greek mythology and the sexual revolution.

“This ceremony unfortunately included scenes of mockery and derision of Christianity,” said the bishops. “We are thinking of all the Christians on every continent who have been hurt by the outrageousness and provocation of certain scenes.”

That was soon followed by an appeal to the International Olympic Committee from a global circle of cardinals and bishops protesting "a grotesque and blasphemous depiction of the Last Supper. ... It is hard to understand how the faith of over two billion people can be so casually and intentionally blasphemed.”

But the Vatican remained silent for more than a week while online combat raged between clergy, entertainers, academics, diplomats and armies of social-media warriors.

Finally, the Holy See released a muted statement that it was “saddened” by the ‘offense done to many Christians and believers of other religions. ... In a prestigious event where the whole world comes together around common values, there should be no allusions that ridicule the religious convictions of many people.”

Given the reactionary outrage at this one element out of the whole ceremony, I’d suggest that the public ritual was even more brilliant as far as public rituals go. It wasn’t just about the Dionysian “Last Supper” (as I’ll call it here for brevity's sake); the ritual also included our participation by driving people mad. How very Dionysus.

Dionysus was the Greek god of fertility, and later wine and pleasure — a god often associated with intensity or hyper-reality. Basically, lord of a really good time (unless he was in his shadow side of madness and death). The arc of Dionysus’ identity — particularly the duality of his nature — is a very significant reflection of our times. His fixture on the global stage is a mirror for our collective state of mind. Sure, we’re not worshipping Dionysus as they would in the old days, but attention is attention. When you hyper-focus on something, you give it the creative attention anything needs to come to life. Times that by a world audience and you’ve got the biggest altar of human attention… all eyes on the god of madness.

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So what exactly are we being called to and how is it a mirror for the hour?

First, the on-stage drag queens at this feast of Bacchus (as Dionysus was also called) signal the shifting god’s own androgynous identity. A shifting god whose own name and parentage are unfixed is an invitation to both the light and shadow of our collective identity. Not one or the other, but both — the duality within.

Dionysus is an invitation to embrace our own multidimensional identity, while in his shadow form is a reflection of the challenges we face as a society in finding solid footing in who we are (causing us to slip into states of our own madness).

Second, Orphic mysteries believed Dionysus was ultimately dismembered and devoured by the Titans. The Titans were pre-Olympian gods who ruled the cosmos. They were essentially rogue and uncultured bandits who turned the promise of civilization into a wasteland — not unlike what we see in our society at this hour.

Do we not have our own bandits waging an endless onslaught against Palestine’s civilian population, believing they are privy to every territory endowed to them by cosmic appointment?

Do we not at this moment have a fresh wave of rogue and uncultured gangs of white supremacists waging anti-immigrant riots in the U.K.?

And here in the U.S., are we not devouring each other as we fight over the last scraps of an idea called America?

To devour seems to be the theme of the hour for humanity, with one foot thick in the swamp of broken and outdated ideologies.

And didn’t we see a representation of Dionysus on the table in that opening ceremony, as if to be devoured? A very long story short (which you can read here), it was believed that ultimately the human race was part divine (part Dionysus) and part chaotic evil (part Titans). Are we not mired in the cliche “clash of civilizations” between the divine and the damned? It’s more accurate to point to how the ‘Mad Last Supper’ and our reaction to it was an ode to ceremonial madness complete with group participation.

The oldest story — the story we’re stuck in a loop with — is the story of “good vs evil.” If we could break out of that broken record of “divine vs. damned”, a conflicted duality where someone always loses, then perhaps we could move into a new model of consciousness. Perhaps we could evolve past the linearity of good and evil that has pitted us against each other since time immemorial. Perhaps we could sweep toward identity as an Orphic egg that ushers us toward birthing a boundless, multidimensional reality. If we had space in our culture to remember our rich human heritage, we would understand that a story shapes an identity. And identity shapes behavior.

The behavior we saw after the opening ceremony seemed more in infighting — fighting within ourselves, not seeing who we are, which leads us to project that fight onto the outer world (and each other).

Perhaps it’s because I embrace the heathen wildscape of my own mind that I didn’t see that much of a difference between Dionysus and any invocation of the Last Supper. Dionysus is very much a story of contradictions and cycles, just like Christianity. And just like Christ, the story of Dionysus speaks to a wandering Earth-side god who for a while struggles to be accepted. So, not only was the pairing of the two (if that’s what you want to believe) not a total conflict of ideologies — it was an invitation to a much-needed conversation.

The idea of dualities and cyclical regeneration goes back to the oldest known gods whose followers believed in the ritual narratives of death and rebirth, complete with blood sacrifice. Crudely put, the belief is that something has to be eaten or consumed for another thing to live. Isn’t that story playing out right now — that chaos is required to usher in another cycle of messianic arrival? How very Titanic.

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Summary:

• How religion is little more than a bedtime story.

• Stories are vessels of symbols (and symbols are visual language).

• A story can mark you and is a more truthful marker than race, religion, or politics. A story marker is a more powerful vehicle for agency than the identities we cling to or flick upon each other.

• We’re reaching for the spaciousness that comes with disconnection from a gridlock so we can move freely into the imaginal space, into dream time.

It’s said that if you want to communicate anything effectively, you should be able to explain it to a child. So much about how I write and communicate is rooted in that lesson, given that I taught little humans for years before moving toward cultivating discussions around faith. In these new spaces I move in now where very sober conversations are had about faith and identity, whenever I hear any pairing of children and stories it’s always some boorish comment about how religion is little more than a bedtime story. Maybe it all is a fantastic mythic story. Maybe that was by design.

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Editor’s Note: In light of the cultural and political wormhole we’re being collectively pulled into — especially with escalating tension around the Israel-Palestine war and the 2024 presidential race heating up over the next month — I felt this was an appropriate time to share the highlights of my four-hour conversation with alleged terrorist Abu Taubah.

In 2016, through a series of personal networks, I had the opportunity to interview an anti-terrorism task force veteran who converted to Islam and was later accused by the U.S. government of being a terrorist. His name is Abu Taubah, and while the allegations against him were formally dropped, the stain of accusation remained.

In the worldwide Muslim community, Abu Taubah has been seen as a progressive voice teaching Islamic education since 1995. He earned awards from Islamic groups in Toronto, Sri Lanka, and Edinburgh.  In addition to teaching, he hosted an online school called Timbuktu Seminary. Later, Fox News took an interest in Taubah because Omar Mateen was said to have attended the seminary. You may remember a radicalized Mateen as the Orlando nightclub shooter.

In a subsequent Fox News interview, Taubah rejected the attack on the gay nightclub but refused to condemn Mateen himself. He said, “[In Islam] we don’t denounce people; we denounce actions. And I denounce this action. I hate this action. But I don’t hate Omar Mateen, and I don’t denounce him.”

There are two Taubahs. There is the Taubah you see on YouTube channels which is filled with extreme emotions ranging from frustrated passion to intolerant reductivism. And then there is the Taubah I spoke with, the Taubah who makes a calm and compelling case for his views. So who is Taubah and why is this conversation still significant years later?

For starters, after the disproportionate Israeli response to the horrific October 7th Hamas attack, we’ve shed the bedtime story that the world is neatly divided into “good guys” and “bad guys.” Blurring that dividing line segregating two realities is at the heart of what I do. I’ve always felt that this conversation with Taubah stood out for marking a new territory. It’s a conversation that invites us to listen instead of react — and I feel we desperately need to do more of that. We need to be able to listen to each other. My role in this exchange — as in any — is to bring you a wider lens through which to view our very fragile human condition. My role isn’t to pass value judgments, to neither praise nor condemn, but to be devoted to kindling the fire of human belonging.

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Marcus Dwayne Robertson accepted Islam when he was twelve years old, though his mother insisted he continue to attend church. The son of educators, Robertson grew up in a home that encouraged the pursuit of learning–something he continues today on his path to a deeper understanding of Islam.

Eventually, Robertson would take the name Abu Taubah from Surah Taubah in the Quran, the last of the Medina chapters forged during the warring years in Islam’s origin story. The verses emphasize a declaration of disassociation with polytheists and how to navigate the fulfillment and breaking of earlier treaties. Also within that surah is the acceptance of any pagan who has repented their ways and come to embrace Islam.

Taubah translates to repentance, but the word carries far more weight than that. Taubah is a moment of horror-filled realization. This concept is captured powerfully in the Hindu story about the goddess Kali, the mother of destruction. Because everything Kali set foot on was destroyed, the desperate attempt to stop her blood-lust led her to step on her consort, Lord Shiva, killing him. When she was faced with what she’d done, that realization pulled out of her state of mad destructiveness. Kali subsequently biting her tongue is one of the most iconic moments of taubah.

Christianity’s expression of taubah is found in the story of Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus. Until recent times, Judas was tainted as the archetypical betrayer, with little to no understanding of his motivations. Arguably one of Jesus’ most devout disciples, Judas’ betrayal was fueled by his love for both Jesus and the movement he led. It wasn’t until he had committed his disloyalty did Judas’ horror-filled realization—a moment of taubah—fell on him.

To understand Abu Taubah the man, it is important to understand what motivates him. With Kali and Judas, their transgressions and moments of repentance came from acts of love and purpose. The same is true for Abu Taubah; he felt that his experience serving the United States in combat created a deep need for repentance that a deeper reach for Islam would fill.

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The man who is raised is never as powerful as the man who has raised himself. Abu Taubah wasn’t indoctrinated by social media or a local imam. He isn’t another Muslim born into Islam, brought up in a remote part of the world with zero exposure to the West. He is soft-spoken and charming, albeit with undertones of aggression. He is neither a simple man nor a run-of-the-mill hate preacher. Taubah is from the West and he has shed its sentiments — at least, he shed everything he believes is corrupt about America and its influence.

As an American-born black man who was passionate about serving his country, Abu Taubah made a decisive move to join the United States Marine Corps as his first act of independence upon reaching adulthood. He served with the 2nd Force Reconnaissance Company, an anti-terrorism force. His voice brims with pride as a patriot who served his country in a capacity that other Muslims would likely see as a conflict of interest. In recalling his military career, Taubah's voice is laced with frustration with what he defines as political interference in intelligence work.

“The era that I’m talking about is before Edward Snowden and 9/11. I joined in 80’s till the 90’s, so it was a totally different era; a totally different way of dealing with terrorism than we have now. Number one, it wasn’t on TV. Number two, since it wasn’t on the TV, it didn’t have so many people having their hand in it. There wasn’t the status quo, so we were allowed to do our job. Nowadays, it’s a political statement.”

When his tour was over, Taubah didn’t come home to beer and barbeques, like other Marines. Instead, he dove deeper into Islam.

“I wanted to learn my deen [Islamic faith] better. I was holding out. I’d already been in the Marine Corps and traveled the world a number of times. And I had been sitting down and teaching children, and I realized that as a teacher I didn’t know enough. So I was teaching at an Islamic school, so I decided I need to go learn more. And I understood that the best place to learn was in Mauritania. And it’s an open desert and anyone being there would not to be there unless they were studying.”

While the most severe interpretations of Islam are found in remote places of study, an escape from influence is found among spiritualists throughout history from Buddha to Jesus. But for Abu Taubah, the puritanism here is important. His post-military retreat into a harsh desert climate is indicative of someone who wants to be free of influence. The harsh asceticism of the open desert has been home to devotees since at least Christianity.

With considerable counter-terrorism work under his belt and renewed Islamic training, Taubah took the first concrete step that positioned him as a radical Imam. Becoming an intelligence asset, he used his unique skill sets to advance a post-9/11 counter-terrorism agenda, where he quickly became either exposed to or disillusioned by the end goal.

“When I was in Egypt, the State Department contacted me and they wanted me to do a covert operation for them. I did. And it was a good way to make money. It was overseas, I needed the money. I’m a Marine and I know how to do work like this. I know Arabic. And we all wanted the same thing: to fight and capture what they call Osama bin Laden, and to stop terrorism. And I was already trained. So I did that type of thing for a period of time and then I decided I didn’t want to do it anymore. I decided I didn’t want to do it anymore because I thought the people weren’t actually fighting terrorism. We were fighting people who we didn’t like.”

Conspiracy theories about America are rife in the Muslim world, including among American Muslims. Many believe in what is called the “myth” of Osama bin Laden—a puppet figure, a phantom target created to justify American assertiveness in the Muslim world. While some Muslims across the spectrum of Islamic extremism see bin Laden as a saint, abandoning all worldly comforts for a higher cause, others will point to the conspiracy.

In Taubah’s world, conspiracies are blurred with racial grievances and critical social commentary. For a mind that cannot see the difference between theory, conspiracy and critique, Taubah is dangerously influential.

His growing animosity toward America was underscored by terrorism charges that were brought against him while working as a CIA asset. Taubah challenged the FBI charge of conspiracy to commit a false tax form, a charge that included tax fraud for the purposes of terrorism in West Africa.  Though the charges were dropped in 2015, Taubah spent four years in jail.

“For three of those years, they held me in isolation, where I was under total illumination. They had bright car lights on my face, 24/7, for three years. The lights never went out. The bright lights were on an angle facing my face.”

Having interviewed intelligence assets off the record, it’s clear that Taubah’s story doesn’t make sense. The CIA doesn’t wantonly throw hard-won assets in jail with grave terrorism charges—especially not highly-skilled individuals such as Abu Taubah. This is where the cracks in his story start appearing, and the conspiracies compound that show us the underbelly of religious and racial tension in the United States.

Why was a highly-trained former Marine turned intelligence asset arrested under terrorism charges and thrown in prison? Taubah’s answer is clear: racism and Islamophobia. “A lot of it has to do with racism, and some of it has to do with religious racism,” he told me. “You know, religious bias and discrimination.”

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Despite being an American, Taubah’s foremost identity is Muslim. He is not a foreign-born and bred imported imam who sees America as the “Great Satan” in the same way as terror groups and foreign Islamists do. He evinces none of the traditional opposition to America and the West that is typical of Islamist figures in other parts of the world. This makes him a striking figure in a larger fight against radical Islam that otherwise simplifies the landscape into a dichotomy of good and evil.

If we define “radical” as a viewpoint that sees all other views as inadequate and inferior then, by definition, being a Muslim who sees Islam as the only option is “radical.” A devout follower of Islam cannot entertain the idea that his view is radical and extremely intolerant toward outside influences. In other words, if you want to call Taubah “radical” then it’s not because he harbors animosity against the actions of the United States; what makes him radical is that he sees no pious alternative to fully embracing Islam. Though Taubah was raised in the United States, he has pushed beyond a state of integration with the larger American community. Despite his upbringing and military service in a free, multicultural America, he cannot see any other way than an Islamic one.

These are the lesser-discussed undertones of what it means to be Muslim and American; what it means to be integrated. Anthropologists would favor a state of acculturation, of merging multiple identities as favored over assimilating to a culture. Taubah rejects this, not only for Americans but also for other Muslims who he says have tainted the faith with the culture they bring with it. For him, culture is second to religion.

For his part, Taubah sees the use of the word “radical” as a fabricated concept used by the West to criminalize Muslims. Taubah is not shy about his views and, in a liberal political climate eager to embrace multiculturalism, he doesn’t need to be.

On the subject of Sharia [Islamic] law, Taubah says,

“Sharia law is good, it’s the best law. People don’t even know what parts of sharia law are already in the Constitution. This all goes toward the confusion on sharia and Islam. We need more knowledge about these things. There’s nothing wrong with using the political system to make sure we [Muslims] get treated fairly. The Jews and homos already do it.”

What Taubah envisions, under Islamic law, is an empire that annihilates all competing ideas. This is what makes Taubah a striking radical figure. Having been raised in the West only to later convert to Islam means that he’s lived life as a non-Muslim. He’s fought our common enemies. He’s done intelligence work for our government. Having seen more sides to this picture than the average American, he still reduces to a single point: Islam

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As we paint a picture of what it means to be radical, we’re beginning to see a complicated mosaic of grievances.

Despite a military career in counter-terrorism work, Taubah holds a diplomatic view toward radical organizations and their acts of violence.

Taubah sees both the United States and the Middle East as nations run by despots antagonistic toward Islam. He describes suicide bombers as something the media plays up to promote their own agenda. When asked about his time at the side of the Blind Sheikh (a.k.a Omar Abdel-Rahman)—the notorious jailed leader of a militant Islamist movement responsible for multiple acts of violence, including the first World Trade Center attack in 1993—Taubah maintains that Rahman suffered at the hands of a media and government conspiracy eager to manipulate and defame Muslims. This perceived conspiracy looms over terror groups including Boko Haram and ISIS, which according to Taubah, “are set up by the West to do clichéd things.” Taubah also can’t manage to denounce ISIS and hints that ISIS is part of a promised prophecy.

In 2016, this would have been a shocking claim. In 2024, it’s being shared among college students at anti-war protests across college campuses. Wormhole.

“I haven’t read up on ISIS. ISIS never said they’re a bad group. The ones who say this are the same ones who said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. I don’t know if they’re good or bad. All is see is all these groups attacking them, and they’re just fighting to survive. The Kurds are closing in on ISIS. In five years, ISIS will be destroyed. In the Last Days [according to Islamic prophecy] it’s established that Syria will still be fighting and the Mahadi will come down in Syria and help whatever group is still left there.”

In 2016, this sounded like bogus ravings. In 2024, ISIS is a blip on our radar and Syria is joining a new coalition of powers against Western Imperialism alongside Russia, North Korea, Iran, etc — in what feels like the dawn of the end times.

Taubah then quickly stepped away and discredited ISIS’ growing recruitment in the West as a fad that plays into a government conspiracy. If you’ve been paying attention to the currents after October 7th, you’ll have seen a conversation boom exposing the hidden hand of Western governments in rattling the pre-existing hornets next in the Middle East. It’s a common claim now that the U.S. and Israel were behind ISIS — a claim that I have no opinion or comment on. I am simply sharing where we are now and that what may have been a fringe view then is mainstream now.

“Why does ISIS have a website running in the US? They could stop that. Why are we allowing it in the US—allowing them to broadcast their message? Why? Because it is something that justifies the justice program. Most of these people [pledging allegiance to ISIS] have mental problems. [The government is] getting those people and making it look good for them [and their agenda]. Why are we they allowing their Twitter account? The US has agreements with companies to [fight] terrorism. There isn’t a freedom to let criminals do their thing.”

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The Orlando attack shone a spotlight on the challenge of the largely unassimiliating, Islamic community leadership that has worked to insulate itself against criticism and examination by invoking Islamophobia. At the time of this interview, there was active ground covered to get Muslim Americans politically engaged through new groups like M Power Change and USCMO.

The next natural progression, especially in light of the deepening rift that feeds off social justice issues, is Islamic militancy. Taubah forecasted the same. That was 2016.

In 2024 some of the college protestors are chanting for death to Zionists — not Zionism, but Zionists. Not the ideology, but the people. It’s a violent and extreme position to take that’s getting cover under the sympathy for victims of genocide — but there’s nothing Islamic about it. As Taubah shared in the Fox interview, Islam calls for us to condemn behavior, not people.

“I think it should be an obligation for every man in the United States to join the military. Muslims in the United States are going to be eaten alive. We have not learned from history. We say ‘never again’ and that just means the Jewish people. But right now we’re going through the history of Herzegovina. We’re building up another Herzegovina right now.”

Despite how extremely uncomfortable it is to hear Taubah refer to people as homos, there’s another part of me that sees the prophetic nature of his views. “Never again” is on all our lips now, including urging the memory that never again meant never again for anyone including Muslims as elected leadership and systems of government freely dehumanize Arabs and anti-genocide supporters.

In 2016, Taubah predicted genocide, and his response to that is increased militancy on the part of America’s Muslims. This includes developing Muslim-run media, arguing that the government doesn’t allow Islamic media. When asked about Al Jazeera and its recent nationwide failure despite being allowed to run, Taubah pointed to a larger struggle that reflects the hearts of millions of Muslims worldwide.

“It’s America versus Islam,” he tells me. “An empire versus a small band.”

It feels like we’re there, right? It feels like this is a David vs Goliath moment in our history. Rebels against the Empire. Whether someone calls America the “Great Satan” or “an Empire,” the sentiment is the same. For many people now, America is an overbearing empire that needs to be cut down. Remembering the Islamic lesson — it’s not America that’s the problem; it’s the behavior of American systems and leaders.

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Throughout my talk with Taubah, he invoked a host of secular grievances that would be familiar to any anti-capitalist activist. The same themes of injustices are ripe in other areas: class warfare, lack of access to education, poverty, racial tension, police corruption, and distrust of the American political system and its politicians. He also has a deep distrust of American society at large, saying that a form of modern-day intellectual, economic and moral slavery is perpetuated through film and traditional education systems.

On whether Western culture is harmful to Muslims, Taubah confesses:

“Prophet Muhammad wasn’t for the believer to see non-Islamic culture. If we see something from a non-believing culture, the heart would blacken because it was seeing things that hasn’t been seen or heard. Take movies for example. By the end of the movie, you’re rooting for the bad guy – people who are criminals or performing zina [fornication]. Those people are positioned in the movie as the best person.

Look at holidays. Children get overwhelmed by Christmas. These holidays have no basis in Islam. And if you don’t go along with it, then that society says you’re an extremist. Western society has become its own religion. Each religion has its own criteria: what’s haram [forbidden], what’s obligatory, what’s encouraged, discouraged, and what’s permissible.”

In addition to solving hunger and poverty, Taubah argues that Islam can also salvage the institution of marriage through Islamic polygamy.

“All the men in the world can’t be dirty bastards. It is how Allah has created them. Polygamy is better than cheating as long as a woman’s rights are taken care of and guaranteed, which Islam offers. For example, it is better to have a wife than a ‘baby momma.’ Right now there’s the ‘Friday night’ girlfriend and the ‘Sunday morning;’ wife. These things exist. Through Islam, a child from an out-of-wedlock relationship is given rights. It’s not a bastard.”

Taubah has two wives and 15 children, all of whom live in the home with him. There is no conversation on what a woman wants in this scenario.

He also addressed Hillary Clinton’s candidacy at the time for President of the United States. His view was contrary to the flocks of Muslims of all backgrounds who cherished the idea of a Clinton presidency. Taubah stepped back to take a much more critical view of the candidate, adding that “Hillary Clinton is one of the worst. Her husband’s administration was the worst against black people in U.S. history. They destroy Negro communities.”

Yet, most jarring was Taubah’s unashamed misogynistic admission that “Islam doesn’t allow for a woman president. Any woman as a leader is bound to fail.” He continued: “[Women are] more emotional, they have menses, or menopause; these things affect their mental state. Women in politics also have a chip on their shoulder.”

So why stay here, most would ask. Why not leave America, as political right always suggests when America is criticized by brown foreigners? (And remember, Taubah is American-born and bred.)

“We’re in the West because our countries are taken over by despots largely placed there by leaders in the West. Islam doesn’t say we have to leave. We have to gain respect of the populous by becoming leaders: mayor, governor, president. Muslims can have a lot to say over how we’re seen in the West. Islam is growing. Just look at birth rates and conversion rates.”

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The words “Islamic radical” conjure images of “Death to America”-chanting, uneducated Arabs, products of madrassas with no experience of the world around them outside of Islam. That image exists, but it’s far too simplistic to capture the full portrait.

Despite his open, monolith Islamic views that wouldn’t allow for a female president and support for polygamy, he is in some ways more open about the clash of Western values and Islamic ones than the average Muslim American. While Muslim Americans stripped Omar Mateen’s faith and denounced him as a Muslim —a move that is easier than admitting there is a crisis in Islam— Taubah can see the difference between a man and his actions. That in itself is radically deviant from the Muslim majority opinion. In its own way, it is more humane.

Taubah is a powerful and terrifying figure because of the dualities he embodies, born in part out of the experiences he’s had that are unlike most other imams in North America. Labeled a “radical Imam,” the question isn’t so much, “Is Abu Taubah radical?” but, rather, “What does radical mean?”

What have we trespassed against as a collective? I cannot help but feel as Americans, as participants of the Western experiment, we’re in our own taubah moment — a horror-filled moment of realization that something sacred has been violated for far too long.

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The Islamic holy month of Ramadan began this morning. I’m sitting at my desk in a modified fast, some water and some floral cigarettes as part of my writing ritual — but no food till sunset. It’s not an entirely unusual form of practice. I remember a conversation I had a while ago with a decorated Muslim man who admitted he had the occasional beer during fasting. I promise you he’s more sincere in his practice of Islam than some of the folks showing up at the masjid tonight. One of the people showing up at the masjid tonight will be a man who observes all of Ramadan’s fasting rules but his prayer performance is a spectacle of horror that shocks even his young peers. A veteran, he races through prayer as if the imprint of boot camp is still within him. In public, among the elders of the community, his prayer is paced in rhythmic keeping with the group. In private, he can’t get through it fast enough, as if he is exorcising something within himself.

Such is Islam — a mixed bag of beliefs. An Islamic scholar and sheikh I once studied theology and history with asked a group of us what we thought Islam was. There were ten people in the group and nine different answers. To our surprise, he shared this was common crop yield. While we have a structure of support within Islam (the five pillars of Islam), Islam is as simple as submission or surrender to the core belief that there is one God and Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) is a messenger.

I once jokingly shared that Muslims will drink, have pre-marital sex, and do hard drugs…but we won’t touch pork. Everyone laughed, but everyone also agreed. There’s something about the rule of “no pork” that brings us all together. No matter which rules we get creative with, that one is generally a shared practice. In an imaginary rearrangement of Islam, as it’s practiced today, the hierarchy of order would go: God, Muhammad, No Pork.

But then there’s Ramadan. Ramadan brings all of us otherwise hedonistic Muslims back into the fold. What is it about Ramadan, a ritual practice of fasting and worship that tethers us back to one story — the story of Prophet Muhammad in a cave devoted to the revelation of the Quran?

The answer is the story. In Ramadan, we have one powerful origin story that through ritual observation brings us back to a zero point: the birth of Islam on the terrestrial plane.

Anyone reading this who knows me as someone who had a tenuous relationship with faith in the past will think this is all bullshit. “She doesn’t even practice properly,” they might add. That’s probably true.  But there’s more here. There’s a question of Islam (and seeded within that, a question of human belonging) that I’ve had since my earliest childhood memory. But instead of sprinting through the mechanical performance of the faith, I chose to sit with this question, this story. And that, for better or worse, no one can disagree with. I dig deep. I always have.

And that’s where the question begins: What makes this month of Ramadan so holy? What is the invitation to the sacred that we’re offered here?

Growing up, I hated everything about Ramadan. As a girl and later as a young woman, I hated how the communal aspect of breaking our fast together became this insipid gathering of people just going through the motions. Another dinner party, another performance — except unlike our veteran friend, there was no sprinting through it to exorcise me of this performative worship. I hated the uninspired decor as if sticking up a few lanterns meant anything. How could it mean anything if we were still in the dark about the light of spirituality? I’ve hated the hard eye of others surveilling your every move to make sure you didn’t eat or drink. The pressure to pray in group prayers after we break our fast.

Now in womanhood with the advent of influencer culture and Instagram your whole life, the spirituality of Ramadan is a series of cheap cookie-cutter decorations that turn ritual observation into another dumb American party. You know those party and holiday decor that started popping up a few years ago — ostentatious displays with balloon arcs, tiered food stands, and that God-awful crescent Christmas tree. Ritual became repetition and worse; it became mimicry.

In developing my third book in The Song of the Human Heart series (The Song of Childhood which I’m still working on), I came to realize that the first story we’re drawn to as children is often a map for our soul purpose in life. Before the story of Islam, there was another story that was sacred to me: The Little Match Girl.

The Little Match Girl is a Hans Christian Andersen story about a little girl who sells matches. In the bitter cold of winter, this girl goes from house to house where she sees visions of families at Christmas time, sitting down at the table before a great feast. At every interval, she strikes a match to keep warm, slowly burning through her supply. With the last match gone, she succumbs to the bitter cold of winter and returns to the arms of her grandmother whose spirit descends to bring the girl home.

I was maybe four years old with my Little Match Girl book, the one in the 80s that had an audio cassette of an Angela Lansbury-type matriarchal voice reading the story. A gentle magical chime would sound, nudging us to turn the page. Page after page, my focus wasn’t on the little girl (the girl who in every way I could become later in life). My focus was on the people in the house. Why couldn’t they see her? But at 4, you’re not thinking in these words. At 4, you’re looking at a picture and trying to make sense of it in a language you don’t have yet — and you won’t have for another 40 years.

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It took me decades to find the words for this: The little match girl was looking through a window and not a one-way mirror, I later reasoned as an adult, and yet to the people inside the home that window was a one-way mirror. They could only see themselves.

Before the story of Islam, there is the story of us — the human collective or the ummah as it is said in Islam. On the surface level, Ramadan is a ritual observation to bring us together in rhythm, back toward a shared story. Like the great hand of God sweeping all the strands of velvet in the same direction, we’re being smoothed into a godly orientation: there is a world beyond ourselves. Nested within that is another story, a story that is almost entirely lost and forgotten in the memory of Islam.

Ramadan is a spiritual technology protecting us from what we can’t see beyond the warmth and comfort of our lives. In a world that covets immediacy and materialism, Ramadan is a looking-glass for our dulled eyes.

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1. An example of the possible conversation between opposing sides, delving into emotions of the hour without weaponizing them against each other.

2. Radically honest conversations are possible. We hope we can serve as one example of that.

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Piercing the Iron Dome of Our Illusions

It’s been over two months since the Hamas October 7th attack that sparked unpressed the pause button on a cyclical problem between Israel and Palestine vis-a-vis Hamas. As many of us have noticed, this war feels different. This war, this time, has pulled us all in. Maybe it’s because of the turmoil of the last few years that everyone has faced on multiple fronts. I know that with the political eruptions since the Donald Trump presidency, the eruptions of ideological clashes on our streets, natural disasters, inflation, and the war in Ukraine we’ve psychologically shifted. No one of those altering events happened in a silo; they’ve been converging and crashing like a storm at sea.

So yeah, this time it’s different. Many of you have severed friendships and relationships over the stance people are taking on the Israeli response to Hamas vis-a-vis the Palestinian people. People have quit jobs. People have gotten fired. The October 7th Hamas attack didn’t just pierce Israel’s Iron Dome; it pierced into our consciousness as a world community — no matter what side you are on. The sequence of events has changed us.

Over the next two hours, Elliot and I discuss

• How a flip got switched that has people rallying to the flag.

• The Jewish mindset of “they’re going to hate us anyway” that speaks to a history of disdain and criticism.

• The Muslim dawning realization that many people don’t see as anything other than savages.

• The psychology of Amalek, old stories used to justify the war.

• How the scripts we’re running play into each other’s fears.

• The challenge of a cease-fire.

Elliot answers reader questions, including:

• An award-winning British poet asks; “How do you imagine the future (say 5 years from now, 10, 100?)”

• A global non-profit leader on progressive Islam who has created satellite chapters of Muslim progressivism all over the world, asks: Since 9-11 there have been ample studies on how to eradicate extremism/radicalism and it has been scientifically proven that killing innocent civilians is not the way to go about it. What Israel is doing is the dumbest strategy. I'm assuming his position against cease-fire is because he wants to eradicate extremism. Question: what scientific study is he basing his position on?

• A scholar of myth and sport, asks: If for every Palestinian child killed, Israel creates at least 3 more “terrorists”, then hypothetically speaking Israel has already created approximately 15,000 more “terrorists”, more people who hate the state of Israel and want justice and revenge for their people. Given that is Israel safer today than it was on October 6th?

• A Muslim researcher on history and civilization, asks: “How would continuous bombardment and civilian casualties defeat terrorism? Particularly if the grievances driving it won’t be addressed”

• My question: Ask him if he sees his faith as justifying Zionist supremacy or if he sees a path to a transcendent faith that unites all the Abrahamic traditions and their insights. Two sides of tribalism: community vs self … and the shadow side or the ugly underbelly which is a pattern of othering people outside the tribal identity, falling into an us vs. them gridlock.

• A Twitter follower asks, “whether teaching children from birth they enjoy a special, elevated status in the eyes of God, is a level of racist supremacy higher than Hitler's master race ideology.”

• How do you respond to statements like this: “Flatten everything. Spare no school, no children's hospital, no old-age home. Delete their entire gene pool off the face of the earth.” The case for genocide:

• A writer asks you to respond to this statement: “Look at who is growing the olive trees, and who is burning them —  that will tell you everything you need to know”

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Follow me on social media for audio and video clips of this conversation.

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Once upon a time, there was a place and a prayer and a fire. And calamity threatened to overwhelm the nation. So the holy sage the Master of the Good Name traveled to the place, deep in the forest, where the divine presence rests. There he lit the sacred fire and he cried out to the Master of the Universe, Lord of Worlds. And in his prayer, he spoke the holy and terrible secret name and God, and by this, the nation was redeemed.

Years went by, and memories faded and the Master of the Good Name died. And once again calamity threatened to overwhelm the nation and destroy all. So the disciple, the Preacher of Mezritch journeyed to the place where his teacher used to go. And he cried out saying “Master of the Universe, Lord of Worlds, I do not know how to light the sacred fire. Because times have been hard on your people and many of the ancient things have been forgotten. But I am here in the place, and I will utter a prayer to you, and I humbly beg that by this action your servant can bring salvation to his people.” ​And the preacher spoke the holy and terrible secret name of God, and the nation was redeemed.

Green leaves grew, turned brown and fell, and the seasons slipped by into decades. And it came to pass that the preacher died and calamity once again threatened to obliterate the nation. So the disciple, Reb Moshe Leib of Sasov arose, and journeyed to the place as his teacher had done. There he cried out to the holy one blessed be he saying “Master of the Universe, Lord of Worlds. As the hair fell out of the old men’s heads, many things that were once known became forgotten. I do not know how to light the sacred fire. And I do not know the prayer that speaks the holy and terrible secret name of God. But I am here in this place in the hour of need. And I pray that in purity of heart, this supplication will be heard by you - redeem us.” ​And the nation was redeemed.

Time never relents, and it was not kind. The people were scattered to the four corners of the world and were not able to find their way home. And Moshe Leib died, leaving Israel of Rizhyn as the guardian of the law. And then calamity came again to wipe out the nation. Reb Israel fell to his knees and cried out. “Master of the Universe, Lord of Worlds. Your nation is degraded and lost, and am not the man my forefathers were. I cannot perform the rites to light the fire. My lips cannot form the shapes to speak your holy and terrible secret name. And I do not even know how to get to the place, deep in the forest, where your divine presence rests. All I have is a story. About how once upon a time there was a place and a fire and a prayer, and it used to be very important. In the merit of my righteous ancestors who sleep in the dust, I tell this story in the hope you may redeem us.” The Lord heard Reb Israel’s prayer. ​The heavens parted, the calamity fled, and the nation was redeemed.

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After Saturday’s attacks ‘by land, by air, and by sea’ on Israel, I wanted to share some journal notes that are part of the material used to write my upcoming book The Song of the Mystery, the second book in The Song of the Human Heart trilogy.

The journal notes are part of the transmissions I receive in altered states of consciousness. Sometimes they’re ushered by plant medicines. Many times, they come through dreams. Sometimes, I hear it. Often, I see it. More and more, these transmissions come through being able to ‘drop into’ expanded awareness. I’ll see the threads between things, see patterns between what seems disconnected, or (as in this case) fall into a flow state where I’m writing what comes through me to later piece together into a storytelling.

Forgive me for the very raw state this is in. May it offer some small alchemy of chaos and confusion into song, in what what will be a very long road ahead in the territory that is Holy Land.

Rust of time.
Rust and red of blood.
Rusted metal. Blood on metal.
Rust Blood.
Rust Blood is the frequency of war.
Rust Blood.

Rust of Time. Rusty Time. Rusted Time. Old Time. Broken Time. Fixed in Time. Stuck in Time. Distorted Time. A tear in time. A scratch in the song. A cracked mirror of time stabbing into the veil that separates this song from any other. This realm. The collective revolving song called reality…

If I could give a name — (I being subjective given this doesn’t feel like it’s coming from ‘me.’) — If I could give this taste in my mouth, the metal of blood, a name…this thing that is alien…

If I had to give this “song” a name, I would call it Rust Blood.

Rust Blood, a pairing of words that gives a sensory density to a word that doesn’t mean anything anymore, a word called war. A word without meaning but which pulls to the surface something very, very old: fear.

What is that feeling…fear? It’s a word that’s too small. It is not pregnant enough with the full breadth of human emotion. “Fear” being another thing that has been distorted from let’s say reverent weariness to fear.

And what is this thing called fear? Dispossession. Dispossession of our connection with the world around us where now anything could be a threat. In other words, to be made unnatural.

IT’S [the Distortion] taken all that IT is and packaged that as the stories we eat to build the diseased culture we live in that hasn’t changed from the dawn of the time when we were hooked onto the sharp hook of a broken piece of mirror, it’s jagged edges caught into the stream of time, as if it broke off from something else, something so far beyond our comprehension that it only makes sense through children’s stories, and babble, and the babble of stories, and the babble of children and the babble of children’s stories

Caught in the hook of time,
And we’re caught on IT.
\

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Previous Substack Posts

Holy Land: Letting Go of Our Death Grip
After writing my first book, it became clear that the territory Muslims are drawn to is off. The map is blurred.

A Religion That Matters is not a Religion that Matters
From an Islam of beards and robes toward an Islam of light and dark.

The Night is Dark and Full of Terror
Reflections on Islam’s “Night of Power.”

The Heart of Islam is a Woman
Extremists hijacked Islam. This is our invitation to take it back...to something far older, far wiser, and far more primordial.

The Game’s Afoot
Faith as a Mystery Worth Solving

Cord-Cutting from the Ayatollah
A look at the Iran protests through the lens of the sacred feminine. Insights inspired by an encounter with Mystery weeks before the Iran protests.

Published Op-Eds

How the 34-Year-Old Fatwa Against Salman Rushdie Marks the Timelessness of the Islamist War Against the West

A year’s worth of research narrowed into a 1000 word op-ed on the crack in Islam’s origin story.

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Reader Reviews

The following is an essay reviewing my book, The Song of the Human Heart: Dawn of the Dark Feminine in Islam.

“The Song of the Human Heart is both a memoir and an exploration of what faith is, has been and could be, through the metaphor, and spiritual and emotive reality, of song. True to this, the book is a multi-sensory and layered experience, interweaving personal history and current events with theological and mythical examination, poetic revelations as part of an unfolding spiritual journey, and, of course, music and natural soundscapes. A core focus of the book is that of illusion—the curse of civilisation, the distortion of ideology—that makes it impossible to see the true wonder of reality.”  — Therese Doherty

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Published in The Federalist, a critical op-ed by Dr. Brad Patty reviewing The Song of the Human Heart.

“Qudosi brings Islam under the lens of a host of narrative modes of interpretation, from Jungian psychology to magic mushrooms. Yet the basic project is itself a contradiction of this sort: how to find the sacred feminine in Islam, that heroic, epic religion whose most famous advocates have always been males and warriors.” — Brad Patty, Ph.D.

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HOUSES MADE OF BUTTERFLIES:
Something beautiful but infective.
Something that favored idealism over practicality.

— Druidic Speech

I recently read that Druidic speech — the language of Druids — was rich with imagery. Imagine a house …made of butterflies. Did you imagine a structure made of patterned paper-thin wings held together for just an impossible moment before it all flew apart? When it “fell apart” so to speak, you wouldn’t say the house is broken; you’d say the house is wild and both everywhere and nowhere.

No one expects butterflies to hold still in a precise menagerie so that a house can look like what we expect a house to look like. It would be cruel and unnatural to distort the natural pattern of a butterfly into a frozen immovable thing for nothing but our fantasy of home.

I think holy landscapes are much the same — at least, that’s what I’m proposing in my upcoming book, The Song of the Mystery.

All my life I’ve been hearing about Islamic supremacy from even the most well-meaning Muslims. The discomfort when I hear phrases like “the Muslims” as if just the name can band together millions of people who don’t know each other, and will never know each other — people who don’t even know themselves — felt…sad and empty. Most people hear these things and get on with their day. For better or worse, I cannot.

After writing my first book, it became clear that the territory Muslims are drawn to is off. The map is blurred.

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I think back to the toys I had as a very young child in the 80’s. There was this one toy with a picture on the screen, and the screen itself was made up of many vertical lines. When you slid the knob across the bottom of the screen, slowly the picture would change into another one that was also always there in some form. There were two pictures on that screen. There will always be two pictures. We get to decide which one we want to look at — which one we want to see as real.

Islam is the same. The ideas I’m proposing are that knob that reveals the image beneath the picture we’ve thought of as the only one that exists. For 1400 years, followers of this faith have had the sense that only one image exists. That there is only one map of a holy land and on it are two territories: Mecca and Jerusalem.

There is another picture. In the sequel of the trilogy of books I’m actively working on, I offer an alternative Islamic perspective of “Holy Land.” This is something that has been brewing within me for over a year; it is still brewing.

Holy Land is a metaphysical landscape for Muslims and a tangible bricks-and-mortar space for Jews. As I share in the first book, Judaism is the foundation and Islam is the crowning. The foundation is tangible ground. The crown is an activation point, a crowning that marks initiation when we return Islam to the Dark. The crown is adorned by the moon’s changing phases, by the stars that pierce the veil of Night. One is not better than the other; they are different technologies. It’s an idea that also deepens the lens of co-existence: we’re not meant to take up the same space. Rather, we are custodians of different grounds. But the radical proposal that offers another picture — the proposal that invites Muslims of faith to let go of their death grip on Jerusalem — was inspired by heartbreak.

Year after year, I see the territory disputes in Jerusalem between Muslims and Jews — I mostly see Muslims clinging to some fantasy of what the holy land should look like. I see a death grip on an idea that is killing everyone around us. Of course, the situation is complex and layered and there is heartbreak on both sides. I cannot claim to know of the challenges faced by those who live on the ground. But I do know the mentalities of those far away who fight for a holy land because they believe it belongs to “the Muslims” — this behemoth that has stripped us of our faith potential by encasing us in a crowded and suffocating monolithic identity.

Building on the story of book one, I expanded on the idea of the Dark. The Dark’s characteristic is beyond words. An aspect of it is expansiveness and nothingness. Nothingness belongs to Islam. That is a two-faced gift. How you look at it depends on where you slide the knob.

In one of my favorite films, Kingdom of Heaven, having just lost Jerusalem to Saladin, Bailian of Ibelin asks Saladin, “What is Jerusalem worth?”

Saladin replies first with “Nothing.” He starts walking away, turns around again, holds both fists up in the air with a smile, and adds: “Everything.”

There are two ways to look at the idea of nothingness. In one picture, you know that you have been offered sacred ground. You have been offered the chance to belong everywhere and nowhere at the same time. You have been given a holy ground that no one can ever take or destroy. This holy land is timeless, and time-less… without time, without any anchor to a human story. In this picture, all of Islam is a seed faith that we are meant to plant in the Dark, plant back into the rich metaphysical world that all of Islam’s most sacred stories are pointing to. In that, you could no more claim a holy land than you could claim Dark Matter, the mysterious stuff that fills the universe — unseeable, unconquerable.

In another picture, nothingness is terror in which God has abandoned you, in which your measure of yourself is nothing. The Islam of chaos that has terrorized the world, the Islam of supremacy, is a picture where is a picture of terror. The terror exists because there is an attempt to claim something — to hold on even if by a death grip — to something that doesn’t belong to us.

Islam is a terra nullius, “Nobody’s land.”

An inhabited space that doesn’t belong to anyone.

A land with no master.

Perhaps peace in holy lands will be achieved when Muslims let go.
When we return to our faith. Return to the Dark.
Return to the gift of nothingness.

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What I’ve learned in the last three years of initiation into the Mystery is that any moment can be thick with the sacred — that often the most sacred thresholds are knit through fingers of light. The spindles across the hand of God spin a web of enmeshment and entanglement we know of as the Mystery.

Sometimes we see them. Sometimes we walk through them. Sometimes, we feel the threads adorn us years after we’ve crossed a threshold. Other times the sacred is found when we knead memory through time and experience.

I was quietly kneading the other day, churning memory with reflection when one moment locked in like a puzzle piece into the map that I am turning these threads into. Laying the threads like ley lines, ancient pathways across the greatest landscape there ever was: the human heart.

Somewhere around 2008, when the economy had tanked and jobs were hard to come by, I started working for my uncle Kamran. Kamran had an audio-video business, setting up complex home speaker systems for exclusive, wealthy clients.

My ‘job’ was mostly to be in the office or on-site and keep him company. It was an act of kindness to keep me afloat in between jobs. The wealth of his generosity is one of the things he’s most remembered for since his passing in 2022.

I spent one of those days at an ocean-front mansion in Malibu, where Kamran was decking out the home sound system for a wealthy Pakistani businessman. It was a beautiful home, a museum of finely curated furnishings and accents that signaled arrival — wealth being the hallmark of success for every immigrant story.

After a long day, Kamran went to the far end of the home and told me to listen for the song he was about the switch on to test the sound system.

Almost quite suddenly the space came to life as a voice echoed through the walls, reverent and reverberating through bones of wood and marble, through skin of fine silk wallpaper, filling the air with breath that stirred something within me. My eyes opened in wonder. I looked up, half expecting to find the song somewhere above me.

The song was Depeche Mode’s Shake the Disease. For the moments I was alone in that room, a rich man’s home became a temple. The choir-like voice in Shake the Disease that signals the sermon of song to follow, reminded me of the monasteries I visited as a kid in Germany, walking through great echoing halls hallowed by song. Suddenly, this great big barren home had a purpose: to be filled with song, to come alive through song.

A threshold had been crossed. It was as if I was hearing music for the first time; amplified sound in its highest possible clarity pulsing through metallic threads, filling the vast room, its doorways, and arches. The whole home was wired for music, crossing its own threshold at that moment, becoming more than just shelter; becoming a mirror for our inner landscape. Becoming a vessel alive with song, responding to our own human need to live in rhythm.

Becoming by taking a space of occupation — a dead zone — and bringing it to life with the foundation of all creation: frequency. Pouring sound from every mouth in the wall, every metal beehive punctured with hundreds of little pockets from which the nectar of song flows freely.

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Song holds the reverent capacity to pull us out of the trance state called life; I was sleep-walking through the day until song stirred me to awaken. Most of us are sleepwalking through life.

Kamran was more than just the laborer he was often seen as by wealthy clients. He was more than just an audio-video man running a small business. He gave every home, and every space he worked in, the potential to become a temple of sound. He was both an initiate and an initiator into the extraordinary realms of song. Kamran’s life’s work was to build thresholds and help people cross them.

He was the gardener tending to roots that take another form: techno-roots. Working in the places unseen just like the Dark, Kamran planted wired roots — red and yellow, green and blue, black and white, a rainbow of architecture with one soul purpose: to bear the fruit of song.

To the outer world, his life may have seemed mundane. But if we move below the surface, we can find the sacred in the mundane — even and especially in the most absolutely ridiculous, stunningly plain everyday life. Nothing more is needed than to simply be as you are. I could ask for nothing more than the gift of being able to see, popping the figurative glass bauble of a mystic’s eye into a Dark hollow orb, to see the world beneath the veneer of our outer lives. I want nothing more than to see, as if I’m just now at the precipice of 43 seeing the world for the first time — seeing the world as it really is and sharing that gift with those who also feel stirred.

The threshold crossed that day — and all the thresholds like it that came before and after — would lead me to become a devotee of the Mystery. It would be years before I would know that the song playing that night in a rich man’s house wasn’t random. Nothing is random.

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A song is one of the ways the Mystery, or our higher selves, or both, speaks to us. Some aspect of myself was speaking that day, asking me to Shake the Disease. It was a disease I would write about years later in The Song of the Human Heart. It would be something I could write about because the series of events that led me to be in that home that day with that uncle would plant a seed that would blossom over a decade later.

We all often wonder why we’re born into our strange little families, in which we’re also often a stranger. The role of a family isn’t to be tethered to the smallest tribe, locked into a dynamic of control, often controlled by ghost stories or stories of the past that still haunt us.

Among many other things, a family is a chance to experience the intimacy of being human, by moving through life’s communal rituals with the same band of people who just like a song, ebb and flow, sometimes terrible, sometimes exquisite. It’s said that the spiritual can be found in the hardest places, and family can be one of the most trying places to find the sacred. Yet through them, we’re given the chance to practice searching for the golden yolk once we crack the shell of our human drama, or the story of our fantastic, phantasmic, and even the fantasies of our identities.

The practice of song, of listening, is an extension of how to listen for the song of the human heart. To embody an enriched life when we marry memory with meaning.

We are all vaster than anything we could imagine, any label or title we could hold. To find that in the people who have stayed with you, both loved and challenged you the most is an extraordinary gift. It is an act of grace to find the sacred in the mundane — or in the case of my uncle Kamran, to uncover how his act of service in the world was so much more sacred than he could have known. The sacred is with all of us, found only through the intimacy of listening for the song that flows through each person.

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“The game's afoot.” — Sherlock Holmes

Recently, I finally took a chance and watched the film Remember Me. It was a poignant reminder that while we are fast forgetting the recent memory of the September 11th attacks, the people whose lives were forever marred by the events (and the years of brutality that followed), are still very much in the depths of their grief. However much we may lift our chin up and get on with life so to speak, grief is a deep pit in the heart that is forever hollow.

Recently I’ve also been writing wonderful op-eds that marry my work, my book, and the fast-approaching anniversary of the September 11th attacks — and try to get them placed in several niche and national outlets. I’ve not had any luck. It’s as if the queries and submissions I’m sending out are either falling into a rabbit hole of their own on the other end of the email … or people just don’t care anymore. I’m curious what you think and what you make of it as another anniversary comes and goes, paired with the anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

I wonder, how much of what we or I do as people who are trying to nurture a new conversation — how much of it matters. Are we wasting our time? I don’t know.

What I do know is that after 22 years of studying faith and religious extremism, I arrived upon the finding that Islam is a seed faith and our task is to bury it in the Dark. And I can’t ignore that. I can’t ignore what I found.

The anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers is next week. My birthday follows the day after — September 12th — and I’d like to offer you a listening gift. I’ve recorded the introduction to my book, The Song of the Human Heart: Dawn of the Dark Feminine in Islam that you can enjoy listening to while you’re driving or working on something around the house. I hope it offers some comfort for those to whom it still matters: some of us have not forgotten.

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Listen above or Click here to hear my reading of the introduction to The Song of the Human Heart: Dawn of the Dark Feminine in Islam.

In working with the mythic and reimagining the landscape of faith, identity, and belonging (my day job), I wondered about my own day-to-day experience of homeschooling my son, Reagan.

Reagan is 12 years old and a beautiful little Care Bear of a boy whom I pulled out of public school in 2020 after years of the system failing him. He’s diagnosed with mild/mod “Autism Spectrum Disorder” — though I don’t call it a disorder ever. Other labels he’s been given include having a learning disability and verbal delay. When he was diagnosed at 3 years old they said he’d probably never speak. In this space, I’ll share how while I understand the challenges he has, there is another way to look at special needs children — and how that informs other special needs parents and how it enriches the environment for learning for all children.

For example, sure he struggles to learn in the ways and at the pace of neurotypical children — but how is he learning in ways that are far more advanced? What gifts do these children offer us that can enrich the world? And sure, he has a verbal delay but he is fluent in another kind of language — the language of symbology. Sure, I am his teacher but in every way possible, my autistic son is my guide, shaping how I re-imagine the world, how I see more deeply, and how to become fluent in a language beyond words.

Autistic or not, every single child holds the same gift.
We just have to be able to SEE.

I’ve been homeschooling Reagan since the Covid-19 pandemic and learning so much about him and about our relationship as a family — while also navigating what has been the scariest part of my life. At the same time that I started homeschooling him (because there was no choice given the education system fallout), I’ve also been overcoming physical disability and challenges, having my career crash and burn, struggling with work in a culture that still doesn’t actually accept motherhood, struggling with bandwidth and capacity, while also having to overcome my own plummeting sense of worth which took a giant plunge because of all these things.

I thought deeply about all this while doing it, and I came out of it with insights that I’m here to offer others. Hopefully, it helps you because no one should have to go through this alone.

When Everything Starts Falling Apart…So Things Can Start Falling Into Place

The third year of homeschooling — that’s when things finally started falling into place. I began exploring, “What if I looked at him and his education in the same way I was looking at complex issues in the broader world?”

My career in counter-extremism where I challenged religious fanaticism crashed at the same time as the education system in a post-2020 world. I took the pieces and created something new out of it that is more beautiful and more promising (and more effective) than anything I was doing before. I came up with a new vision for countering Islamic extremism. For the past 22 years, I was fighting Islamic extremism, but when everything fell apart I was finally given the spaciousness I needed to go within. When I did, I found that instead of fighting the old paradigm, I discovered something more beautiful than the war zone of fighting bad ideas. Instead of fighting bad ideas, I created something new.

At the same time, the same thing was happening with the education system.

After years of fighting the public school system’s failure and being exhausted from it just to start again every new school year…I found something new, something more beautiful, more effective, and something older that gave us the ground we needed to build a foundation for belonging. It’s rewilding childhood through intuitive presence that needs a rich, fertile feminine landscape to take root in.

I was tilling the soil here, looking to see how I could pull the weeds and plant new seeds that help Reagan flourish. There’s so much to say here, which is why I created the Rewilding Childhood community — and ultimately it starts with this:

We can’t really have a conversation about homeschooling until we have a conversation about us. We have to have a conversation about us as mothers, as women, first.

In my day job commenting on global issues like the 2022 Iranian protests over women’s rights, I pushed through the noise of all the opinions of “women’s rights” and intuitively felt called to speak to women’s rites and the ritual of cord-cutting. The practice of cord-cutting is as old as human spirituality and it speaks to severing an energetic tether that binds us in some way. I compared the global protest of women cutting their hair to the sacred women’s rite of cord-cutting, of severing what no longer belonged to us.

The opposite needs to happen here. More and more we’re culturally being pushed and exploited into giving up on connection to our children. I’ll discuss this plenty more in the future, but for now:

In order to give our children the education they deserve, it’s so important to repair the cord that connects a mother to her child.

We need to repair the energetic cord that connects us to our children intuitively. Sensing what our children need is an instinct every mother has, but it is also a skill. You are all here as part of this Rewilding Childhood community because you are listening to the song of your heart; you know homeschooling, unschooling, and/or wildschooling is the environment your child thrives in. You are already rewilding.

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Just like learning how to find our voice in a song or knowing how to play a chord in the language of music, the cord connecting us to our child is like a root. The entire root system is a chorus that is always singing, always feeling through the soil.

Finding ways to repair that cord — those chords — is what I do here. I take my experience as a mother who has successfully worked with her son to overcome challenges…I take my intuitive gifts feeling for the song between things…and I bring that to you in ways that rewild both root and earth.

Thank you for being here, for your time, your friendship, and your trust.
Welcome to the Rewilding Childhood community.

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About Rewilding Childhood

Welcome to our collective, a place for homeschooling families devoted to wildschooling, unschooling, and nourishing the kaleidoscopic reality of children with Autism.

Every Tuesday from 9 am to 10 am PDT, we have a one-hour coffee and chat with our Rewilding Childhood Facebook Group. This is a space where we can come together so this journey of homeschooling feels a little less alone.

If you’d like to learn more about my work, books, guides, and other range of offers, please click here.