#15 Stories from the Fountain of Life with Aisha Gray Henry

Summary: Stories from the Fountain of Life with Aisha Gray Henry

We tap into stories from The Fountain of Life in this timeless conversation with ʿĀʾisha Gray Henry, bridging luminaries of our time into present time. Layered with an undertone of radiating brilliance, a merciful, enduring, undercurrent invites us to turn our attention toward our own fiṭra (فطره) and listen, acutely, through the heart to find secret truths of stories, symbolism, and mystical teachings blossoming.

ʿĀʾisha Gray Henry is the Founder and Director of the charitable foundation and publishing company Fons Vitae (The Fountain of Life). She is also an American writer, filmmaker, and ʿIslāmic scholar of her own merit. Influenced by the works of ʿImām al-Ghazālī, it’s been her life’s mission to....

Summary: Stories from the Fountain of Life with Aisha Gray Henry

We tap into stories from The Fountain of Life in this timeless conversation with ʿĀʾisha Gray Henry, bridging luminaries of our time into present time. Layered with an undertone of radiating brilliance, a merciful, enduring, undercurrent invites us to turn our attention toward our own fiṭra (فطره) and listen, acutely, through the heart to find secret truths of stories, symbolism, and mystical teachings blossoming.

ʿĀʾisha Gray Henry is the Founder and Director of the charitable foundation and publishing company Fons Vitae (The Fountain of Life). She is also an American writer, filmmaker, and ʿIslāmic scholar of her own merit. Influenced by the works of ʿImām al-Ghazālī, it’s been her life’s mission to instill the teachings from the ground root up.

Through the eyes of The Ghazālī Children’s Project, we are given the opportunity to connect at a deeper level to the timeless teachings of an extraordinary saint and begin to reframe the lens with which we look out into and interact with the world, as well as our own inner workings. Something about language in its most simplistic form allows for authentic quality guidance to reach all ages.

We are strongly encouraged to read the children’s books, adults and children alike, simply because they are the concise version of high caliber intellectual writing in layman words. Writing that requires much thought and depth for understanding, a delving into Qurʿān and ḥadīth (حديث).The children’s books contain the whole cumulation of al-Ghazālī’s The Revival of the Religious Sciences, إحياء علوم الدين (ʾIḥyāʾ ʿulūm ad-dīn), designed to enable us to interact with the teachings and become present for the sake of servicing others as the سنة (sunna) of every tradition, modeling to the best of our abilities the Prophet (ﷺ) who was the best in character. It’s precisely when scholarly works are written in a way that even a 5-year-old could understand it, that people are given a way to understand the meaning of what they’re doing and consequently, foster the inner transformative dimension of every detail of the faith. It’s through this collaborative effort that we can begin to plant the seeds of love for the dīn (دين) in our children. For the foundation of the lens of their seeing and being to be al-Ghazālī; clearing misidentification and locking in confidence, courage, clarity, and compassionate being. It will help future generations of people.

A recurring metaphorical image referenced is the golden heart. As ʿĀʾisha explains, the degree of light reflected from our essence, our fiṭra, determines the degree we can let go of attachments (mental, emotional, physical) and begin to see things as they truly are, in their exquisite perfection, the expressive manifestation of Light upon Light. Things are exactly the way they are meant to be. “Life is a gradual demonstration,” as Martin Lings (Abū Bakr Sirāj ad-Dīn , ابو بكر سراج الدين) put it, and through trials and blessings we can arrive at that point of actualized gnosis and equanimity.

A bridge to connect deeper to the pillars of faith is understanding. Here, we discuss some of the inner realities of the outer rituals of worship in ʾIslām; awakening ourselves to the hidden secrets, mysteries and meanings embedded in fasting (الصيام , al-ṣīyām), ablution (الوضوء , al-wuḍū), prayer (الصلاة , as-ṣalāt) and exaltation (تكبير , takbīr).

Explored in conversation is a living description of wayfaring and traveling distances toward truth. Moments constantly define and redefine how we show up in this world; instances that live beyond time and in the instant of occurrence, we are often left transformed. For ʿĀʾisha, a sentence of truth in W. Montgomery Watt’s autobiography of al-Ghazālī, المنقذ من الضلال (al-Munqidh min al-Ḍalāl) ignited that flame setting off a domino effect: “I'm living as it were on a crumbling bank, up, up and away, if not, now, when?”

Her husband’s interest in the living saints of Morocco initiated a long, arduous, but luminous journey through the Atlas lands. Weaved in bold determination are the memories before reaching al-ʿAzhar for studies: from a freighter out of New York in the summer of ’68 to Morocco, Tunisia, and then Libya—pausing there due to the ongoing war between Egypt and Israel at the time, while being 9 months pregnant, only to finally reach Egypt with a newborn in the spring of ’69.

Syllables mount us in the spirit of courage, inspiration, and deep yearning, encouraging us to tread on a path less traveled. To witness, human potential, at its best. We are educated about three luminaries of the 20th century whose stories are honored by Fons Vitae publishing: Shaykh ʿAbdul Ḥalīm Maḥmūd الشيخ عبد الحليم محمود)), whose tranquil presence resembled great beauty and stature; Shaykh Ḥāfiẓ al-Tījānī (الشيخ حافظ التيجاني) , just, caring, silent, and present and although blind, had a mind of the full human with recollection; and Shaykh Ṣāliḥ al-Jaʿfarī (الشيخ صالح الجعفري), a true exemplar of kingship who was known for seeing the prophetic presence during jummʿa khutbahs خطبة الجمعة)). Recognition, insight, and knowing occurs at the soul level; these people, as ʿĀʾisha describes, are beings of luminous generosity, light upon light. What they carry is the paradoxical nature of absence, being emptied of self, and full presence.

We are reminded of great saints and teachers, relationships of loving reciprocity, including Shaykh Hamzah Yūsuf (همزة يوسف الشيخ), Shaykh ʿAbdul Ḥakīm Murād Winter (الحكيم مراد وينتر الشيخ عبد), and Dr. Zahīra ʿĀbdīn (زهيرة عابدين د.) and pausing with what it must be like to be in the presence of a qutb(قطب) like Shaykh Murābiṭ al-Ḥajj (الشيخ مرابطة الحج). The mutual witnessing that takes place.

We are reminded of our own vicegerency role, with the potentiality to live as a sanctified essence, as a khalīfa (خليفة) on earth. We are called to step up. To clear up the rivalry between our nafsand our golden heart, that which is muṭmaʾinna (مطمئنة ). To take heed of the subtle nuances in the Arabic language, such as in ḥaḍritik (حضرتك), as a means of maintaining deep courtesy, ʾādab (ادب), awakening to presence, ḥaḍra (حضره), and find our speech rise to address the Holy Spirit.There’s a need for us to listen, be present, and speak from that very deep place.

This intimate interview carries a reflective ambiance. It posits the essential question: who are we and where we are going? How surrendered are we on that path? Are we diligently polishing the mirror and radiating a golden heart? How devoted are we to purifying the self? And why does it matter? Are we, in every moment, aware that we have entered ākhir al-zamān (آخر الزمان)?

When we understand freedom as the opportunity to reframe what is happening to us, as ʿĀʾisha explains, we find the means to purify our being, to become luminous, in service to our true nature. We are at the fork-road of choice: in our response, in prioritizing the needs of others without compromising our own, practicing sunna byputting the other always first, and using our sensitivity to read between the lines and help others align in authenticity and purpose. Between the polarities of negative and positive is free-will: Will we choose to be amongst those who are in a constant state of witnessing, in awe and equanimity, that huwwa ʿalā kulli shayʾin qadīr (هو على كل شيء قدير)?

We close this conversation by exploring how The Ghazālī Children's Projecteducational initiative might be taught through Ḥikmah. Ghazālī teaches us that we are all teachers, casting a shadow. The project, as ʿĀʾisha reminds us, has come from Allāh. Everybody now needs to deeply and profoundly use every moment of their life. The objective is to make these teachings accessible to local communities worldwide. Impactful engagement, through drawing, imagery, workbooks, role-play and stories, the teachings are given a medium to age into experiential knowledge. For those interested in active involvement, whether leading online or through an existing on-ground educational platform, resources can be made available. Reach out and keep inspiring change!

Stories from the Fountain of Life with Aisha Gray Henry

Speakers
Host: Saqib Safdar
Guest: Aisha Gray Henry

Saqib
Greetings, السلام عليكم (as-salāmu ʿalaikum), welcome everyone, my name is Saqib, I'm your host on The Ḥikmah Project podcast. In today's episode, we'll be talking to ʿĀʾisha Gray Henry from Fons Vitae and she's probably one of the most remarkable eighty year old I've spoken to, so much energy, it was just unbelievable. We ended up having quite a long conversation, which is actually in two parts and it's taken me quite some time to actually edit this down.
So, الحمد لله (al-ḥamduli’llāh) we talk about a number of things from her own journey firstly and how she meets these luminaries in Egypt, in Cairo, and then she basis some work around that later on in her life. She has published three books about these luminaries, these saintly figures in Cairo. Funnily enough, she also starts her journey with a quote from الامام الغزالي )ʾImām al-Ghazālī(, that's what really got her into الإسْلام (ʾIslām( and the path and as TS Eliot says, “We shall never cease from exploring and at the end of all our journeying will be to arrive where we started and know that place for the very first time.”
You know, after all these years of traveling the path, she has come back to ʾImām al-Ghazālī with this phenomenal project, which she tells us about, it really does feel the project is coming through her rather than from her; and it's been translated in multiple languages, we talk about how it's going, how it started, and the impact it's had in the way she's sort of working with different communities and children. And the podcast is filled with stories so, you know, if you're into stories, I think you're in for a treat.
Before we start the podcast, just a couple of announcements. We are currently running the Secrets of Divine Love reading circle. You can join via the Ḥikmah website at www.thehikmahproject.com and there you'll see a post on the Secrets of Divine Love. Currently, as I speak, we are on chapter 3, I believe on the Qurʾān, and we're just basically taking it gradually and part of the reading circle is to do some journaling as well.
You should hear some news about an Ibn al-ʿArabī reading circle in which we explore mainly through the texts of Chodkiewicz and Michael Sells and invite guest speakers when we can and انشاء الله (inshā’ Allāh) that should be actually advertised pretty soon and hopefully, after talking to ʿĀʾisha Gray Henry I would like to start putting together some sort of plan around how we can run The Ghazālī Children's Project by Ḥikmah and what that might look like so if that's something that interests you, you would like to get involved, please do get in touch.
And finally, we have advertised for an Arabic to English translator; we are planning to get a commentary by الشيخ رمضان البوطي (Shaykh Ramaḍān Boūṭī) on the حكم (Ḥikam) translated, so if you know any good translators, or indeed if you're one yourself, and that does interest you please do get in touch.
Also to note is the various hyperlinks and resources I share mentioned in the podcast are put in the Ḥikmah post for this podcast so if you are interested please do support us by becoming a member. I think it's something like five pounds a month to support the development of the Ḥikmah Project and of course you can also subscribe as a free member to get access to newsletters and posts as well as join various reading circles.
So without further ado, here's the podcast.

So as-salām ʿalaikum ʿĀʾisha, so lovely to have you with us today.

Aisha
Well, I'm honored and I feel privileged to share a conversation with you my dear Sīdī.

Saqib
Oh, thank you so much. I'm very, very humbled. I've been really looking forward to speaking to you for a very, very long time and I can't tell you how humbled by heart is just to be with you and share this moment, al-ḥamduli’llāh.

Aisha
Well, you know, we're all together. We're all on this journey together in our own paces, just as الله (Allāh) brings us back to Him. He sends us what we need when we need it. He gives us our files and, you know, it sounds like platitudes, because you read it everywhere, but I remember Martin Lings once said, “Life is a gradual demonstration.” And over time, these eternal ideas and principles that are part of the religious journey, you can read them and you say, “Right, that's true,” but it's not necessarily when you look out every day, you are not looking out through that lens, you know about that lens, and it takes any number of blessings and trials, to finally as Martin Lings said, demonstrate completely, that, هو على كل شيء قدير(huwwa ʿalā kulli shayʾin qadīr).
You know, it only—only, I'm 80 now, only last year when I was 79, did I finally realize that that's really true; and that when I get bad news, I no longer have any negative reaction to it because I have seen through certain experiences recently, that like, every single moment, like being with you right now, is exactly meant to be. And our freedom really is whether we are, you know, negative or positive, or taking every moment in our lives as an opportunity to reframe what's happening to us as an opportunity to purify, you know, because that's what we want to do by the end to be purified of all but He and I think that's the whole Ghazālī thing about the golden heart, you know, for the radiance of our golden heart, to be really luminous beings, to be منور (munawwar), you know. That the degree of light that is reflected from our فطره (fiṭra), our essence, really determines the degree we finally are able to let go of things in our own lives, you know about ourselves and all the rest. So…

Saqib
Al-ḥamduli’llāh so can you just take us a bit back and firstly, it's extraordinary, we can share your story, and I'm sure you've met many brilliant people who have had an influence on you who have emptied themselves in various traditions. So can you tell us about your journey to Ṣūfīsm and spirituality? Where did it start? And how did it unfold for you?

Aisha
I majored in world religions when I was at Sarah Lawrence in the ‘60s, early ‘60s, actually ʾIslām was not taught because there was, I mean, in the early ‘60s, there was no mention of the ʾIslāmic world, there wasn't even an oil crisis, and somewhere I had this idea it was something like One Thousand and One Nights (الف ليله وليله), camels, harems, Baghdad, you know, totally, like, from fairytales, that kind of thing. And so I didn't know about it. I did have a Pakistani friend at Yale and ʿAlī Fancy Anwar, ʿAlī Fancy, and he talked about Ṣūfīsm, but I didn't pay any attention, you know. And then later, after college, I was working in filmmaking in New York, and my husband, a Venezuelan film director, we were reading, he was reading books on the saints of ʾIslām, because having grown up a Catholic, he really wanted to be like St. Francis of Assisi but one day in his catechism class, the priest said, “Boys, what do you want to be when you grow up?” and they said, “Doctor,” “Fireman,” “Lawyer,” and Theodore said, “That's not be, that's do.” “I want to be like St. Francis,” and at that moment, the priest didn't have the sensitivity and he said, “But that is for the elect,” and then he thought, my former husband, he said, “Well, then I'm out of here, if all this going to mass and all of these things we’re asked to do aren't leading to that state.”
And so then he lived in Europe, and ultimately came back to America through Venezuela and became great friends with his film director, teacher, who said, you know, “If you're not involved in that process of the purification of the self, you're not doing anything with your life.” And ultimately, he started reading books in the New York Public Library and he started reading books about the living, living saints of Morocco in North Africa, whereas as Christians we were growing up with the idea that saints basically were a long time ago, not that there aren't living Christian saints you know, it's just that one is not aware of it in one's communities; and so he started reading these books, and I was reading with him, but I had no interest and I happened to pull over out of ادب (ʾādab) politeness, the life of ʾImām, the autobiography of al-Ghazālī, المنقذ من الضلال (al-Munqidh min al-Ḍalāl), that book by W. Montgomery Watt what was called The Faith and Practice of al-Ghazālī. So I pulled it over and when I started to read it I thought, “Oh, my goodness, this is the truth,” and when al-Ghazālī said, “I'm living as it were on a crumbling bank, up, up and away, if not, now, when?” When I read that I've never recovered from that line and here I am, at my age, still on a very crumbly bank and when am I going to simply be—be who I really already am. A friend of mine, she's a Saudi, مها فيصل (Mahā Faiṣal) said, “Life is so brief in one sense, we're all already dead.” It's like that.
So what are we holding back for? Why don't we just be the sanctified essence that's our true nature, the fiṭra, you know, and I don't know what holds one back from not just quitting putting oneself first, you know, and being present is the سنة (sunna) of every tradition for the other. And so reading that al-Munqidh min al-Ḍalāl and I was like, 21 years old, 22, something like that. It was like, “Wow!” and then Theodore wrote toالأزهر (al-ʾAzhar) and they offered us scholarships to study. Well, I mean, of course we didn't know Arabic and so in any case, we accepted, and we got on a freighter in the summer of ‘68 and shipped out of New York to Morocco, to Tangier, and had never seen anything like it, you know, what that walking into the beautiful Muslim world and Morocco; and so from there, we bought a car and drove all over down the Draa valley to Zagora and beyond to M'Hamid, sleeping with Bedouins in their tents who were collecting dates, finally drove into Algeria, the car broke, the mechanic took us in to live with him while he fixed it, gave us his only bed; crossed to Tunisia, reached Libya, but by the time we got to the border of Egypt, I was nine months pregnant. So we stopped and Egypt was at war with Israel anyway; this is ‘68 but the war raged on and so, my daughter Ḥajar was born in Bayda Libya and we met wonderful, for the first time we found that Muslims weren't just Arabs in the usual cliché, but we met Nigerians, Bosnians; the Filipinos we hung out with, totally, we became Philippine-ized with awe, they were from the Sultanate of Salu. You know, we know a lot and we were, even نور ميسواري (Nūr Miṣāwarī), he became the head of the مجاهدين (mujāhidīn), you know, but he was our babysitter.
So we reached Egypt in the spring of ‘69 with a newborn and went to al-ʾAzhar and began our studies but of course, we didn't know Arabic, so we had special studies. And the great الشيخ عبد الحليم محمود (Shaykh ʿAbdul Ḥalīm Maḥmūd), الله يرحمه (Allāh yirḥamhu), was one of the three subjects of our three great luminary beings of Cairo. We went to his office and I had never seen anything like it. He was just sitting there with his prayer beads, we spoke in French, and that presence, that peace, that silence, it was like, it was like meeting a prophet—it was unbelievable. And he said, you know, “You will come here every day after work and I'll have teachers who know English teach you فقه(fiqh) and تجويد (tajwīd) and احديث (aḥadīth),” and all the rest of it. “But you will need jobs,” because the so-called scholarships are like $3 each a month or something. So, so my husband got a job teaching film direction at Cairo University. He worked to teach Spanish at al-ʾAzhar. He worked at night at the radio. I taught at al-ʾAzhar girl school English and art.
And so we began, you know, but then in those 10 years, we were in Cairo, young people like us, came from Japan and Italy and England and France, so there were generations of us together and we're all still together today.

Saqib
Right.

Aisha
We're all doing our work, we're a gang, right? So, and every generation has its gang. I'm sure you're a part of a—as cross and it's interesting to see that. So we spent 10 years there basically and my son مصطفى (Musṭafā) was born there and then there were two other great saintly beings there. There was one called الشيخ حافظ التيجاني (Shaykh Ḥāfiẓ al-Tījānī) and he was blind, you know, and we'd go once a week, to sit with his many disciples from all over the world and I’ll just tell you a beautiful story about him is that, you know, there was a French Muslim, Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch, she translated Rūmī from Persian into French, حجة حواء‎ (Ḥajja Ḥawwa), and she had come to see Shaykh Ḥāfiẓ and wanted to be his disciple and he took his robe and put it around and he said, “No,” he said, “you may have my robe,” he said, “I would give you all these things to say,” you know ورد (wirds), “you wouldn't do them and you would feel guilty and I don't want you to feel guilty,” and at that moment an eye doctor came in from Shibin el-Kom and he said, “Shaykh Ḥāfiẓ,” and he was Ḥāfiẓ because he was حافظ (ḥafiẓ) aḥadīth. “Are there any ḥadīth which mentioned this particular plant, which I think might be valuable for eye medicine,” and the Shaykh said, “In my small knowledge there are three,” and he recited two of them with the complete إسناد (ʾisnād) and the third he said, “I'm unsure of it.” So there was a little boy next to me he said, “Now bring down the book.” So he went up on the shelf, dust, dusted it off, and then Shaykh Ḥafiẓ said, “Well, somewhere around in the center,” you know, open and read, and the boy read, he said, “Go two pages back, it's at the bottom,” and we saw the mind that we now call the computer, the mind of the full human with recollection, it was unbelievable.
So Shaykh Ḥafiẓ was a wonderful beloved and right now an Italian, عبد الصمد يريتزي ʿAbd al-Ṣamad Yuritzi, is preparing the book on him for our trilogy. And another man is doing, Shaykh ʿAbdul Ḥalīm, he had a book, he wrote something called: هاذي هي حياتي الحمد لله (Hadhī Hiyya Ḥayātī, al-Ḥamdulil’llāh) that's being translated into English and then, the last book is already out, سمير دجاني (Samīr Dajānī) did that, and that was الشيخ صالح الجعفري )Shaykh Ṣāliḥ al-Jaʿfarī(, The Reassurance for the Seeker. So one of the trilogy is out, it's called The Three Luminaries of the 20th Century because I didn't want that to get lost, you know. But—

Saqib
Before, sorry to interject, before we move on from here I've read some of the book on Shaykh Ṣāliḥ al-Jaʿfarī, and putting the book aside tell us when did you first see him? How was it like seeing this person, for our listeners who haven't read the book or don't know who he is.

Aisha
Yeah.

Saqib
Tell us about him. I would just add before you sort of, you know, maybe you can expand on this, that he was somebody who saw the prophetic presence during the خطبة الجمعة (jummʿa khutbahs) that he gave, the jummʿa sermons, I believe.

Aisha
You could see it because he was—he was luminous, and they would bring him out, he'd been in the مسجد الأزهر (al-ʾAzhar Mosque), he never left the mosque, he lived there for 40 years or I think something like that, and when they brought him out, he would sit in the courtyard after the prayer to speak to everyone. But, he, you wouldn't have known he was old, and he was more than 100, and except that when he stood people had to help him walk back to his quarters. But he spoke in the language of the people at their level. He didn't speak above them, you know, he would speak to taxi cab drivers, you know, “When you go home today from the jummʿa prayer, you know, take a little surprise to your dear wife,” you know, “think of she's at home cooking the jummʿa meal,” you know, just lovely little things. But when I first saw him oh, makes me cry. I thought: “I'm actually in the presence of a king.” It was kingship. And then you realize of course the various stations: king, warrior, businessman, farmworker, these are four spiritual states also and that, that kingship really, it was always the king had received Divine Right; let's say when King Charles is anointed, they will hover him like in a tent, it can't be seen by anyone because at that moment he's receiving from God that responsibility of partaking, of giving his community, their social and religious and spiritual order and all the rest. It's a huge thing. I mean, that's why Pharaoh was considered God as it were. But I mean, so but I was looking at the real thing, not the worldly king, but the King, what kingship actually is and that's what I saw in his presence.

Saqib
Do you have a story, an interaction with him, that you remember?

Aisha
No, I was too—I can only look from afar. But I must say bringing out that book, all the pictures we put in of him, the picture, the book cover, what he looks like, you can see it, that is it, that kingship, look at the cover of the book, The Reassurance for the Seeker, or take it off of the internet or something but I have to tell you, wow. And you could see pictures of him sitting with Shaykh ʿAbdul Ḥalīm Maḥmūd Allāh yirḥamuh as well. But sometimes I hear on the radio still they have Shaykh ʿAbdul Ḥalīm’s voice and I cry when I hear it; the beautiful—the beauty and the presence.
He then went from being the head of ‏مجمع البحوث الإسلامية (The Islamic Research Academy); I remember when he wrote a book on the Prophet (ﷺ) peace and blessings be upon him, he said, “People are on like a pendulum between يوحى اليه (yūwḥā ilayhī),” receive revelation, and “ بشر بس (bashar bas),” only man. And he became Shaykh al-ʾAzhar, Shaykh al-ʾIslām, and when he went to Hunza in Pakistan to Gilgit, he said, “That was the most beautiful place in the world.” But he was like, what can you say? What we see in these people is who we want to be. And you can't get it out of books. Because you can read descriptions and it's just descriptions. But when you see it, you realize, that's who I want to be.
There was a woman, a saintly being in Cairo called زهيرة عابدين د. (Dr. Zahīra ʿĀbdīn) and she worked tirelessly for the poor and the sick and built hospitals all over the world, major; and she was always smiling and luminous. She left at six in the morning and came back at midnight and in 1987, I was living in England and I got paralyzed with Guillain-Barré and when I could no longer move at all, I mean, I couldn't even chew, I couldn't move my eyes, and I thought, “What will I do with the rest of my life? I can't move,” if I live. And then I thought, “Wait a minute. Do we love people for what they do? We love people for their presence; that they are. We love it. We don't care what people do for a living or that they saved this or all these great things مشاء الله (mashʾAllāh).” So suddenly I'm lying there and I realized she has always done more for me than anyone else because of her just luminosity. So I thought, “So, if I would just be like her, I would be doing and giving more than any charitable—all the stuff I run around and do.”
I never got over her, you know, and she's the one who insisted I go on her behalf to Bosnia during the war. She was friends of Tudjmān and she said, “I want to sell all of my lands and properties and make a walk for educating teachers, not buildings, but teachers.” So it was because of Dr. Zahīra I worked in the refugee camps and later published for the Bosnians and much more stuff like that.
But I mean, and when we had been in Libya, there was a student who was with us named Haris Silajdžić and he was our best friend in Libya in ‘68, because he spoke English to start with, kind of looked like me, and in the end I ended up, he was the Prime Minister of Bosnia, so after my parents died, I went and worked with him there. So it's a gang, you know what I’m saying, people traveling, that's the main thing.

Saqib
And can you tell us about Ḥafiẓ, Shaykh Ḥafiẓ al-Tījānī, your first interaction, your first—how was he like when you first met him? And what sort of presence did he have? What was he doing? And where did you meet him and…?

Aisha
In a زاوية (zāwiya) he just, he just was silent and present, you know, I think that's what we love. You know, he was just and caring, you know? And there's nothing to say actually, isn't that funny? What can you say? I think with these people, what you're loving is the absence of anyone being there you know, and in that space the presence of God is there you know, without the person talking their head off as I’m doing right now.

Saqib
During your 10 years at al-ʾAzhar, did you take hand with anyone? What—what was your spiritual path after that? What happens then?

Aisha
No we wanted to take hand with Shaykh ʿAbdul Ḥalīm, but he, a Spiritual Master has to have time for his disciples and he only had time to serve the world, you know, so, so we hadn't taken had with anyone, you know we just simply, during 1976, my husband was also working for the مركز أبحاث الحج في المملكة العربية السعودية (Ḥajj Research Center in Saudi Arabia) and filming the taking down of the old city of المدينة المنورة (Madīna), working on the ḥajj with the German Muslim Maḥmūd Rasch, who is the architect of all the tents of the new مقام ابراهيم (maqām Ibrāhīm), of the steps you push up to wash the inside of the الكعبة (kaʿaba) out. So, they were there, and in ‘76, there was going to be the world of ʾIslām festival in London, or ‘77, something like that. So my husband met at that time Martin Lings, ابو بكر سراج الدين (Abū Bakr Sirāj ad-Dīn), who was in Saudi Arabia, you know working on some of the books and some of the ideas along with other people.
So we moved to England anyway in ‘79. We lived in Egypt from ‘69 to ‘79. We never left Egypt, of course we're still there. You don't leave Egypt. And my grandparents had been in Alexandria from ‘25 to ’52. He was a judge under the kings.
Saqib
Alright.

Aisha
So my family, we're going 100 years now, you know, I have a granddaughter born in Egypt, we're Egyptian actually, you know, and we were able to continue our great friendship with Martin Lings and he became for us our spiritual mentor because for me also just Sīdī, to meet someone from my own background, an English background, that made it, that was empty. It's fine. You can, how many I’ve been on—I’ve done a couple of ḥajjs, trillions of عمرة (ʿumras), traveled with my family, the whole Muslim world, visited the Muslims in Taipei, Indonesia, Japan, India, and you see all these beautiful people and beautiful elders. We don't have beautiful elders in America. There are probably some, but I mean, handful, and England too. So for me, and I had seen these beautiful people, I mean, earth shattering for you, but always of another culture. Right. So I wasn't actually sure whether somebody with an English background had a chance, you know. But then when we met, Abū Bakr Sirāj ad-Dīn, he was writing the wonderful life of the Prophet (ﷺ), fantastic! Right? Finally, a سيرة (seera) that works for us that wasn't written by someone who has a mustache or basically didn't like the Prophet (ﷺ), peace and blessings be upon himself. So he became our spiritual mentor. And then after he died, همزة يوسف (Hamza Yūsuf took) me to Mauritania to meet the great الشيخ مرابطة الحج )Shaykh Murābiṭ al-Ḥajj(, you know so I had—

Saqib
Alright.

Aisha
So I had a pillar to lean on, right. And it was quite something to meet him and to see him with his white hair lying on his side and Hamza was sitting in front of him and I sat to Hamza’s right, and Hamza said, “Now, this is ʿĀʾisha,” so Shaykh Murābiṭ al-Ḥajj started in toning my name and I said, “What's going on?” Well, it's like he's meeting you, right? And then he did a beautiful long دعاء )duʿā), probably for The al-Ghazāli Project, and then drifted into sleep. And imagine being in the company of a قطب (qutb) like that, you know.

Saqib
Wow.

Aisha
Hamza Yūsuf’s great teacher, you know, for seven years living in the desert, you know I mean we're talking about total desert, total desert.

Saqib
And while we are on Shaykh Abū Bakr Sirāj ad-Dīn, I had the honor of seeing him once, at The Shakespeare Globe Theatre, we gave a talk on Shakespeare.

Aisha
Oh that was at the end of his life, wasn't it?

Saqib
Yes, yes.

Aisha
Hamza spoke at that one too.

Saqib
Yes, yes and al-ḥamdulil’llāh, I was just floored, it was just amazing to see somebody of that luminosity and depth. And it was only much later, 10 years later that I began to understand.

Aisha
Aha.

Saqib
To some extent, what he was actually talking about, with Shakespeare and the symbolism behind.

Aisha
Yeah.

Saqib
The anagogical reading of his face.

Aisha
But you know, the thing with Martin Lings was that, not only was there no نفس (nafs) there, right, but when he spoke to each one of us, he spoke to our true essence, he didn't address me with my crummy personality and my whole, but, so that you would rise up. If I spoke to you, as I am right now, hopefully, I am addressing your fiṭra, your true essence, not your packaging or your story or your narrative. That's the problem, we're not talking to people who they are, right. We're talking to a passing package, which is a terrible thing to do. And now that I have friends who are dying, you know, a lot of my own friends, and you go to see them, and then people are talking, you know, side issues, you know, and actually, I just looked into one of my friends eyes and she was confused, and just said, “You're, you’re so beautiful,” and then she began to cry because I was talking to her.
And I have many friends now with dementia, you know, lots of stuff in that direction, and people really are doing such a disservice to all these people with short term memory and all the rest, they say, “How are you? What are you doing?” How dare they, you know. How dare they put people on a spot to ask about a mere packaging, right. You know, what have you been doing? Who cares? But really, what you have to do with these people, is just look into their eyes, and address the Holy Spirit, right? And then you're talking to them, and we should all talk that way to each other. I mean, think of really goodbye as “God be with you,” but does anyone think that anymore?
The great Saint Seraphim of Sarov, who lived, you know, in the tiger forest of Russia, finally, you know, and finally, this man, Motovilov went to see him and he said, “He was shining so much that he could only see the lips moving because it was a flame in the snow,” and he went up to this spiritual saint, and the saint didn't say, “Hello, sir,” he said, “Your godliness.” We should be doing that to each other. If you think about it, حضرتك (ḥaḍritik), right, حضره (ḥaḍra), your, your presence of God, you know we speak of the ḥaḍra or, you know, the presence of God. So when we say, “Sir,” to each other, or “مدام (madām),” we—we really are saying in Arabic, your—the presence of God in you. We are all asleep with what we're saying to each other, it's very sad.

Saqib
I know, and I think the soul in my experience, the soul craves for that because in the modern world, in this hyper connected world, although we are connected, the depth of relationship or the depth of connection, isn't quite there sometimes. And I know the one thing that's really fascinated me is in the Turkish tradition, I think they call it görüşmek, so the Mevlevi’s would kiss the cup they would drink from, they would have this moment of seeing, and I think in the African tradition they call it sawabona, it's a mutual, it's not even I see you, it's we see you, there's an ancestral—

Aisha
Oh, how beautiful!

Saqib
You know, seeing of each other. And then the response is, we see you or you know, I see you too.

Aisha
That’s beautiful.

Saqib
And so it's a mutual witnessing, if you like, of something that goes beyond, as you said, the just the mere outer form or the or just the story, the sun depth, but surely we need to be in that place.
So that really intrigues me that Shaykh Abū Bakr would speak from that place. That doesn't surprise me but to somebody who may not be in that; so when you said Sīdī at the beginning of this call, you said, “My dear Sīdī,” you activated something inside me that responded from a deeper place than it normally would have, al-ḥamdulil’llāh, and that's, that's phenomenal. And we forget that I think sometimes, when we do things like courses or books or readings, you know, I feel they need to come from, they need to—we need to learn to listen, to begin with, to sit, be present, listen, and speak from that place. I think that's so needed.

Aisha
I know, so needed, yeah, but that's, well, that's what the journey is to reach that place. Yeah, yeah.

Saqib
Al-ḥamdulil’llāh and if I may, and again I'm thinking of my listeners here, who some of them don't know about Ṣūfīsm; they don't, you know, and I think it's a great honor to be able to have this conversation with you because you've got so much to share. But even just from a narrative to say this is what happened in Cairo, “These were three luminous people,” you know, just that, you know, this was Marty Lings, many people they know about the biography of the Prophet (ﷺ), peace be upon him, but that interaction with this saintly person who was completely empty. It's you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s—it’s gold dust you know I think to be able to have these experiences and to be able to share them and ʾinshāʾAllāh it will spark—I know, Michael Sugich, Sīdī Harūn, wrote a book recently on The Signs of the Horizons, and I thought, that was such a service to say in the contemporary world there are 40 اولياء (ʾawliyāʾ) he's met, some hidden, some apparent, but it gives hope to people of my generation who might not have met Martin Lings or the three luminary people you've met, to say, they are the ʾawliyāʾ, they are alive, there are people here always in our midst.
So ʿĀʾisha, can I just ask you mentioned Shaykh Hamza Yūsuf and I know you go back a long way, when did you first meet him? And I think there was a story about him being a student and you’re in a bookstore or something, or?

Aisha
Well, he told me this story, I didn't remember it. After the 10 years in Egypt, we thought عذب عنا (ʿazbu ʿannā), it's our responsibility to give back. The West, the Western world we came from totally misunderstands ʾIslām and that's only worse now, by the way, you know because of media, what the media, the imagery the media gives to the world on Muslim countries and Muslims, and people believe their New York Times, and we all do, and if you think about how many images I have of Australia, just a few images I have from the media, you know, three or four, so people are not to blame, but someone has chosen what's going to be shown. But anyway, we thought that, and this was in the ‘70s, that the books that were out about ʾIslām were mostly either very poorly produced or really against Muslims, some of the academic works. And we have discovered from living in the Muslim world, the wonder of the Muslim people, you know how kind they are, how beautiful they are, how generous they are. I mean like it's unbelievable actually, actually, it's unbelievable. And there's no way you can tell somebody that, they have to go to a Muslim country and experience it. There's no book and no video or no anything will do it but anyway, so we decided that we would try to get some of the great spiritual classics translated from Arabic etcetera into English and publish them in an incredible way.
So we set up something in England called the جمعيه النصوص الإسلاميه )Jamʿīyya al-Nuṣūṣ al-ʾIslāmiyya, The Islamic Texts Society) and the original funding came from الامير محمد الفيصل )Prince Muḥammad al-Faiṣal) and later from الشيخ زكي يماني (Shaykh Zakī Yamānī), Allāh yirḥamhum. And we lived on a farm, you know outside of Cambridge, and we started The Texts Society in our house, in the living room, just like Fons Vitae is in my basement and I'm in the kitchen, which is my office, always nonprofit, you don't traffic with religion, right?
So, anyway, so we moved there to England and finally had a little building which we rented in Cambridge, with a little bookstore downstairs, very beautiful and nice offices, and continued all of this work and one day Hamza Yūsuf came up to my office and he said, “I'd like to buy the Lanes Lexicon,” these two huge volumes, we took the Lanes Lexicon, the eight hard to manage volumes and made them into two beautiful. So he said, “But I don't have the money,” he says, I said this and I simply said, “How much money do you have in your pocket?” and he's like, “Five dollars,” or something. I said, “Here, take my copy.” So he, he remembers this. He walked out with my copy and of course, what an Arabist he is, you know?

Saqib
And this was way back in the?

Aisha
In the ‘80s.

Saqib
‘80s, wow.

Aisha
Yeah, somewhere like maybe 1985 or ‘86 or something like that, I don't know, something like that, yeah. And then I used to see him when he was in California, he was working, doing projects with Dr. Thomas Cleary, some wonderful things they did. And then starting there Zaytūna, really, in a wonderful little town south of—in California, I can't think of the name of it right now. So he's been an old and dear friend and that brings us to The Ghazālī Project; it was that, about 10 or so years ago, maybe longer, he called up and said, you know, that his children were studying in an ʾIslāmic school and basically wasn't working out. You know, we know what—

Saqib
His children?

Aisha
Yeah.

Saqib
All right, yeah.

Aisha
Because you see it's very hard to compete with the world of iPhones and all the rest and children, if they're just told do's and don'ts and “You're going to hell,” and you know, all the rest of it, they're not going to love their faith, you know, and love the process of realizing their true nature.
So, he said, “What about al-Ghazālī for children?” Well because of—it’s quite interesting, if you see my whole life, I'm reading al-Ghazālī when I'm 20 years old in the New York Public Library. Then when we opened The Texts Society, we immediately started, عبد الحكيم وينتر (ʿAbdul Ḥakīm Winter) he was just getting out of Pembroke, he did Death and what comes after (The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife), Book 40, and then he did on Breaking the Two Desires and of course we've known him since he was just getting out of college it's been such a long—and to think he now has it this beautiful Cambridge Mosque, a Ghazālī school, you know, for 200 families.
I mean, it's, but anyway, so we began Ghazālī and we loved him. And I love Ghazālī because it gave me a way to understand the meaning of what you're doing and everything, the inner transformative dimension of every detail of the faith. And so, we plugged along, and then, in 1989-90, I had to leave England and come back here to Kentucky where you're talking to me because my mother and father were bedridden and really ill; so I turned our porch out here into a hospital room and was able to be blessed to be with them till they died.
And so that’s—so finally, in about the early ʾ90s, somewhere in the ʾ90s, ʿAbdul Ḥakīm Winter said why didn't I start another publishing company and call it Fons Vitae, The Fountain of Life, يعني (yʿanī), الكوثر (al-kawthar), al-kawthar.

Saqib
Right, right, right.

Aisha
And do of course ʾIslāmic spirituality but, you know, add in other world spiritualities, which is important because I love interfaith work and love all the faith traditions, I mean few enough people in this giant world are involved in a spiritual process, we should, we should hang on to one another.
So then we started bringing out a little more Ghazālī something with, you know, The Marvels of the Heart, other things like this. And then, so this project came up and so I thought: “He's right, I now have grandchildren. How are they going to be raised? How are they going to love their دين (dīn)?” So I started going around fundraising for The Project and got the first books 1 and 2 going and then in the end Hamza encouraged me to go to Templeton for a grant.
Now, people say, “Well here is,” okay, “Here is al-Ghazālī’s Children's Book,” you're seeing it right now, right? What's behind this? All right, to start with, we had to commission for books 1 through 7 top scholars to put them out of Arabic into English. That's The Book of Knowledge, Book 1, The Book of Creed then, of course, Purification, Prayer, Charity, Fasting, and Ḥajj.
And first you've got to get those out of Arabic into English and then have of course the editing maybe takes a couple of years because every single thing has to be checked. I mean, every reference, every ḥadīth, you can't; and we're using an incredible critical edition from the دار المناهج (Dār al-Manāhij) in Jeddah. These big volumes, utterly beautiful, Hamza said we have to use these.
So then you have to find scholars, who are not just translators, historians, scientists; they have to be someone who understands the inner way. So, for example, The Book of Knowledge went to ʿAbdul Hādī Honerkamp, unbelievable. Humble; he was humble, saintly, beautiful, professor, I've ever known. You know just unbelievable. He did some الترمذي (al-Tirmidhī) for us years ago.
Anyway so then, then here we have a manuscript which is going into editing, and then I would take it, and I would circle every key idea and some of the supporting scripture, right, and then sit down and think, “How can I say this for young people?” In other words, I'd have to understand it to put it into their language.
Because fine, I will be honest Sīdī, I was trying to read ʿAbdul Ḥakīm's book on Death (The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife) and I panicked because it was too hard for me. Wasn't that it was too hard but it was so deep and the language was so high and the English was so beautiful and there were so much ḥadīth and Qur’ān, you can't just read a ḥadīth, you have to stop, and think about it, and travel with it, and go with it. You don't just read it like you're reading a magazine, right? So, I suddenly panicked and thought, “I love ʾImām al-Ghazāli. Before I die, I want to see all 40 books out,” and by the way, we have all the remaining missing volumes under translation right now, the whole 40 ʾinshāʾAllāh should be ready within the next three or four years ʾinshāʿAllāh.
I was so scared that here I love him ʾImām al-Ghazālī and I'm gonna die without reading him. Imagine, it makes me cry thinking about it, but Allāh is so generous that look at this, I can see exactly what happened because finally you can look back at your life objectively and see why Allāh سبحانه وتعالى )subḥanahu wa-taʿālā( now listen to this, I have this from al-Ghazālī’s The Book of Zakāt. When I did that for children I was thinking, “Oh my goodness, زكاة (zakāt),” it took me back to al-ʾAzhar, مدعين (mudaʿīn) two and a half—this is going to be really boring for children. I didn't know it would change my life because, you and I, if I asked you or asked myself, “Be humble. Be humble.” How do I just be humble? How do you do it?
Well, ʾImām al-Ghazālī in explaining you know zakāt, now listen to this, just his stories are off the—this will change your life, all right, get ready. He says, “In it I have the children on a merry-go-round in the in the park and they're noticing some children don't have the wherewithal to ride. They're poor. And the kids are on their way, they're on their way to their teacher, their mentor, Ḥajj ʿAbdullāh,” who in each book he's illustrated as a different culture, he's the universal elder, and they meet him in a forgotten garden going through a door with vines and they rush in and they say, and they pass a beggar saying “لله )lil’llāh)”, and they rush to Ḥajj ʿAbdullāh and they say, “Oh Ḥajj ʿAbdullāh, why are some people rich and some people poor?” Great question we all ask, right? And there's a man saying lil’llāh and Ḥajj ʿAbdullāh said, “We never disappoint someone who reaches out, take this to him.” And “Li means not only li, for the sake of God, but also it belongs to God, انا لله (inna lil’llāhi), surely we belong to God,” so you take—and then they come back and he says, say he's speaking to you and me, “Do you Sīdī? Do you Sayidā?” did either of us, “Did you give yourself? Did you choose your parents? Did you give yourself your station of life? Did you give yourself your particular skills? Your connections?” Did we give ourselves anything? No! Everything we are, and that leads to what we have and do, everything we are is on loan, it's a trust, we don't have anything, it's all on loan to be given back I mean, this is just amazing to think about it.
And even a little boy, I teach classes on Zoom here, little boy said to me, “You know, when I borrow a book, it's easy to return it. Why is it so hard for me to give things I didn't borrow?” And so Ghazālī tells two stories, how to give and how not to give. And you know, you realize, as you start reading Rūmī and everybody that there are all these stories they just took from Ghazālī, they're all passed along, everybody says the same stories.
So in the first story, the King, yʿanī Allāh, says to the rich man, “Now go and give these poor people, they're hungry in the town, give them food,” he says, “Look,” you know, “these are my lands,” you know, “we till them… alright, I'll take some food,” so he goes, and he holds the plate of food up high so that the people feel low reaching up. Probably they're thinking, “Are we now beholden? Next time he comes to town will we have to hold his horses.” Wrong way! This is the way to give.
Now get ready for this. So a young man, a king goes to this young man, I had him in the story is an orphan raised by people who taught him finance, and says, “There's a poor widow there. She needs money to educate her children.” So he goes and he takes a plate of gold and he puts it low, way down low. And he looks up into her face and this is what he says, and we should be in our lives doing this all the time in some form, “Oh, blessed lady, I beg you to take what I bring on behalf of the king, in order that I may return some of my loan, not for you to get your children educated,” at this at a time right now with رمضان )Ramaḍān( with zakāt, this is so big, because I mean what Ghazālī taught me about that is that we, even in Ramaḍān the zakāt we're giving we should give it with such shame. We're giving so little. You know because رضي الله عنه ابو بكر(Abū Bakr raḍī llāhu ʿanhu) gave everything in Ramaḍān and then was it عمر (ʿUmar) who gave and kept some back for the family in case of need and so we're given what we're supposed to give, this percent, because we're so greedy. Well, we won't give, right, I mean, it's unreal, that actually this is flowing through. And so.
Anyway, what happened is, so I started sitting down with these books one by one and I had to find a way to put the deepest stuff written by scholars into something even a five year old could understand. Imagine that. And I've been sitting here, right by this window now for 10 years, actually on the couch or here in the kitchen, right. And what I think happened, and not only that, to have to somehow come up with the illustrations, and if you hire artists, it takes forever, and if they do it wrong, you hate to have them repaint it. So I got into getting beautiful photographs from the whole Muslim world and there's a wonderful Canadian lady who takes them and then turns them into watercolors and then we move things around and we can get powerful, beautiful images, with Muslims from the entire world all being brought in. But imagine I had I got a grant from Templeton, for three quarters of a million dollars and I had to raise another half, right? And they wanted Books 1 through 6 done and printed and published in three years. Can you imagine this? Imagine having to figure out how to say it, make it effective, get the illustrations done, get them typeset.
People when they get these children's books they don't know what they're getting. They think, “Oh, it costs twenty-five dollars,” no, every single volume, it costs for me to print 5000 of these $50,000, where in the world do you think I'm getting that now for the reprints? But you know what, the ʾIslāmic children deserve their best and what this is done, is I raised my little grandchildren, Bilāl and Madīna, I started them at 3 and 5, they're now 10 and 12, they're Ghazālī, their whole lens is that, because children their fiṭra is so pure that if you tell them—now I'll just tell you, the first like 20 pages of The Book of Knowledge, which is considered to contain the entire احياء علوم الدين (ʾIḥyā ʿUlūm ad-Ḍīn), he says it all.
So you take Book 1, all right, and all right I'll just pretend you're like 5 years old okay, so my granddaughter Laylā was sitting in Cairo when I told her the first thing and I said, “Laylā, did you know there are two kinds of learning?” This is how ʾImām al-Ghazālī starts. And she says, “Two?” “Yeah, regular practical learning but then there's the special learning,” and of course, they all want to know what's that? “What is the special—the special?” “Oh, that's how to polish your heart.” “What?” “Oh, you didn't know you had two hearts? You know, there's the physical one that pumps the blood and then there's the real heart, the Qurʾān came on the heart of the Prophet (ﷺ), peace and blessings be upon him, that heart is the intersection between time and eternity.” So she says, “Oh! Polish the heart. Oh, well, how does it get dirty?” “Oh, you know, maybe you don't mind mummy, maybe you don't share? You know, you have it for—we all know how we,” and she said, “So we have to polish that off but why?” “Well, you see, after this life, which is very brief, and you have many trials, problems all the time and disappointments, oh, but those have come as opportunities to polish your heart. So we love Allāh’s will, he sends us these difficulties because this world is very brief, and then there is the next realm forever. And so you cannot enter fully if your heart isn't polished.”
So you have told a child in 10 minutes, you know who you really are, you're a golden heart. Because he says, “The real nature is you're a golden heart,” right? So most children go around thinking, “I'm nobody,” “I'm worthless,” and all the rest of it, when in fact, they are a special golden heart. First you tell the child, your true nature is the fiṭra, your golden heart, that's who you are. And the problem Sīdī, everything—everyone is misidentifying, they are identifying with their outer package, there is a miserable story with all of it instead of, “Oh, well, al-ḥamdulil’llāh I am at the end of the روح (ruḥ) coming from Allāh; I am this glorious, luminous essence, this is who I really am.”
And so you tell a child, this is who you are; and then you know, and you have two hearts; and the real essence is there; and you know, “You're going to have problems and guess what, guess what you get to do you get to polish these off! And there are all these beautiful ways you're given to polish it off, through prayer and وضوء )wuḍūʾ) and all the stuff,” you know that we're given to do. These are all incredible opportunities to do this. So “Oh, by the way, there's no death. There's the next world.” So my little Laylā got up from the dining room table, went into the living room where her father Muṣṭafā was playing the harpsichord and she said, “What is that?” and he said, “I'm playing Bach, or Beethoven, or Motz...” she's like, “Who is that?” “He's a composer and he died about 250 years ago,” and Laylā put her fists on her hips and she said, “Dad, he's not dead. He's in the next world.”
So you see, she had just been told this idea, and she knew it to be true. So if we don't give the young people what's really going on at the beginning so they don't have to paste it on like people like me at the end of their life, it's harder to paste things on, you know, much better to see that way.
So this project is, I would say, I think what happened was, Allāh was looking around and he said, “There's poor old ʿĀʾisha, you know she loves Ghazālī. She's been publishing for years. She knows all the scholars. She was dying to finally read him,” you know, “and she, she would know where to get the money, and she can find the people. So we're going to run this one through her.”
So I didn't do it by the way. I'm just going to tell you, there is no sense of having ever done this project, it does, there's no feeling, it went on through because it was needed and my dear, it has gone into like already 16 languages, Urdu, Arabic, Spanish, Finnish of all things, it's going now into Uzbek, Kazak, you know. The other day I was in Abu Dhabi and I met a lady from Ghana and she said I run a school out of my straw hut for children and feed them and so I said, “Here's the whole project you just put it in your dialect,” you know, because it's uniting this Ghazālī families all over the whole world.
And the most exciting book that's coming up that I'm working on right now, of course, The Ḥajj was amazing, I did it during COVID and I'd made two ḥajj’s when I was young, you know, let's say you're in Jeddah and you're going out to Mecca, all right. So you get in a van or a taxi or whatever, Ghazālī says, “The vehicle that is taking you there,” it could have been a camel or a donkey in his day, “consider that vehicle as the wooden plank, the bier that's carrying your body to the grave, you are dead. You are dead to this world and you are going dead to this world to meet Allāh.” Imagine thinking that as you're driving there, then we get there. And of course—

Saqib
Say that again, sorry.

Aisha
You have to reimagine the vehicle that’s taking from Jeddah or wherever to Mecca, you have to reimagine it is that plank, that wooden bier, that they carry your dead body on to the grave. Yeah. So you're making another journey, you have left this world, you are returning to God. Imagine doing it with that mindset. Then you get there and of course, you know we all go around and you pass the الحجر الاسود (The Black Stone) and you say بسم الله – الله اكبر (bismi’llāh, Allāhu Akbar). Guess what you're doing there? Because علي )ʿAlī( says, of course, سيدنا عمر (sayyindā ʿUmār) said, “I wouldn't kiss the Black Stone except I saw the Prophet (ﷺ) kiss it, right? Because ʿAlī said that’s not the reason—no, this is it, he said, “When Ādam ʿalayhi as-salām (a.s.) is standing before Allāh and Allāh says, “Am I not your Lord?” and Ādam says, “Yes,” بلا (balā), نعم (naʿam). Lest on the day of reckoning we plead ignorance of this relationship. At that moment, Sīdī, you and I were in Ādam’s loins; all—every human that will ever be was present, so we all said “Yes,” it was a contract we made and guess what? That contract is inside of the Black Stone.
Can you believe that that's where it is. So that when you start your ʿumra or let's say you're making the ḥajj and you end up on the سهل عرفات (plain of ʿArafāt), which is a preview of the Last Judgement, begging His forgiveness, you have experienced in 3 or 4 days the entire existence of humanity from within Ādam to the end of being; I mean, what rights Muslims are being given to have to perform? But they go and do them with reading booklets and not experiencing this huge thing that's going on. Isn't that too bad? Well, Ghazālī gives it all back. I just took the children's Ḥajj book and made ʿumra last month, it was unreal, having done so many without being awake to what I was going through.
So this project has come from Allāh, you know, and the way it's spreading throughout the world it's because everybody now needs to deeply and profoundly use every moment of their life. And I have been, I do classes online on the weekends with kids all over the world from Bosnia to New York City to Dubai all at once, all ages people 5 years old and 80 and, you know, in doing these, I suddenly realized, and this will take you—you’re asking about what is Ṣūfīsm, right? It's the sunna. It's putting the other always first.
Now listen to this, if we're told you should never argue, Ghazālī says, “Yeah,” why? Because you're saying, “I'm right and you're wrong,” and I'm trying to overpower you, my nafs. Oh, what am I doing? I'm putting myself first. Why should we argue? Why should we lie? All the things we're asking not to do are because we are putting ourselves first.
And there's a story that changed my entire life. A friend of mine she's a Muslim convert and a translator of تفسير (tafsīr) and she had a daughter born with spina bifida and in the end, the husband left, and the girl is in a school, and her mother gets a call several times a week saying, “Oh, she just had a seizure. She's peed on herself come get her.” So my friend was saying, “So every time the phone rang, I was thinking, ‘Oh, no! Not again.’” Ah, would سيدنا عيسى (sayyidinā ʿIssa), would our Prophet (ﷺ), peace and blessings be upon them, would they think: “Oh, no! Not again,” they wouldn't even have that thought. They would say, “Let me help her out. Let me go! Let me go!” We are all—all of us, putting ourselves first. “It's not convenient for me.” “This—this is ruining my day.” “I don't have it all to give”. And that is what we have, that is the distance we have to overcome between thinking of ourselves first and being so in the sunna that we don't even have the thought of not saying, “Oh.”
I was just crying thinking of Ghazālī on zakāt. He was talking about someone was at the kaʿaba and he heard someone maybe the Prophet (ﷺ), maybe I don't know, saying, “Oh, no, they are the losers. They are the losers,” and the question was who are the losers? Everyone who doesn't always before and after them, say: “Here. Here. Here,” to the degree we don't say, “Here, here.” And you know I've been in Saudi Arabia, some of the wonderful Muslims, just watch them, the kind of people who are always saying: “Here. Here. Here.” We are the losers because we are not returning our loan.
And I think Ṣūfīsm is a support system for that. It gives you brethren and you can talk about it and you can encourage each other. But there are plenty of Muslims that have nothing to do with Ṣūfīsm who have attained sanctity. I know a woman who gave her life in serving. And only, and even when she greeted you just did this, she never talked about what she did or anything. And then, you know, when she died, and she was certainly not interested in Ṣūfīsm, didn't like it you know., when she died at a certain point, years later, there was a rainstorm, and her body got washed up, you know from the rain, and they found that she was perfumed and unchanged from death. So she had achieved sanctity. Did she believe in Ṣūfīsm? Did she ever Ṣūfī Shaykh? No. She simply was humble and gave everything. So that's what it is.
And I think it's wonderful to have these incredible blessed elders who attained this state of being that we can see and think: “That's who I have to be. That's who I already am.” We’re not asked to become something that we aren't but to be the true essence of our beings. So whatever, whatever path works, whatever group you can go with that encourages you, I think, I think that’s the thing to do.

Saqib
So, ʿĀʾisha, you told us really beautifully about what ʾImām al-Ghazālī, the insights he has on, say, the ḥajj experience and how, you know, even just going and moving is symbolic of our journey, you know, in death in a sense. Could you just share what he says about fasting? What does al-Ghazālī teach us, other than hunger and thirst, what is fasting? What is it here to do for us?

Aisha
Well, the program I'm doing for young people, it's sort of a Muslim community center in Los Angeles, I've been working on that and with other children because of course they're too young to fast. So the question is, what can you do? And Ghazālī says the regular fast as we know, what you cannot do, but then there's the fast of the elect, and then the elect of the elect, those are the الأنبياء (al-ʾanbiyāʾ) the prophets who fast from anything—any thought but that of God, right? But the middle one right, is the body, all the different organs of the body fast in their own way.
For example, we can consider that our hands, and this is the way we teach the children to do wuḍūʾ, as you rinse your hands, you say, “Yā Allāh, forgive me for what I've been doing. Let me do what pleases you.” You know, “Let me say what pleases you. May my feet carry me toward good things and not things that were displease You.” So whenever you do wuḍūʾ you are going through this incredible process of all the parts; what you listen to and everything else.
And there was a little boy who once said you know, “I got my wuḍūʾ down to about 30 seconds.” But once it's slowed down, once you start doing it this way, you are 5 times a day actually observing, not always, but when you remember to, you are recalling what you have done that you wish you hadn't and you are asking for guidance to rectify it. So just as in wuḍūʾ we have this incredible opportunity to further face ourselves and correct ourselves.
In the fast of the elect, you also are breaking your fast if you listen to bad things because you are actually participating. Even if you're not saying anything bad, never mind what you do. But then the one that we're working with most is the what we say; and if you are able during your Ramaḍān to fast from any backbiting any—children, like have the children not tattletaling, not sharing secrets that they've heard from a friend, to get into the practice for the month, of actually being conscious of all the harmful things the tongue can do, not only to others, but also to one's own fiṭra. So, I think that's a really important, important thing. I mean, I'm going to be talking to the children tomorrow, you know about this, about this very thing. And I think that's—I think that's the important fast and by practicing it, you know during Ramaḍān and realizing it, it's totally breaking your fast.
You know we know the ḥadīth of the Prophet (ﷺ), peace and blessings be upon him, when two elderly women sent a message that they couldn't fast, they were too frail and old, and he sent back a bowl and he asked them to throw up in it. And to the horrified onlookers blood and pieces of flesh came out. Because you know the Qurʾān says that it's the same as eating your brother's dead flesh. And that's a صحيح حديث (ṣaḥīḥ ḥadīth). And he said, “No, you would have already broken your fast because you were backbiting.”
And I don't know whether I mentioned this, but when I was doing the chapter in the children's Ghazālī book on backbiting, I rewrote it 22 times, and I kept thinking about how horrible that ḥadīth was, and that, for something to be that really disgusting in the Qurʾān it has to really show how Allāh feels about it, that it is beyond belief. And when you think of most of the conversation of people, in general, people talking about other people, not concealing what those folks would like concealed. Imagine if someone took the things we were concealing about ourself and spread it abroad. Can you imagine that? And yet people easily do it. And Muslims are always saying, you know, “That ʾimām was terrible; this and this,” I mean, the Muslims never stop, nor do anybody. And it's very, very sad.
But then, just a story that went along with that children's book, the very afternoon, I finished writing that chapter, I was joining some lady friends at a restaurant and one of our close friends wasn't there and she has a father who is now dead, but she has a father who was really, you know, worthy of a lot of talk. And everyone was telling the stories and Ghazālī says, “When we entertain people,” right, “we are usually doing it at the expense of someone else,” telling a funny story about someone, think how many of what we relay, how much of what we relay, is really at the expense of someone else, something about them.
So, everyone mentioned something and I had a very funny story so I told it, and then I got in the car to drive home and I felt kind of queasy, and then finally I got home and I ran into the house and literally threw up. And just, nothing, but I mean, what had happened was that ḥadīth is not a metaphor, it's real. We are literally eating the peoples flesh. It's not just a symbol. It's that bad and I experienced it myself but we are so veiled over and so used to living in a culture that does nothing but talk about other people, you know that, that—when we should be silent about them completely.
So I've got a whole group of little children and they're gonna report tomorrow how they've done with the fast, five or six things and I called up my little granddaughter in Germany and I said, “How are you doing with the fast?” Not only of outward talking about others but I think I mentioned to you before Ghazālī says that we are always backbiting inside because we have our golden hearts, ourمطمئنة (muṭmaʾinna), our true selves, and then we have the nafs which is having opinions. “Oh, look at that person. Yuck.” Right? So we are already inside of ourselves, we need to even—we have to stop that conversation. Quit judging.
And he says, what we're doing with all those thoughts we're having about other people and so on is that we are basing it all on assumptions, not on facts, things we are assuming, and without knowing what's going on in that person's life.
So my 10 year old granddaughter, Madīna, said, “You know, we do this all the time, don't we?” She said, “Sometimes I'm just looking out of the window and the people going by and I see a homeless, and I think, ‘Oh,’” she said, “I see a little girl who is very sort of boastful, you know, and, and spoiled,” and she said, “but I don't know what's going on in her life. I don't know what's happened with her parents,” that I'm actually having those thoughts. And I'm seeing that children can immediately, they're clear, they're not riddled with all the things we're—we have got so many things to do we can't even survive every day, but they are clear. And she started, and I realized she understood everything he was talking about with an inner fast, particularly of the tongue, and then she said, “Oh, yes, it will.”
So Ghazālī doesn't mention tattletaling, but children know about, they're always telling on, “Oh mother, my brother did this,” right? Yeah, do that. But she thought of that. So I'm hoping with projects like this, if you can get the children molded with a new lens through which to see their lives and aware, aware you know, that this will help future generations of people.
But we're really in the آخر الزمان (ākhir al-zamān), you know, I was thinking about it today. But I feel as though we really are the publishing, and the work you do, we are planting a tree at the last, you know, because I don't see how you can get the world changed in such a way that they are not all lost in the material thing and the greater and greater loss in the belief in God everywhere, even people in churches, you know. So I—I don't know when, and in America the result of that is, this shooter who just shot everybody, 25 years old, he was depressed, and he had no sense of self-worth. Oh, well, multiply that among the youth of the world, you know, it's because they're not—they’re not aligned with their inner, the amorphic essences with their hearts, within a faith tradition that gives them—gives them a secure place, you know. So, so we're all doing what we can at this point in the world.

Saqib
So, ʿĀʾisha, could you tell us about on the Ghazālī Project, which is a phenomenal initiative and al-ḥamdulil’llāh, I just want to say before we continue, I've never been taught wuḍūʾ, I mean, I'm what 43, I've never been taught what wuḍūʾ in the way you just said, where you're cleaning your hearing, your sight, your feet, and what a difference it would make if I started thinking of those attributes and how they are accountable to God when doing wuḍūʾ and if it wasn't five times a day, gosh, that's, that really blew me.

Aisha
I'll tell you the story that goes along with it if it helps. Alright, so this was a little Muslim town and there's the shaykh with the robe and the إمّه (ʾimma), you know, the jurisprudent, and an old man comes with a cane. All that he says, “Oh Shaykh, what is wuḍūʾ?” And the shaykh is saying like, “How could you be your age and not know what wuḍūʾ is? Get out of here.” But the old man persisted, “I want to know what is wuḍūʾ? What?” And finally the man said, “Look there's a little,” he's down in his building, there was a little sink, “I'm going to show you how to do it,” so, to get rid of it. So he showed him and then the old man got it all backwards and wrong so the shaykh, “Barra (برّه),” get out, and then he said to his assistant, “You know, that's very strange to have an elder in our village who at his age doesn't—would you follow him?” And the helper came back and said, and see what's going on, and the helper came back and said, “Oh, Shaykh, I'm sorry to tell you, but that man is the spiritual elder of our village, the ولي (walī),” and so the shaykh puts on his, and kneels at the foot of this old man and says, “What is wuḍūʾ?” and then he tells the story about when you do your hands, when you breathe, may it be the smells of الجنة (janna), you know, all of this, I won't go through the whole thing again. But I mean, you think of that story, and that's what wuḍūʾ is.

Saqib
And al-Ghazālī sites this? This is from al-Ghazālī?

Aisha
No this came from somewhere else.

Saqib
Yes.

Aisha
And we included it because it was good for children to hear it.

Saqib
Yeah. Amazing.

Aisha
But Ghazālī explains that wuḍūʾ it's a transition, how could you and I be talking about, oh, maybe a movie we'd seen, and then suddenly we turned to pray? How can you go from that, to that, to standing before God, you need to transition, you know.

Saqib
Wow.

Aisha
And wuḍūʾ is, you even feel, you know when you put water on you, you feel different to, you know.

Saqib
Amazing.

Aisha
You ought to read The Ghazālī Children's books, honestly, it’ll help you.

Saqib
I have them, inshāʾAllāh. And was about the Shādhulī story of الإمام أبو حسن الشاذلي (ʾImām Abū Ḥassan ash-Shādhulī) he meets goes to meet his shaykh Mashīsh, عبد السلام بن مشيش (ʿAbd al-Salām Ibn Mashīsh).

Aisha
Yes.

Saqib
And he turns him away and he says go and do wuḍūʾ, I think three times and my understanding is, he realized that it wasn't just a physical act, but he needed to empty himself even of the ideas of being a scholar or an accomplished mystic, he had to be completely empty before he would come to his shaykh to meet him.

Aisha
I have to tell you, something amazing, is that I've been, I have a friend who has a little house up on the top near Ibn Mashīsh, and I've gone to stay with her a few times, and this last time we went down the back of the mountain. Because Mashīsh, here is the tree and where he is, and they've taken cork off all these trees, and the cork goes out to the edge of this cliff and at dawn, at فجر (fajir), the first light makes it shine, it's all light coming up. So you're on this soft cork but then there's a sort of, you're looking out into the mountains, but if you go down below, up over to here, there is an eternal fountain coming out, right, and it's at the bottom. And there is next to it, both a fig tree and an olive,وطور سينين والتين والزيتون (wal-tīni wal-zaytūni waṭūri sīnīna, Qurʾān 95:1), look at that, and so we went and we made wuḍūʾ there down in that and that must have been where you had to go all the way back down the mountain, look at the symbol there, and do the wuḍūʾ and then come all the way back up, you know there must have been a path.

Saqib
Wow.

Aisha
What a beautiful place that is.

Saqib
Amazing, so in terms of our listeners who want to be part of The Ghazālī Children's Project, so I've got a friend who wants to start something up in our local community. She was asking me what the relationship is with the adult books of Ghazālī and the children’s. So would you encourage the parents to be reading along in the adult book? Do they go hand in hand? Or are the children's a standalone? How have you designed it?

Aisha
The parents should read the children's because it's the concise version. It's the exact same because every single key point is there and passages of scripture. Many read the children and then they go back and tackle the adult book because then they know where it's going, right.

Saqib
Right.

Aisha
And then that just gives them more Qurʾān and ḥadīth and other levels. But it's all in The (Ghazālī’s) Children's book and the important thing is Ghazālī ends Book 1, The Book of Knowledge, the كتاب العلم (kitāb al-ʿilm), is said to contain the entire 40 volumes of the ʾIḥyā.

Saqib
Wow.

Aisha
And the 40th in its 40 chapters, right? And in the one that, the handwritten one I've seen in Sarajevo, right, 40 lines. Why 40? What is the symbolism of 40 we think? In Moses (موسى, Mūsā) you know it was 40 years in the wilderness wandering and sayyidinā ʿIssā 40 nights, you know, in the garden or something like this? Well 40 and ʿAbdul Ḥakīm Winter mentioned this but I knew this too, 40 is the symbol, the numerical symbol, for the ending of your old order existence and reintegration into the principle.

Saqib
Oh, wow.

Aisha
Isn't that interesting? Yeah. So it's—it’s really a big deal.
But in the 40th Chapter of Book 1, Ghazālī says, “We are all teachers,” parents are teachers, children are teachers, that everything we do casts—he uses two trees, a straight tree and a crooked, and every one is casting a shadow, right. And we copy each other. You know, as a woman, I see, “Oh, the lady wears her hair—I’m gonna start wearing those,” you know, we're all copying each other. And so ʾImām al-Ghazālī says, “We should never do anything that we wouldn't want copied.” That's heavy, right?
So parents have to be involved in this project because they are the role models. What's the point? Oh, I think about the—there was a mother that called me up. And she said, “You know, I was having a lady's Tea Party, and we were talking and my little daughter came and whispered my ear, Mommy, are you all backbiting?” I said, “May I speak to little Dīnā,” who is 8 and she gets on and she says, “Auntie,” she said, “you know, until mother read me the chapter on backbiting, I'd never heard of it.” Never heard of it! When I was a little girl, my mother once a week would say, dear, if you don't have something nice to say about someone don't say anything at all. Well, isn't this interesting? Because it's key; it's key, and we're not talking about it all the time in the Muslim world. And once I finished that whole chapter and particularly now this thing with the bane of the tongue, I'm actually at the point where I'm aware all the time, that I'm about, in a conversation, to add in something negative. And imagine if that were built into you.
But with the parents, this is the way they can do it. I would order the whole set. Because if people do it one by one, there's a deal, they get a huge deal if they buy the whole set and you can get it with the adult books or not. But things will go out of print, I'm just telling you, you know, and, and so what happens is, is that some families at night they read it as a bedtime story to their children. And a mother is always a great teacher, you don't have to be a special teacher, it comes with a workbook, and comes with a teacher's manual, activities you can do, the core teaching of the chapter, the core passage of Qurʾān. So all—it comes with everything. So you don't need to be a great teacher, you have to be an enthusiastic mom or dad. So parents can do it.
Now my grandchildren went here in Kentucky, there were six mothers, or I don't know how many, and they took turns having all the children on Sunday mornings, like a Sunday school, they did a chapter and they did the workbook, and then they did activities, and then they played and they ate, and then they got certificates at the end of each book, you know, one of those gold things, it was a big deal and parents came.
And of course the project also involves children from the beginning they draw their own hearts. And they put dots of things they wish to polish off, you know, because it makes it objective. It's not like, I've got to quit teasing my sister in your head. There it is: written out. You should see the children's drawings, their hearts and what they've done.
But also we do play acting; because if children play act out what they've learned, they remember it, and it also becomes real. Like let's say you have two children and they're not sharing something. Well, that's nearly continuous. “That's mine! That's mine!” So you tell them okay, “Play act not sharing,” and they love it. “Oh, you can't hold my truck!” “Oh, you can't have any of this, it’s mine!” Now, pretend, pretend to put the other first, pretend to like, share, so that: “Would—would you brother, would you like to hold my truck?” and then the children feel, oh, that felt better. It wasn't nafs, it was easy to do, and I didn't lose anything by it. So they feel it.
Most of the stuff we are asking them to do, and saying do's and don'ts, they haven't experienced it, it's just lists of things they shouldn't do. So it's very important. You know, even with the zakāt story, I had the how to give and how not to give, I think I've told that story before.

Saqib
Yeah, yeah.

Aisha
I made the children act out those stories, to actually be the man who looked up to the widow and said, “I beg you, oh blessed lady, to receive what I bring on behalf of the king in order that I may purify some of my wealth in order that I can return some of what I have on loan,” and once children play act one of those stories, they don't forget it.
We remember by stories. Man I could say, “Be patient,” but then if I tell you the story of ايّوب سيدنا (sayyidnā ʾĀyūb), Job is clearly patient. You see, so this can be done at home and then of course all the schools that have opened up. Shaykh ʿAbdul Ḥakīm Winter, the New Cambridge Mosque has a Ghazālī school, they took the first 200 people who applied.
I'm happy to send you an email you a list of things that people can click to, films of the Hub Club School in England, they have a whole school, all levels, all the teachers teaching all of this. It's utterly amazing, you know, to see whole schools built on it. And they have something called the Radiant Hearts Program, they took the Ghazālī materials, and teachers taught each chapter for little ones, middle ones, and big ones, and those are available to be streamlined like if a parent just can't do it themselves. Put them in the environment, in terms of just a family doing it together. But then you have to role model it, you know, don't think if you're teaching your daughter not to backbite, and she hears you're doing it all day long, what's going to make the biggest impression?  
Saqib
Exactly.

Aisha
So it's—it’s a family project and it's not just a project, it's the most important project of our lives, period. There is nothing more important than the realization of the sunna. And this is an incredibly fun way to do it, right. It's engaging and it's not just lists of councils and do's and don'ts, which don't work anymore.

Saqib
Exactly. And so, if you have parents who, you know, are not near a school, like the Cambridge Muslim College.

Aisha
Then do it themselves, do it online.

Saqib
Or if they want to do it in a community, like you said, there’s like you know, being on that journey and what have you. So if people wanted to do it as a community are there options of doing it online? Could they join—are you running sessions online? Or could they setup something online?

Aisha
They could set it up online. I did, a couple of a years ago we had a Sunday group, every other Sunday, people from, there were Turks, Bosnians, people from New Jersey, people in London, several, during the COVID, I watched those little London kids grow up, Dubai. Of course because of the time, the people in Dubai going to bed when we did it, but we had parents and children, and we had 80 year olds and we had 10 year olds; and the little kids liked having the adults. Because the father were saying, “You know I get angry, and I know I shouldn’t,” and they liked the fact that tall handsome teenagers were doing this; and then, because suddenly the little children felt this is not just us being forced to learn something, this is a group of everyone. And everyone, believe it or not, the little kids were as smart as the 80 year olds, you know.

Saqib
Wow.

Aisha
It was like just to hear everybody talking honestly. And we would take a chapter and discuss any one of the chapter of the books and it went on for several years. We’ll probably get it going again sometime. But anyone could setup a group like that.

Saqib
And is there a framework? Because I could potentially do something like that on Ḥikmah and setup a weekly thing.

Aisha
That’s a good idea!

Saqib
Yeah. Would we… so is there a pdf copy of the book or should we just order the printables and…? Should I run two separate classes? One for the adults to read through the ʾIḥyā, the adult books and then the other ones? Because you buy it as a set; I’ve got the set by the way. So, you know, I’ve used some of them with my kids, but they’re big now, they’re in their teens. So if I say color in and what have you it doesn’t connect.
So, that’s the other thing I was going to ask. What do you have teens or people at college, 16-19 year olds who are interested in this stuff, they were never taught it, they’ve gone to a مدرسة (madrasa) and they’re told how to read and recite the Qurʾān, but, they haven’t learned the inner meanings. So, how would we teach the teenagers?

Aisha
Alright, believe it or not, only Books 1 and 2, The Book of Knowledge and The Creed, are written in small children’s language, and I did it because they are foundational. That’s the basis of everything else. But by the time I got to the Pilgrimage book it was normal language, like for adults. But the truth is, even for your teenagers, what you can get them to do is teach the little kids. Then, it’s a big responsibility and the big honor, you can’t teach it if you don’t get it, you know, if you don’t understand it.
So I would involve teenagers doing that but also just say, “Auntie in Kentucky says, don’t be thrown by the children’s books, you don’t have to do the workbooks,” although, the workbooks are hard, I went back to some of the workbooks and I couldn’t answer some of the questions. They’re too hard.
You know I mean, and it’s what I said to you, you can say to a mother who says I don’t need these books and you could say, “So when your child says to you, who and what and where is God, how are you going to answer that?” Ghazālī makes it so simple, and I think, that the children’s Creed book is being put by al-ʾAzhar into Arabic, the children’s, for college students at al-ʾAzhar, because it’s essential, and there’s an ʾimām in Birmingham who is also using that book for adults, even though it’s for children, because it’s really deep, you know.
And then you are putting yourself—I mean with your teenagers just say, “Look, just give it a shot,” or “Write down the key ideas as you go. What are the things in this chapter that you can actually use and really speak to your heart?” you know. They don’t have to do any workbooks or activities or any of that but the material is all in there. I mean I would have the parents read the children’s and then read the adult’s if they would like, you know?

Saqib
Yeah

Aisha
Because I tell you, in our groups, once you essentialize it, once you get away—I don’t want to say get away, but you’re not bringing in all the scripture, for every line, and you get to the actual point you are working with, it’s amazing, it’s clear to little kids and it’s what we need. We need to know what are the exact things we are doing, you know.

Saqib
So, if I—if we were to setup an online sort of group that would, obviously we could do activities in person with their own sort of families so it’s not an online sort of activities thing but it’s a way of way for us connecting, reading, sharing, and then for us to go away, as you’d like, to go away with some homework, to say this is what we found during the week, in our day to day activities and life; so, would we—are there sort of online versions or copies of the material? Or should families buy the set?

Aisha
Every family should have the hardback set.

Saqib
Yes.

Aisha
And then we can send you pdf’s for putting online.

Saqib
Okay.

Aisha
But they should buy the hardbacks because we are a faith of al-kitāb, the Book. And books are beautiful and the children have had enough crummy stuff associated with ʾIslām, pamphlets, silly things with wraps. These are really powerful and they will respect it and they are weighty and beautiful. They need to have something like that.

Saqib
Tangible, yeah.

Aisha
Families need to have the set, and say their children are finished with it, you can always re-read it. Look, I just re-read the Ḥajj one just when I made ʿumra in January, just the children’s one, I took it with me because it gave me everything I needed essentialized quickly with all the main points in depth.

Saqib
Amazing.

Aisha
So, you know, the person leading it, if you’re leading it, you read that chapter, then you mark some points, and then say, “Let’s go over some of the points that are being made in this chapter,” and it can be just said in normal English you do not have to read it out loud. Some of the Ghazālī schools in Michigan, the teachers will pass a book around and everyone will read a paragraph and they will take turns reading a paragraph, and that involves everybody; you could do that, you know. You know you’ve got an hour, you know, to do it. You could read the chapter like that, bit by bit, or if there is an idea, stop and discuss it. You know, what can I do?

Saqib
So like a reading circle, yeah. So like a reading circle essentially?

Aisha
Try that too, depending on their energy you know.

Saqib
And then—

Aisha
Yes, go ahead.

Saqib
Is there like an online forum where we can say connect and share with all these wonderful people involved in the Ghazālī, I mean I’m sure we can learn from each other and you know, if the school in Michigan or the family in Singapore are doing something interesting, or the children are now on the same—
Aisha
Or what about this, I could give you names of people and you could invite them to be on the program, like the Head of the Hub Club school in England, she could talk about that.

Saqib
Wow, perfect.

Aisha
And then, you got the video of her school, and we’ll send you links to these videos, and you send these out to the parents, and they already get the sense of being a part of a greater Ghazālī international family throughout the whole world.

Saqib
Perfect, perfect.

Aisha
Yeah.

Saqib
Wonderful.

Aisha
You just email me, send it, I will send you links to everything, even links to a film when we had—South Africa made a Ghazālī Festival and my son Musṭafā and I gave 26 presentations in the four main cities. It was unbelievable, you know! Ambassadors and people came out, you know. And they have printed the books there, they have all the books now in South Africa.

Saqib
Al-hamdulil’llāh.

Aisha
Inexpensive versions. I mean, the depth of The Book of Knowledge, what it covers, I mean, how do you get a child to, when they are disappointed and things go wrong, to trust that Allāh has his best in mind, right. You can tell a child that, you can tell an adult that, and it’s hard for them to not really be upset when something happens, right. To trust. So Ghazālī tells the story the ant and the pen, very hard story, and the illustration you have this ant on this piece of people with writing and the ant can see the nib of the pen writing, and the ant can see the hand of the person holding the pen, and maybe the arm, I don’t know how far up; the point being, we are ants, and life is being written in front of us, we think the cause is just the nib, “Oh there was an accident because he wasn’t watching out,” but really it goes all the way up to a much greater Divine Plan that’s all in place. But I didn’t know how to explain that to children; even the ant image was hard. So, I told the story, “Once upon a time, there was a family of ants and they promised to take the ant children to the zoo on Saturday, and then they told the children sorry to tell you but the relatives are coming. So the little ant children do what all—‘Oh no, you said we were going,’ moping faces. So the relatives are there the whole day,” the children are moping, right. Then—then what happens is at the end of the day they hear on ant radio that a lion got out of the zoo and there was chaos and trauma and injury, and then the father said to the baby ant, “You see, Allāh loved us so much he sent the relatives to prevent us from going to the zoo.” So, I read that to my little Bilāl, he was like 6 or 7, and you never know whether they get it because they show no expression children sometimes, and then we live on the Ohio river here in Kentucky, so my husband has a boat with a little motor, and the children drove up and down the river every day to school, but they never been out of the water. So Nevel @1:42:47 went to great trouble, he was going to get his boat out, yeah, you know and haul it on a truck all the way down to the river, I was going to have to find to borrow little life preservers, who has them, right? Big deal! But the day of the adventure, Bilāl got sick right, and we couldn’t go. I went to see him the next day, he was in bed, you won’t believe this but yesterday we didn’t know there were going to be huge storms up river in Cincinnati, and logs and waves and dangerous stuff, and I said, “Allāh made you unable to come so it prevented us from going out,” and I thought, “He didn’t hear,” but that changed—it proved it to him, and he always brings that up. Because children can hear that, if they’re told the idea, that’s a very deep idea as you and I know, because in life we get bad news and we say al-ḥamdulil’llāh.
And living in Egypt at first I didn’t get it, all these people say al-ḥamdulil’llāh all the time and also, for everything bad that happens, “Oh, he broke his leg,” “Al-ḥamdulil’llāh,” and like a South Westerner living in Egypt, I didn’t get it but I get it now. It got demonstrated me that that’s really going on. And it is, you see, they speak about ʾIslām is submission and ʾIslām is peace, the word, and it becomes like a platitude you don’t even think about it. But after I finally realized yes everything is as He—everything that is happening is from Him. Where am I free? I can reject it, I can be angry, I can accept His Will, right? I can love His Will. I can say al-ḥamdulil’llāh; whatever You are doing, al-ḥamdulil’llāh. You know, right? But that didn’t come to me for decides, right. And only like completed like last summer, did I finally get to the point where I really do. And that means that I finally submitted to His Will and I’m peaceful, you see what I mean. I’m not just submitting, I’m loving His Will, you know? And when a tragedy comes we have to not say oh no but “We love you O’ Lord.”
You know, but this Ghazālī makes clear; you see the ideas that are in The Book of Knowledge. If you open in to page 3 and look in the back, in the preface, I list 8 key incredible concepts that are going to be delivered in these stories because it’s foundational, it’s the substructure of reality he is talking about, you know.
So, I mean you’re going to have so much fun with this. No matter what it will totally change your life, even like okay let’s say like prayer, we talk about prayer, so prayer. So he opens and he says you know, “If you were standing before,” oh, this is so lovely, he said you know, because by saying it in children’s language it really makes it accessible to me because I don’t know think in terms of, my mind I don’t say to myself the transcendent yet imminent, I don’t think like that. Think of the way I’m talking to you.

Saqib
Yes.

Aisha
So, these books are written in that language, not the level in which al-Ghazālī speaks, it’s عظيم (ʿaẓīm), so he said, now, prayer, “If you had some needs,” if you had a need, could you just go to the Head of Mobile Oil and get an appointment with him and ask him to help you?” He wouldn’t have time for you, right? “Allāh always has time for you, he’s always waiting for you to come with your needs.” Then sometimes you’re praying and thinking about other things, “Would you stand before a King and be thinking of other things?”, thinking “I wonder if I left my lego over at my friends house,” right? And we have those thoughts. And Ghazālī said you know, “We all, our minds don’t stay conjured @1:47:17 straight on what you focus so here is what I suggest, when you open the prayer, الله اكبر )Allāhu Akbar), when you say that, at that moment, bring your moment into complete presence before the Lord of the Worlds,” right? You’re not just fiddling around. The Lord of the Worlds, you’re standing before Him. Now, he said, “And hold on to being present. It wont last very long. But maybe next day it will be a 2 or 3 seconds more. Imagine one day it could extend all the way into the prayer, all the way through.”
But I realized Sīdī that when we changed positions, we are saying “Allāhu Akbar, Allāhu Akbar,” and that worked as a way to bring me back to the original “Allāhu Akbar,” but then he says now looking it, people are just standing up, it's like the wuḍūʾ, they’re saying formulas, they’re doing postures, just unconsciously right, “Know, with with each آية (āyā), with each verse, there’s a mode of being,” right. You don’t just say, you know, سبحان الله (subḥānʾAllāh), actually, slow down, and you feel Glory Be to God All-Might. And then if we’re saying, “Lead me on the stray path,” اهدينا صراط (ʾihdīnā ṣirāṭa), we contrite, “Oh! I really need guidance,” you can imagine how this slow the prayer down because you’ve got to with each position, understanding what it means, you’re awake, but ofcourse you’re going to lose focus half the time, but what happens is, if you go to pray like this, it makes it glorious, you’re like in a space that seems to go out in forever, a paradisal luminous space. So I mean he’s giving incredible techniques.
The book on Prayer is unreal, even like, he talks like people that can’t concentrate and they start looking at patterns on their prayer rugs, I’ve done that. Like, he says if you’ve got a real problem, go up and pray in front of a wall rather than look at other people. Or I have the children go and make their own prayer rugs out of you know, beige paper, not putting designs that bother them. And oh the النيّة (nīyya) do you try to pray on the front row so you could pay attention or are people seeing there. All the levels of subtleties of attending to prayer.
And the stories he tells about jummʿa, praying in a group, because I am alone and I pray alone. He tells a story in the time of the Prophet (ﷺ), peace and blessings be upon him, is that everyone gathered and prayed all the prayer, jummʿa. And one day there was a man who wasn’t there, he’d fallen asleep or forgot or something, the whole congregation went to his house and they cried with him because they were so sorry for missing—not in praying in groups. The ideas you get from ʾImām al-Ghazālī are just other wordly.
But as ʿAbdul Ḥakīm Winter, or I think Hamza Yūsuf said, “The ʾIḥyā is like the Qurʾān in a usable order, it builds up with what we need to do and brings in all the ḥadīth and the Qurʾān as they relate to each thing as you go.” I mean, I could have read that ḥadīth about praying in jummʿa in group, just read it in a book of ḥadīth, but it came while right when you were studying, who attends. So all of it is brought to bare on the different issues.

Saqib
SubḥanʾAllāh.

Aisha
Yeah.

Saqib
That’s amazing.

Aisha
I’ll send you the videos of all this stuff and you just sit there and watch them and then if you want families to join, like the video on my email, the attached documentary called Polishing the Heart with ʿAbdul Ḥakīm and everybody speaking, you could send that out to the families who are thinking you might want to join, or the people you are talking to, or if Ḥikmah does a class. There was a lady in New Jersey, she had a group of 500 families from New Jersey to Kentucky, that got on every Sunday night at 5’oclock in the evening with all their children; she had an art teacher, it started out with somebody, an ʾimām of some sort reading a prayer, and then it’s a duʿā, then the art teacher at a certain point, oh and at the beginning when everybody was assembling, they showed all the art of last week of the children’s art you could buy and then they had the lesson and then the art project. It was a different kind of thing, it was on some point of the Ghazālī, so families got together with their little tiny kids and they all got together and did this, people come up with wonderful things, you know.

Saqib
SubḥanʾAllāh. That’s amazing. I wanted to as you this question, you have a cup of coffee with ʾImām al-Ghazālī.

Aisha
Okay.

Saqib
Fifteen minute, ten minute conversation, what do you ask him?

Aisha
What would I ask him?

Saqib
Yes, it’s just you and ʾImām al-Ghazālī. You’ve got—

Aisha
Oh. To start with, I’d ask him to pray for my soul. Secondly, I would ask him to help me strengthen my will to carefully follow what’s been asked, techniques, support that he could give me, which I’m sure are all in there. Certainly, there are words we can say, maybe there’s duʿā, maybe there’s things I need to understand more deeply. But I think I would just ask for ways he could support me in being who I really am. So, like how can I get away from being distracted by my story, and identify with my eternal fiṭra. I think that’s what I would ask him.

Saqib
SubḥanʾAllāh. Al-ḥamdulil’llāh. ʿAʾisha thank you so much, I just want you to ask you for your prayers for Ḥikmah, may it move and support the work that you’re doing at Fons Vitae and move in that same direction.

Aisha
Okay, have a beautiful day my dear in London and so much love to you and your project. I’m glad the word Ḥikmah always takes me to the Ḥikam, you know that’s my favorite, Ḥikam is my favorite, you know.

Saqib
Al-ḥamdulil’llāh.

Aisha
It’s what I used to take with me to Mecca, you know.

Saqib
Oh really! The Ḥikam of ابن عطاء الله السكندري (Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh).

Yeah.

Saqib
Wow.

Aisha
Yeah, things he’s said, really have helped me so much. There’s somewhere that he’s said that Allāh brings suffering to us to cause the soul to go forward. If everything were just perfect and everything was every day fine, and everything was perfect, your soul wouldn’t move ahead, you know. I think that’s somewhere, I’ve forgotten that. I should have to re-read it.
So many blessings brother.

Saqib
Thank you.

Aisha
And I look forward to meeting your family online sometime.

Saqib
Thank you.

Aisha
And visit me when I come to England.

Saqib
Al-ḥamdulil’llāh. We’d be really blessed and honor to meet you ʾinshaʾAllāh.

Aisha
Al-ḥamdulil’llāh.

Saqib
As-salāmuʿalaikum.

Aisha
Wa-ʿalaikum as-salām. في أمان الله (fī ʾamān Allāh).

Saqib
Fīʾamān Allāh.