Two words that have fascinated and held me since I embarked on adulthood — to the point they became a name that identified me as a creative.
I remember sitting outside a mosque during Ramadan, tears rolling down my face.
My father was inside praying. I was outside. I wanted to go in. I wanted to pray like everyone else. I wanted Allah desperately. I wanted to be close. I wanted to belong.
At the time I thought I was crying because I couldn’t get through the door. Now I think I was crying because I was carrying far more than I understood.
I had no language for neurodivergence. No understanding of overwhelm. No understanding of paralysis. No understanding of nervous systems. Only a deep love for Allah and a desperate longing to be near Him.
Looking back, I can see that none of us knew. We were a family trying to make our way through Ramadan. My parents carrying things they did not have words for. Me carrying things I did not have words for. All of us trying to hold ourselves together for the sake of Allah. For the sake of Ramadan. For the sake of one another.
If someone had asked me how much grief I was carrying, I think I would have told them enough to fill an ocean. Perhaps that ocean is still there. Occasionally finding its way back through these eyes of mine.
Each drop belonged somewhere. Each drop was carrying meaning.
Back then they were just tears. Now I can see they were speaking a language I had not yet learned how to understand.
For a long time I thought everyone else had been given a map that I somehow missed. They seemed able to walk through doors that felt inaccessible to me. Not only in faith. In life. Belonging. Community. Work. Relationships.
The older I get, the less I think I was failing. I think I was standing in front of doorways that were never designed for the way I moved through the world.
I craved my own path at 27, as a first-generation Muslim woman in a British Pakistani household. I was working as an Artistic Director, designing community arts projects that harmonised what were often seen as opposites: Muslim women and non-Muslims, East and West, classical music and storytelling, tradition and experimentation.
Looking back, I think I was building doorways. Doorways into creativity. Doorways into belonging. Doorways into faith. Doorways for people who loved God but could not always access Him through the routes they had been given.
For a long time, I didn’t have language for this place I lived in. I only knew that I couldn’t perform belief in ways that felt externally legible, even though my relationship with God ran deep and constant beneath the surface.
Then two words found me.
Sufi — for the inward path. The one that privileges love, mercy, beauty, and intimacy with the Divine. A path that understands faith as relationship rather than compliance.
Punk — for the refusal. The resistance to imposed authority, to gatekeeping, to being told that belonging must look a certain way. The insistence that truth matters more than approval, and that access should never be policed.
It was through parenting my son that I eventually found my own diagnosis. AuDHD — the combination of autism and ADHD. And suddenly many things began rearranging themselves.
Living with a nervous system that experiences demand as inequality teaches you very quickly that coercion destroys trust. Parenting a child whose autonomy is non-negotiable teaches you that relationship must come before instruction. And faith, if it is to be meaningful at all, cannot survive where safety is absent.
Those realities have not diluted my faith. They have clarified it.
I have always lived between worlds. Between longing and refusal. Between devotion and resistance. Between faith that breathes and faith that demands. A faith built on invitation rather than coercion. On curiosity rather than certainty. On trust rather than fear.
If Sufi Punk means anything at all, perhaps it means this: Trusting Allah enough to keep walking towards Him, even when the road looks nothing like the one you were told to take.
And when the door will not open, having the courage to build another.
I sat with that for a long time before I could write it. The tears outside the mosque. The door that would not open. The longing that had nowhere to go.
They were not a failure. They were the beginning of everything built here.
Turn to look at the world. This one is for everyone who has ever stood outside a door that wouldn’t open — and for everyone standing inside one, not yet knowing who is sitting on the steps.
Zawiya Discussion
The Wide Lens — Somatic, Intersectional & Systemic
Our institutions — educational, medical, and religious — are built for a mythical ‘average’ nervous system. When a neurodivergent, marginalised, or traumatised person cannot walk through their doors, the system labels it ‘defiance,’ ‘unbelief,’ or ‘failure.’ This is a profound systemic violence. The social model of disability reminds us that the barrier is never the person’s body or brain; it is the design of the entrance. When we add the intersections of gender, race, and spiritual expectation, the doorway becomes even narrower.
The Devotional Lens
The Sufi and the Punk meet at the threshold of the closed door. In the Islamic tradition, the ultimate spiritual state is Inkisar al-qalb — the beautiful, sacred cracking of the heart. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ related that Allah says: ‘I am with those whose hearts are broken for My sake.’ Tears outside a mosque door are not a failure to pray. They are a direct, unmediated liturgy of longing that bypasses the human gatekeepers entirely.
The Christian mystic Meister Eckhart understood the same truth from a different tradition — that the fastest path to wholeness runs directly through suffering, and that the most sacred place a person can stand is inside their own brokenness. Not beyond it. Not after it. Inside it.
The poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen, writing from outside any single religious tradition, pointed to the same opening. His insight was simple and devastating: it is precisely the crack — the place where we are broken open — that allows the light to enter. Perfection, he suggested, is not the goal. The crack is not the problem. It is the doorway.
Three traditions. One truth. The place you could not enter was never the real entrance. The breaking was.
Questions
What institutional doorways in your life were never designed for the way your nervous system moves through the world?
How can we stop moralising our sensory paralysis and recognise our tears as a valid, holy language?
Where in your life does your Sufi need your Punk to protect it?