My 50th Birthday This Week: Standing at the Threshold This week, I turn fifty. There is something about writing those words that makes me pause. Not with fear, but with reverence. Fifty years. Half a century of breath moving through this body. Half a century of being carried by a Mystery far greater than my own plans, ideas, or understanding. As June opens her soft golden door, I find myself standing at a sacred threshold. In the Sufi path, we are often invited to see li

On this Memorial Day, we remember every soldier, every civilian, every mother and child whose life was taken by war — American, Afghan, and all those whose names history forgets. We honor the fallen most truly when we refuse to let their sacrifice be in vain...

I could not sleep last night, and I will not pretend otherwise. This morning The Times of London printed a sentence that should have stopped the world: "Taliban legalise child marriage for girls as young as nine." The decree — thirty-one articles signed by the Taliban supreme leader and published in the official gazette this month — removes any minimum age for the marriage of girls and declares that the silence of a virgin girl is to be treated as her consent...

“Form began to soften at the edges; the sense of ‘my’ body expanded into the space around it until inside and outside were no longer clearly divided. What remained was one continuous body of presence, appearing as fifteen people in a room.”

A Sufi Reflection on Love, Surrender, and the Vanishing of the Self By Anosha Zereh When I first thought about intimacy, I imagined it as something reserved for romantic moments or private conversations. Over time, I came to see that intimacy is far more vast. It is not confined to relationship—it is a way of حضور, of being present enough to let another soul touch your truth.

In Iranian memory, the lion has long stood for courage and sovereignty; here it walks through a war‑torn orchard under the shadow of an eagle and a shrine‑beast. This is my way of speaking about Iran, Palestine, and Afghanistan in the current wars without maps or headlines—only animals, orchards, and the dangerous act of remembering the taste of our innate wisdom.

I want to tell you the truth: we Europeans and Americans are not innocent in this story. Our comfort is not neutral. When we fill our tanks, when we tap our cards, when we upgrade our phones, we are plugged into an order that feeds on someone else’s night. The quiet of our suburbs is insured by the sirens of Gaza, the hunger of Kabul, the sanctions suffocating Tehran, the rubble of Sana... We may not dismantle empire in a single gesture. But we can refuse, again and again, t

“No More Girls”: How Afghan Daughters Are Being Erased from Public Life

Enhanced Version: Stewardship, Dignity, and a Lineage Older Than Doctrine Long before religion wore names, humans already knew—they were not owners of the world, but guests within it. The Islamic teaching of khalifa is not a new revelation. It is a remembering—an echo of an ancient human responsibility that has traveled through nomadic memory, Zoroastrian ethics, and Islamic consciousness.

A story of ancestry, myth, and the wild feminine that refuses to be named.