For a long time my special interest was Michael Jackson.
My family could not understand it. To them he was a pop star. To me he was a doorway into my own heart.
Every morning on the way to school I would listen to Man in the Mirror. Again. And again. And again. It wasn’t the music itself that held me. It was the feeling. Something opened inside me when I listened. A deep empathy. A deep emotional world. A place where I could feel things fully. A place where wonder lived.
I did not have language for that then. I only knew that some things made me feel more alive than others.
That was how I learned. Not only through music. Everything.
When people told me what Islam was, I could never simply accept it from the outside. I had to enter the experience for myself. I had to climb inside the idea and wander around in it. Feel its shape. Listen for its heartbeat. Only then could it become real.
My spiritual education was led by wonder. Not because scholars, teachers, and traditions had nothing to offer. But because Allah kept meeting me through the things that opened my heart. Music. Poetry. Stories. Beauty. Longing. Special interests.
As a young woman, I could not access mosques in the way I was told faith was meant to be accessed. My sisters chose visibility. They wore hijab. They prayed. They became recognisably Muslim in ways that made sense within the community. I respected their choices. But I couldn’t make the same ones.
Something in me resisted performing faith in ways that felt externally compliant but internally hollow.
I want to be precise about what I was resisting. Not the practice. Not the prayer. Not the hijab itself or the mosque itself or the tradition itself. I was not refusing Allah.
I was refusing a particular idea — one so embedded in religious culture that it rarely gets named — that the outward signs are the starting point. That you perform belonging before you feel it. That you wear the form before you’ve found the substance. That the ritual precedes the relationship.
To me this has always been backwards. And I think it explains something important about the state of the world.
When we teach people to perform faith before they inhabit it — to prioritise the visible markers of belonging over the invisible reality those markers are supposed to point toward — we produce generations of people who have the shell without the pearl. Who can recite without feeling. Who can comply without transforming. Who belong to a community without ever belonging to Allah.
The Sufi tradition has always understood that the Batin — the inward reality — and the Zahir — the outward practice — are two wings of the same bird. The outward forms exist to serve the inward reality. Not the other way around. When the institution forgets this — when the wing becomes the destination rather than the vehicle — the bird cannot fly.
What I was refusing was not the wing. It was the insistence that the wing was enough. That performance was the point. That a soul still finding its way inward was somehow less Muslim than one who had mastered the outward form.
Allah — in His mercy — disagreed.
The barriers I encountered made belief feel shallow — not because God was absent, but because access was conditional. And so my relationship with God went inward.
When I wanted to understand the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, I did not begin with theology. I fell in love with a poem. The Poem of the Cloak. The beauty of it. The devotion inside it. The longing it carried. What began as an arts project became something much deeper. I was not studying the story from a distance. I was entering it. And somehow the story entered me.
That happened repeatedly throughout my life. I would become fascinated by something. Follow it. Live inside it. And emerge understanding something new about myself, the world, and Allah.
Years later, when I became Artistic Director of Ulfah Arts, I didn’t set out to create a faith project. I set out to create access. Ulfah Arts became a place where Muslim women could enter without explanation. Where belief was not measured by appearance. Where participation didn’t require permission. Where you could belong without performing.
I nurtured over 500 women and girls through my work — from international campaigns such as Muslim Women Music Makers, initiated at the World Music Expo in Seville in 2007, to live art installations as part of the Fierce Festival. At the time, these were considered no-go spaces for any respectable Muslim woman.
In Too Punk To Pray (2008), I performed Maghrib prayer in real time — transforming from a punk figure into a hijab-wearing woman praying to her Lord. It was controversial on both sides.
I thought I was proving that Muslim women could make music. That was certainly part of it. I had grown up hearing that music and faith occupied opposite sides of a line. Yet my own experience kept telling me something different. Music had not taken me away from Allah. It had brought me closer to my heart. And it was through my heart that I encountered Him.
Looking back, I can see that none of the projects I created were random. Each emerged at a particular moment in my life, and each carried me somewhere deeper — not towards answers, but towards alignment.
I don’t experience belief as something I possess. I experience it as something that accompanies me — an ongoing consciousness that appears at thresholds, withdraws when forced, and returns when invited.
Diagnosis didn’t feel like an interruption to my spiritual life. It felt like a clarification. It named the nervous system I had always lived inside. It explained the intensity, the symbolism, the depth, the resistance to fixed forms.
I did not coin the term low demand. It belongs to the PDA community — to the parents, advocates, and practitioners who understood that for a nervous system wired the way my son’s is, reducing demand is not a lowering of standards. It is a complete reorientation of how a household, a relationship, and a life are held together. A lifestyle change, not a technique. A different way of understanding what care actually requires.
I am a parent living inside that reality. And what I noticed — slowly, then all at once — is that the same truth applies to faith.
That a soul cannot be coerced into genuine relationship with God any more than a PDA nervous system can be coerced into compliance. That the demand has to come down before the real thing can emerge. That what looks like resistance is often simply a nervous system waiting for an invitation rather than an instruction.
Low demand faith is not my invention. It is the application of something I learned from my son — and from the community that helped me understand him — to the spiritual life I was already living.
Now I call it low-demand faith. Not because faith asks nothing of us. But because some truths cannot be taught from the outside. They must be encountered. They must be lived. They must become real within the landscape of a person’s own heart.
I have come to think that many neurodivergent people learn in a similar way. Not through compliance. Not through transmission. But through fascination. Through relationship. Through direct experience.
The wonder comes first. The words arrive later. The relationship comes first. The understanding follows.
Low demand for me does not mean low depth. It means the demand moves inward rather than outward. What looks effortless from the outside is often the most intense engagement happening on the inside.
When I look back now, I can see that Allah was educating me all along. Through music. Through art. Through beauty. Through longing. Through every doorway that captured my attention and invited me further in.
I thought I was following my interests. Perhaps, all along, I was being led.
Turn to look at the world. This one is for everyone who found God through the back door — through music, obsession, beauty, the thing that wouldn’t let you go. And for anyone who ever told them that wasn’t a real door.
Zawiya Discussion
The Wide Lens — Somatic, Intersectional & Systemic
Standardised education and mainstream religious institutions rely on transmission and compliance — the idea that truth is a package passed from an authority figure to a passive recipient. For the neurodivergent mind, this method is not only ineffective; it triggers a threat response. Neurodivergent people do not learn through coercion; we learn through fascination. A deep, intense special interest is not a distraction or a clinical symptom to be managed. It is a profound cognitive and emotional sanctuary where the nervous system finds safety. When a young Muslim woman cannot enter a mosque, cannot wear the visible markers of belonging, cannot perform faith in the expected register — the system reads this as failure or refusal. It is neither. It is a nervous system seeking a doorway that was never provided.
The Devotional Lens
When the Qur’an repeatedly commands humanity to Tafakkur — to wonder, contemplate, and look at the signs — it is legitimising curiosity as a form of worship. This wonder has no borders. Whether it is a child entering her emotional world through Michael Jackson, a young woman falling in love with the Poem of the Cloak, or a community of 500 Muslim women discovering that their faith and their creativity were never opposites — the mechanism is the same. It is what the Eastern traditions call Lila — spiritual play — and what the Christian contemplative tradition recognises as beholding the Divine in the ordinary. If Allah meets us through what brings our hearts to life, then our fascinations are not secular detours. They are the very tracks upon which our souls travel to meet Him.
Every contemplative tradition has understood this ground — that the soul finds God not through compliance but through what brings it most fully alive. They name it differently. They arrive there by different paths. But the territory is the same.
Hazrat Inayat Khan — the Sufi teacher who brought the wisdom of the Chishti lineage to the West — understood this more precisely than almost anyone. He taught that the soul which is music itself is affected by music. That sound is not a distraction from the sacred but one of its most direct expressions. That when the heart opens through beauty — through a piece of music, a poem, a story, a special interest that pulls you fully into itself — it is not moving away from God. It is moving toward the most intimate possible encounter with the Divine. The fascination is the path. The opening is the prayer. The soul that follows its deepest joy is already, in that very following, doing the most sacred thing it can do.
A young woman who could not enter the mosque but could enter the world of Michael Jackson — who found her emotional depths through music and her way to God through beauty — was not failing at faith. She was living it in the register her soul could receive. This is what Hazrat Inayat Khan understood. And it is what this collection has always been trying to say.
Questions
If your deepest fascinations are actually personalised pathways of divine connection, what has yours been trying to teach you?
What would low-demand faith look like in your daily life — where curiosity replaces performance and wonder comes before instruction?
Where have you experienced belief withdrawing when it was forced, and returning when it was simply invited?