Parallel Play
The Spiritual Underground is the art, culture, and creative practice strand of this work — a place for people whose faith, attention, and making live a little outside the standard rooms.
It grew slowly, over many years, as I searched for language to describe a way of being with God that felt spacious, honest and deeply alive. Long before these ideas had names, they were already shaping the way I moved through the world.
You do not join this.
You recognise yourself in it.
“Low-demand faith is the recognition that faith can be practised outside ritual, standardised religious practices, and cultural norms. It is the understanding that our relationship with the Divine is often alive in the ordinary moments of our lives, not only within formal acts of worship.”
Spiritual Parallel Play is following your own curiosity with monotropic depth — allowing yourself to go all the way into one thing and discovering that God is already there, beside you.
Like children absorbed in parallel play, there is no need to direct or control the encounter. Each remains fully themselves, sharing presence rather than performance.
Within Sufi tradition there is a saying that God is a Hidden Treasure who created the universe to be found.★ Whether or not its chain of transmission is accepted by every scholar, that image has shaped my devotional life.
The child in me heard that invitation literally.
A treasure invites searching.
So I searched.
In music.
In scripture.
In stories.
In gardens.
In art.
In places.
In conversations.
In people.
Each fascination became another landscape to wander. Each question became another doorway through which I hoped to glimpse the Divine.
Over time, something beautiful revealed itself.
The searching became the practice.
The curiosity became the prayer.
The attention became the place of meeting.
Years later, after my autism diagnosis, I recognised this movement as monotropic attention — the capacity to remain with one question, one beauty, one thread until it opens into something larger. Spiritual Parallel Play is the name I eventually gave to that way of seeking.
Ritual follows a well-worn path towards continual awareness of God.
Spiritual Parallel Play follows deep curiosity until that same awareness begins to bloom.
The destination is shared.
The paths are different.
Inspiring the Sufi: A Neurodivergent Practice in Parallel Play is where this practice lives in the open.
Fifty Names of Allah, surrounded by songs. Written reflections.
Ten years of practice, freely shared, freely wandered.
Looking back, I can see one thread running quietly through everything I have made.
As a young Muslim woman, I longed to know God in ways that felt true to the person I was becoming. Questions carried me further than certainty ever could. Each project began with a curiosity that refused to let me go — some I had to follow, others arrived as invitations from people who recognised something unfolding before I fully understood it myself.
Each became another treasure hunt.
2008 · Public art
What makes prayer recognisable?
Listening to hundreds of people describe moments that felt like prayer, the answer kept arriving in the same shape — letting go. A sigh, a silence, a piece of music, a wave of longing or gratitude. Prayer was already happening in places no one had named as prayer.
2009 · Community festival
What happens when two scriptures are allowed to sit side by side?
Belgrade Theatre Coventry’s community festival paired stories from the Qur’an with stories from the Bible for the first time — scripted plays, spoken word, film and dance, performed by community members and more than two hundred young people.
2009 · National Trust commission
Can scripture be a way of noticing what is already here?
Working with the National Trust at Wightwick Manor, I invited people to pair rooms inside the house with verses from the Qur’an that echoed what each space already carried. The work became an act of noticing.
2010 · Ulfah Arts UK × DAM Festival Kosovo
Where can a story from the Qur’an meet music from somewhere else, and remain itself?
Stories from the Qur’an, drawn from conversations with Muslim women across Britain, travelled into music composed in Kosovo and performed across two countries.
The stories remained the same. The form changed. The meeting with the Divine remained.
To see this throughline in motion, across more projects than any single page could hold, here’s the Sufi Punk show reel:
Looking back now, I see one practice unfolding through many different forms.
The projects changed.
The search remained beautifully constant.
Spiritual Parallel Play simply gave that lifelong practice a name.
Most of this work has grown through conversation, shared curiosity and quiet recognition — the same way the treasure was always there, waiting for the searching that would know how to find it.
If you are a neurodivergent person finding your own way to the divine — or a parent or carer wanting that same space for yourself or your child — you are welcome to write. This is simply an open door.
If you work in faith, the arts, or culture, and something here meets work you are already doing — or simply opens a question you have been carrying yourself — I would be delighted to hear from you.
Programming.
Residencies.
Collaborations.
Conversation.
A short, plain note, in your own words, is enough.
Wherever the path begins is enough.
For quieter companionship, reflections and news about the book, you are warmly invited to join Sanctuary First on Substack.
