Ihsan. It’s part of our DNA – the urge to create beauty, the hunger to experience it, and the
immediate awestruck state when we encounter it. Every cell in our bodies starts to pulse in
sympathetic harmony, sometimes to the point of tears. A sunset, a song, a work of art, a story
or film that touches us deep in our core. This impulse lies at the very center of the center of
our being and is so foundational that we rarely give it much thought. But we know it when it
enters our field of perception.

My parents were professional musicians. White, American, secular musicians who played jazz
standards and Tin Pan Alley songs and popular songs of the forties, fifties, and sixties. I heard
music in the womb, sang it and played it in my youth, devoted hours and hours of my teen
years immersed in it, and entered undergraduate studies as a classical piano major.

I listened to everything: from Coltrane to Shostakovich to Chopin to Led Zeppelin to Ella
Fitzgerald to Debussy, and realized that it all had the power to profoundly connect me to a
stillness and a silence deep within myself. I think it was this recognition that sparked my early
pursuit of that still, vast emptiness containing every sound. I was thrilled to discover this imagery in the book of Genesis: “And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters (1:2).” and in the
writings of Thomas Merton on emptiness as the necessary precursor of Divine Union. I hadn’t
a clue about Islam, had never met a Muslim (that I knew of), had never encountered the poems
and songs of the Sufis. But all in good time…

My mother was always interested in things unseen, and I recall sitting in rapt silence amid her
coffee klatches with friends as they discussed reincarnation, the psychology of Abraham
Maslow, and psychic mediumship. My conventional religious education was nearly
nonexistent, save for church hopping with friends and a one-time experience at the neighbors’
Pentecostal church (the speakers-in-tongues). I found it hard to subscribe to the illogical
concepts of the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity, along with other doctrines that required the
suspension of reason. So I stuck with Merton and Alan Watts and Lao Tzu and hoped for
something that was a better fit.

It was in the fall of my sophomore year that I enrolled in a Classics course entitled, Intellectual
Traditions of the West. The professor was adjunct faculty at St. John’s College, and rigorous
as it was, the class had only 8-12 students per semester. Wednesday evenings the class met
at the professor’s house, and discussed (over copious amounts of tea and zucchini bread) the
current selection from the Great Books, starting with the ancient Greeks. I enrolled in the
second of four semesters comprising this wildly unpopular course, covering the Old and New
Testaments through the Middle Ages, the Penguin Classics translation of the Qur’an, Avicenna,
Thomas Aquinas, and Dante.

During the third semester, we welcomed two Iranian students to the fold. My superficial
understanding of the Iranian Revolution came from American television and print media. I was
ill-prepared for the impact these two students would have upon my life. Suleiman and
Shamsuddin was mostly quiet but lamented the excision of the soul from Western philosophy
and of subjectivity from the scientific method. In the spirit of true hospitality, Sulei and Shams
invited the class for iftar during Muharram, the first ten days of which they fasted. The table
was piled with delights that they had cooked up during their fasting day: lamb and biryani,
salad and sweets. Offering us fruit, nuts, milk, and finger foods they broke their fast. Then it
was time for the Maghrib prayer. As Shams intoned the adhan, my inner tectonic plates shifted.
I began to shake imperceptibly as I experienced the call to prayer at every level of my being: it
was at once profoundly foreign and intimately familiar, like a sound I had always known deeply.
I spent the next three days in an altered state, a little disembodied, unable to sleep, profoundly
aware of the energetic connection of all things.

These two gracious young men were incredibly kind to me in the following months, answering
my questions as I navigated Pickthall’s dry translation of the Qur’an, reciting and rendering
quatrains of Rumi, and introducing me to the Islamic philosophers who informed the
Renaissance in the West Later in the academic year, I took shahada.

During spring break I ventured to East Lansing, a university town, to attend jummah prayer. I
joined a small group of women in black chadors and their children, who were relegated to a
dingy, cluttered, windowless space; they proceeded to tuck every last hair under my scarf
before we began salat. In the meantime, the men prayed in a clean, spacious, sunlit front room.
I couldn’t hear the khutba, but I performed the rakats and departed as soon as it was finished.
“I’m an American woman and a feminist,” I thought. “What have I signed onto?”

My mind was racing. I sped back to campus, knocked Sulei and Shams’s door, and told them that I took it all back, that I had had no idea how backward this religion was, and that I wanted no part of it. Sulei smiled and shook his head: “No, no, don’t go to masjid!”

He gave me tea and recited some poetry to calm me down. They were truly my brothers at a delicate time.

The next twenty years, I focused on reconciling my personal experience of the Revelation with
its many outward forms it takes from one culture to the next. I stayed away from the masjid. For
a while, I took refuge with the Baha’is but ultimately found that they were more focused on
recruiting new converts than on nurturing the spiritual life of existing members or contributing
to the greater community. And then, in the early 1990s, I was drawn back to Islam by the
music of the Sufis – from the passionate qawwals of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and the Sabri
Brothers to the lamentations of Shahjarian and Lotfi to the austerity of Turkish classical music
and Mevlevi ilahi. Fresh translations of Rumi by Coleman Barks, William Chittick, and Camille
and Kabir Helminski, and collections of Hafez and Yunus Emre spoke to the spiritual
experience that first opened my heart to Islam in a voice I was able to hear.

I participated in a Mevlevi circle in Vermont for several years, and through that association met
sheiykhs from several different tariqats. In 2005, I moved to California to be closer to family.
As a WASPy middle-aged, divorced convert, I found that I was quickly “othered” in gatherings
among American Muslims. For several years, I attended an ethnically diverse, seemingly
progressive masjid; however, many in the community believed that music at the masjid is
haram. I was usually introduced as a “Sufi” and a few eyes would roll. There was little room
for any female voice, let alone a singing one, in this setting, and I grew weary of the politics of
the ummah.

A few years back, the masjid rented a local theater to stage a Muslim talent show. Three
members of the planning committee asked me to audition, which I did, but shortly thereafter I
was told that women were no longer welcome to participate because it would upset certain
people in the community. But the discrimination wasn’t personal, I was told; even women
members of the Aswat Ensemble would be barred from taking the stage. A young male
member of the planning committee sought to set me straight: “My sister, even the prohibition
of alcohol in Islam happened gradually, and we have to introduce these changes slowly.” To
which I replied, “Yes, but it was not the Prophet (saws) who made that decision, it was revealed
by Allah in the Divine timeframe.”

So I find myself once again unmosqued, and I find new inspiration in the vital work of the
Muslim Writers’ Collective and GAMA to nurture creativity and inclusivity among Muslim artists
and poets. I’m grateful that these twenty- and thirty-somethings welcome me and firmly
support both men and women who were raised in Islam and those who came to it by other
means. This is where I take refuge. This is where my creativity thrives. I have discovered a growing network of creative, tolerant, nurturing souls who are truly collaborative and accepting and ready to stop dividing the arts into that which is Islamic and that which is not.

I spent many hours as a teen listening to Cat Stevens – every word of every song still lives in
my memory. I am heartened that Yusuf Islam has returned to the music scene and continues
to shed the concept that music and religion are somehow at odds with each other. The sacred
and the secular are two sides of the same creative coin, each inherently beautiful. Can we walk
the edge where the two sides meet? Can we become less rigid about where the Sacred
resides? Only if we truly believe la illaha illallah — that there is no reality but the Divine Reality.
I’m always surprised when a new melody flows through me. It never feels like it’s my own, but
a gift from the imaginal realm dropped into my heart by an otherworldly composer. In those
receptive moments, I find myself singing and singing and singing the melody that comes to me,
determined not to forget it before I manage to record it. It could be a prayer or a poem or just a
riff, but it all originates from the same place – deep within the human heart.