Reflections on Sufism

And a Ramadan Offering

Salaam friends, happy 2026, I pray it is a year of great openings and ease. Here are some reflections that actually feel quite tender and vulnerable to share, I notice how much I want to change, and how much it is a beautiful practice to let go and just allow something to be what it is and land where it may need. At the end you can find some information about a container I am offering for Ramadan called Women in Sufism.

It is often the things closest to us that are the hardest to see clearly. I was raised in a particular Sufi community in Southern Spain and I received a very distinctive flavour of Islam through this. Some of the essence of my experience as a child of being raised in this environment was the sensation that there was always inherent access and immediacy to the Divine. I felt drenched in the Divine, I felt totally supported, encouraged and nourished by the adults in my life around my direct experiences of God as a child, particularly by my father. Understanding more now as an adult around the developmental stages of a human being, I am infinitely grateful for this. Part of the work I dedicate myself to now is the dissolving of identity and story around who I am, who I have been being in the world. This maturation process of outgrowing the body-mind in order to see clearly the story in which it is living, and welcoming the possibility of knowing ourselves beyond it. It is a slow process of dissolving the structures of my beliefs and truly examining how I perceive reality, and, how I partake in it. It is a deep questioning of everything, all my assumptions. The things I just accept as reality. It is a fascinating experience to examine my Islam, my experience of being a woman and the strength and power that I feel in the spiritual lineage that I feel a child of.

There have of course and continues to be great battles, questionings and the deep journey between my feminine experiential knowing and ‘rules’ and absolutes I often find in Islam. My mind is laden with associations, automatic responses and somatic experiences even hearing the word Sufism. In light of all of this, I wanted to share some things with you. There is something coming up for me to do with me being a woman and claiming my power and capacity to share about these topics which often feel so laden with a constrictive patriarchal energy, whilst I wish to invite you into the dark fecundity of ‘I don’t know’ around these explorations. Of the permission to get it wrong, of there being no right or wrong.

A universe exists on my notes app, I fear that if I was to die they would reveal disconcerting amounts of insight about my psychological states. There is one note in particular I come back to over and over and over again. I wrote it in the winter of 2019 in a tiny flat staying with my father in Rabat, Morocco. I was 20 years old, brazen and sure that I was really grasping what was being taught. They are notes from my father teaching me about Tasawwuf/Sufism through the works of many influences Sheikh Muhammad ibn al Habib, Ibn Arabi, existential philosophers, and his own idiosyncratic insights. These are mingled with my own reflections. There is a ruthless existential cadence to them that I adore, a directness in tone which makes me feel close to my father, and something I feel I inherited from him.

I have tidied up these notes slightly and tried to keep some of the messiness or lack of structure or sense as I find it rather endearing. I am not sure why this is titled ‘Affirmations’ it simply is. And I will just leave this here before you read on: William Chittick shares that Islam is “a religion that teaches people how to transform themselves so that they may come into harmony with the ground of all being”

Affirmations: Tabula Rasa

Tabula Rasa baby!! Wiping the board clean. An empty board. Even Islam must be wiped away.

There is the famous Buddhist saying, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” We are thrown into the world. Facticity. The nafs (self) constructs itself around facts and reality. Universally, the human problem is that we believe the narrative our ego has constructed.

To ask someone to be completely objective is already difficult. Even the concept of God must be let go of. Sweep away everything you think you know. Authenticity and inauthenticity are not necessarily good or bad. Inauthenticity is when you take on the conventions of thought and action of the world you are in. For example, stepmothers are often asked how they get along with the children because stories portray them as evil. These assumptions can be swept away. She is simply a woman who married my father.

This is a deconstruction of the world as we see it. Like millions of others, the idea that everything is one and everything is the same can itself become another concept. Do not focus on your facticity. This is how the world should be. This is how I am. These are the means by which you function in the world. Your story about yourself. You view everyone through the filter of your own perception. In any encounter there is you, the other person, and their judgement.

Let go.

When you meet a situation, meet it as it is. You will fail again and again. With time, and by the will of Allah, you may reach a state where you overcome it. Yet you never overcome the struggle, that tension, that conflict is an aliveness. Even the concept of God you know must be put aside. Forget punishment or good and bad. You are only approaching it from your own perception.

Ghafla is lack of awareness, forgetfulness. Direct awareness is its opposite.

Religion, from the Latin meaning “to bind together,” as explanation or arena is equally false. To mistake the name for the thing named, the category for the indicated, is to make Tasawwuf/Sufism inaccessible. Non-realities that have crystallised in the imagination, such as history, class, or individuality, must be set aside. Do not get caught up in the structure of Islam, which is just a form. It is like admiring a beautiful car and forgetting that the car is meant to take you from A to B.

The subject of Tasawwuf is you.

The subject of Tasawwuf is reality.

Let us begin from the beginning, which is One.

After all that has been said, we are stripped right down. Garcia Lorca’s poem, Earth, Sky, Sun. (I am unsure as to what poem of FGL my father is referencing here) You and the world without value judgements.

The whole matter begins and ends with an affirmation of One.

Everything has been stripped away. To affirm that there is One is to look around and see that all of it is one thing. Beneath the outward weave of the world, this reality is one. Duality is an illusion, but it is not bad. It is one. Duality is part of the matrix we and others have made. It becomes problematic only when we believe it and invest in the idea that one thing is better than another.

We accept duality while knowing that beneath it everything is one. Precisely because of experiential multiplicity, the science of Unity exists. We need duality in order to know the One. There is not even continuity, yet we persist in believing in it. Everything ends. Everything is constantly changing. Nothing is permanent.

In dreams, objects seem insubstantial. When awake, they appear solid and therefore real. Real has come to mean solid. Yet physicists now tell us that solidity has no reality for them. We are subatomic, made of the same substance. Carbon. (Fritjof Capra)

The object slips away again. Forms are proved out of existence, and I am left holding a mental image of solidity in a vanishing world of forms, described as dynamic space. This growing awareness is disconcerting. Information about the real world becomes strange and contradictory, even ironic. The figures appointed to soothe our anxiety are often in worse states than we are. It is to this condition that Tasawwuf addresses itself.

We fear nothingness. Seeking help from others who share the same predicament does not resolve it.If you desire to know reality, you must know yourself. You are the key, the only key, to reality. You are nothing but a mirror. It is enough to reflect. The only way to understand existence is through knowledge of yourself. You are the doorway into reality. “Whoever knows themselves knows their Lord.”

Yet anxiety about what lies ahead, and within, prevents calm reflection. You seek tranquillising information to reassure yourself that everything is proven and secure. For now, information must be set aside. When you are distracted by pain, clarity is impossible. The human condition is fear of nothingness. We create stories to fill the gap. These constructions are necessary to a degree, but we must remain detached from them. They allow interaction, but we must hold the knowledge that everything we think we are is an illusion.

This requires a certain detachment. A lack of total investment in your story. A knowledge that you are nothing. Yet we forget and become caught between dhikr (remembrance/awareness of God) and ghafla. Between authenticity and inauthenticity. Heidegger’s Das Man. Reality is dynamic. There are multiple versions of reality. People describe the same event differently. Nothing can be fully trusted. Humanly, all one can do is weep.

This realisation, this is the starting point of Tasawwuf. It begins with surrendering the idea that you can think or reason your way out of the contradictions of lived existence. Complexity is too great. The main source of complexity is other people and their perspectives. The mind cannot grasp all elements of any situation.

So you give up. You accept what you see. Phenomenology. You see what you see. Surrender, though outwardly to the shaykh, is in truth to the Messenger, Muhammad, the Messenger of reality. You relinquish the idea that you can fully understand reality. Your story collides with others and becomes confused. At a certain point you accept the limits of human understanding. Emotion interferes. Clarity dissolves. You give up, yet reality remains. Submission is required to one who knows.

The shaykh represents the Prophet in the situation you are in. The Nur Muhammadiyya (Muhammadan Light). Through transmission from shaykh to shaykh, illusions are cut through. There is nothing mystical or fanciful here. The necessary qualifications are simple and profound: deep humanity, sanity, and disinterestedness. Most people are neurotic, overly absorbed in material affairs.

Disinterestedness means seeing life as dreamlike. Not false, but fleeting. You are in the world, but not of it. You engage without attachment to outcomes. You do not equate your worth with success or failure. If you lose your job, you have lost a job. Nothing more. It does not define you. Sheikh Darqawi was asked the best profession for a Sufi. He replied, “No profession.” Work should not enter the heart. It is a means to eat, nothing more. The Qur’an says: “By what you see and what you do not see, it is the speech of a noble Messenger.” He is not a poet, nor a magician. He embellishes nothing. He speaks reality as it is. “By the pen and what they inscribe… you are on a vast self form.” This is Allah soothing the Prophet, affirming the immensity of his character. Insan Kamil. The full human potential realised.

Existence is one, yet we are trapped in duality. To understand reality, we must loosen our engagement with duality and attach ourselves to one who has travelled from duality to unity. We must beware of importing discarded value structures into Tasawwuf. If Tasawwuf is reduced to guilt, sin, and repentance, we return to the beginning. Our conditioning can make seemingly highly moralistic hadith sound pompous. We must look beyond this. As you read, just as understanding arises, value judgements intrude. In speaking of fear or taqwa (reliance on God), we must abandon our assumptions. It is a response to the immensity of reality, not fear of punishment.

Transmission flows from shaykh to faqir (disciple) through the golden chain of transmission. Our concern is the alteration of the self. A peace treaty with inner rebellion. The nafs resists reason and inclines toward self-destruction. Some shaykhs say to treat the nafs like a young child. Harshness creates conflict. Gentleness allows growth. Set goals too high and failure brings despair. Be gentle with yourself.

Thank you for reading, share your thoughts with me, there is a lot here that is invigorating and challenging. I also wanted to share some sweetness and softness, an invitation to hear the words of Sheikh Muhammab Ibn al Habib, it was through him that our community found Islam.

Listen Here

Also I asked Chat GPT to critique me harshly on this Substack and the worst thing it said is ‘The Tasawwuf section borders on unexamined reverence. The notes are compelling, but they are largely presented rather than interrogated. You rarely push back on them as an adult with distance. For a piece about dissolving belief structures, there’s surprisingly little friction with the inherited framework itself. At times, it reads as transmission reproduced, not yet fully metabolised.’

Ha! Heres to more unexamined reverence!

Women of Sufism- An Online Container for Ramadan

I am launching an online container for Ramadan, it is a course about the feminine dimension of worship, or rather a feminine approach to relating to the Beloved. I have not officially launched it since I have not ironed out the details, but I am following my desire and impulse and sharing it here with you. By the will of Allah I hold the intention for it to be magnificent. I really feel it is a space for women who feel on the margins of the faith, or who are truly struggling to grapple with aspects of the religion and feel cut off from God. Here is a link if you want to sign up. Email me if you have questions.

Find out more here

Love, Medina