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Asma Waheed tried to go to art school three times.

The first time, at fourteen, her father talked her out of it. He told her that if he sent her to art school, he would lose her, so she studied home economics instead and carried on like that for years. The second time, at West Virginia University, she was one semester in when she became pregnant with her first child and had to withdraw. The third time, a master's at Hood College, she made it three weeks before learning she was pregnant with her fourth. Five years went by.

This is a conversation about what she did with the waiting.

Asma is a multidisciplinary artist from Ellicott City, Maryland, working in clay, metal, fiber, wood and mirrors, with an MFA from the Mount Royal School of Art at MICA. She came to the United States from a small town outside Faisalabad, too nervous at first to answer the telephone in English. She learned the language in a year, raised four children, and found her way back to the studio one class at a time.

She came to clay in 2011, the year her mother died, through a workshop called Healing Through Clay. The first time she touched it, she describes a state of khushu: her brain quiet, nothing else in the room. She has worked with it ever since, and she calls it her fifth child.

Much of this episode is her reading her own faith through the material. Centering a ball of clay on the wheel, which took her a year to learn, as the foundation underneath everything built on top of it. Firing as the trial that either breaks you or makes you stronger. Compression as the squeeze that strengthens. Unfired clay, which can be rehydrated and reclaimed, against fired clay, which is changed forever. And clay as a record: it remembers how it was handled, down to the fingerprints of whoever shaped it.

She closes on the dua (prayer) she has made for years: Ya Allah, don't let me waste me.

Follow her work on Instagram: @asmawaheedart and website: https://asmawaheed.com/

Man laysa lahu wird, laysa lahu wārid.

Dr. Sayılgan's day starts before most people's. Fajr (morning prayer), then writing while his mind is fresh, then coffee, then ten pages of Quran, three hadiths, a few pages of the Risale-i Nur, and some lines of poetry. He calls it the thing that sets up the day.

He grew up herding cows in a village in eastern Turkey, named by a Naqshbandi shaykh who came to visit when he was born. He went to boarding school in Konya, the city of Rumi. Then Istanbul, Estonia, a Christian seminary in Virginia, and eventually a Jesuit university in Washington, where he teaches a course called The Problem of God.

He teaches that course because of a question he has spent a decade on: why is there suffering? In 2022 the question stopped being academic. His daughter Maryam was killed in a car accident weeks before her fourth birthday, while he was finishing a book on evil and suffering in Islam. He will tell you plainly that he has no answer. What he has is taslim, submission, and a practice that did not stop.

We talk about Bediüzzaman Said Nursi, who wrote his life's work in exile and in prison, sometimes on matchboxes, and produced hope out of it. About what jihad actually means, and why Nursi called for the jihad of the pen. About why he says there is no word in any language for a parent who has lost a child. And about an Ottoman poem in which every single line ends with the word for water, and the water is the Prophet ﷺ.

Man laysa lahu wird, laysa lahu wārid.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction

01:05 Ten pages, three hadiths, and a few lines of poetry

03:19 Why he reads Nursi every day

05:58 A village in eastern Turkey

06:51 Boarding school in Konya, the city of Rumi

07:44 Named by a shaykh

09:47 Istanbul, Estonia, and a Christian seminary

11:33 Why he chose religion

13:37 Said Nursi: writing on matchboxes in prison

15:59 Weakness as a starting point

19:31 What jihad actually means

21:35 The jihad of the pen

24:14 Islam in America: visibility and reaction

26:36 Why a cemetery matters

31:19 Studying Christianity

33:05 The Problem of God

35:26 Maryam

38:05 No word for a parent who lost a child

40:09 Taslim: the call from the hospital

42:30 A community that isn't afraid of death

46:56 Following the Prophet ﷺ

49:35 Imam Suyuti's treatise on losing a child

51:39 "The Prophet is the one who raised me"

53:43 Layla, Majnun, and seeing through another's eyes

57:16 Every line ends in water

Hernán Guadalupe became Muslim on the morning of September 11th, 2001, in a dorm room, minutes after the towers came down across the water. That's the part people know about him. This conversation is about the twenty-five years since.

He's an engineer who'll tell you he isn't a technical person; what he actually does is find what people are capable of and get them there. He runs a Brazilian jiu-jitsu school. He co-founded Hablamos Islam, building Islamic resources in Spanish. He went to Egypt intending to study at al-Azhar and came home before he started.

What makes this episode unusual is that he doesn't present a practice that worked. He describes a plateau; a stretch where he did the minimum and told himself it was enough, and only in the last two or three years has he started climbing back. Through dhikr. Through a set of prayer beads he'd avoided on principle. Through al-Ghazali, at an age when it finally landed.

An imam told him something that undid him: that he'd learned a little knowledge, but he was actually living it.

Chapters

00:00 What the wird is

01:59 How he defines success

04:40 Ecuador, Jersey City, and his parents' definition

07:52 The zeal of a new convert

10:33 His father's question: "Why now?"

13:13 Why he waited, and what changed that morning

16:26 Altar boy: faith and logic in conflict

20:11 Losing a community

22:51 "I didn't convert for a community"

25:00 Starting Hablamos Islam

28:45 Latino Muslims since the 1930s

30:53 You don't have to change your name

33:01 An imam from Ecuador, and a turning-point Ramadan

36:46 Egypt: what he learned without the language

40:31 Dar Al-Salam, and finding jiu-jitsu

44:16 Roll Star, and a father crying on the phone

46:56 "Whatever you're meant to make, you're gonna make" 4

9:05 Hitting a plateau

50:41 Dhikr, and the beads he avoided

52:49 The sky looks different now

54:26 Al-Ghazali cleaning the floors