Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be with you and really looking forward to our conversation because I am with you in wanting to cross boundaries so that we can reach that higher place in life.

Yeah, you're so right, because in our voice is our breath and in our breath is our being. So much of how we even live our life is in our breath. It's captured in whether we dare to breathe throughout our system, whether we are stuck somewhere at the top with anxiety and fear. I know you have a practice of meditation and breathing that you've woven into your life, and it's more than that external breath because it then becomes your being in this world. I appreciate that you can connect to my voice, too.

As you're speaking about it, I just think about voice as a metaphor for our being. I love that point that you're making because I actually haven't thought about it myself as an expression of who we are. We oftentimes think about the words that we say, right? Not what you're reflecting back to me about, the vibration, really, that's another dimension of voice. But when I think about it, I think too, about how it's a reflection of our breath and then it's also a reflection of our brain circuitry. Because the truth is, as you know, language and processing are in our brain and it's in one part of the brain but the way that we manifest our communication is reflected in how our brain is working. Are we tapping the rage, the anger and the trauma that is in the back of our brain and part of our brain? Are we only tapping that or are we having our own thought process include the entire circuitry? Which means that we process even our emotions through some prefrontal activity that is logic, and thus, that also reflects in our voice because we know the difference between rage and anger. You can see it in the eyes.

I have a story I want to tell you in a few minutes that goes back to your hometown of Chandigarh. It's your hometown?

It's Chandigarh. Which state is it in, in India?

Yes. That's what I was confused about. I'm going to bring this all to life for you right now. I brought this symbol for myself of power.

This is a symbol of a goddess in Hindu culture, in Hinduism. Durga is her name. She rides on this tiger, and she's sitting in, I guess what they call it in America as a side saddle. She's wearing a beautiful red sari. Her right foot is across the knee of her left foot. She has her right hand up in a gesture of openness. She wears a crown. She has in her hand a sword of symbolism. I have this before me because I listened to your podcast with Melissa from the toy company. I don't even know Melissa's last name because she's only Melissa to me.

What's her last name?

Hitendra Wadhwa: Bernstein.

Asra Nomani: Okay, great. Thank you. My son grew up on her toys, and I listened to the podcast that you just had with her in which you reflected on her own journey. I thought to myself, when I talk to you, I wanted to bring Durga as a symbol of my journey. What happened for me is, we will give everyone the backstory on how I ended up in Delhi in 2000, working on a book. I was pursuing a study of Buddhism and Hinduism. I wanted to travel on my own, I wanted to be navigating my own journey. But I knew that the roads were a little too narrow for me to manage a car, I felt. Because the roads back then in 2000, you'd be right next to another car in the other lane. I got a motorcycle instead. In Lucknow, which is where I have family, I went to the Honda dealership and convinced them to sell me a Hero Honda Splendor. Do you know that motorcycle?

My Hero Honda Splendor is 100 CC. I don't know what your Suzuki is?

In America I think mopeds are 100 CC. They won't even let a 100 CC I think sometimes on highways here. But I enjoyed it because in the state of Uttar Pradesh, which is where Lucknow sits, a lot of the bad boys drive these Hero Honda Splendors. I was like, "Okay, I'm going to channel that." I cut my hair so that I would not look like a girl underneath the helmet. I was wearing this STUDDS helmet, learning how to ride the motorcycle, doing circle eights around these sleeping cows on this cricket field, not far off from Hazratganj, the main marketplace.

I learned to ride my motorcycle. I took it to Delhi and I was doing circles around golf links, this neighborhood practicing. I got on the road because I was going to go to these temples that are called Shakti Peethas. Peeth is a divine place. Then Shakti means feminine energy. There was one that I was going to hit and my road included Chandigarh. I ended up at the famous Rose Gardens of Chandigarh and I stopped for Chai. There I met this couple, they looked at me, they listened to me, as you're saying about voice, and they said, "We can see the Kundalini in your eyes." The Kundalini is that energy that male or female energy, but that energy within us that we can unleash within ourselves and into the world. I'm just telling you that story because I thought of it as I was listening to Melissa's interview and thinking about you coming from Chandigarh and how it is that exactly like what you're saying, that being about us can be reflected in our eyes and our voice and it is about that integration within us.

Yeah. I'll give the backstory. Who was this person who was now on a motorcycle? It was a long journey to get on that motorcycle. I was born in India, in Bombay. I spent my first four years in Hyderabad. I lived with my parents and my grandparents' home in my Dadi and Dada, my paternal grandparents' home, as is the tradition in India. I have an older brother, and like you, my dad, just a couple decades earlier in the 1960s, came to the US for the same intention as you, for his education. He got his PhD at Rutgers University and then brought my mom over. When they settled, they brought my brother and me over. At the age of four, I came to the United States and like so many immigrant children and so much of humanity actually, worked for the next decades on figuring out who I am. This Muslim girl growing up in West Virginia and became a journalist. I knew not a word of English when I came to the US, but then because of the opportunities in America, at the age of 23, I got a great opportunity to work at the Wall Street Journal. I covered the airline industry, international trade, all these highbrow, big beats, rubbing shoulders with Richard Branson, from Virgin Atlantic and the architects of these big airline and airline companies. Carl Icahn, who bought TWA and destroyed TWA. I never covered Donald Trump, but was covering industry at that time of mergers and acquisitions. That was really just turning people's lives upside down, I could see. I could see it as a reporter, because when we would write our articles about big purchases or Pan Am is declaring bankruptcy, we would lead with the issue of the assets and their projected earnings, then the second, third and fourth paragraph would be about the human beings that would be losing their jobs.

You know this so well as an expert about how businesses run themselves and you remember the 80s and the 90s, and that was the era when vulture capitalism became a concept. That was the world I was in. Just as the last century was ending, I said, I need to do something different. I ended up getting this book contract to report about this spiritual philosophy called thantra or tantra, as people call it in the United States. It had become big in America on the sale of tantric sex by experts, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan and GQ. They'd all have their tantric experts. But I went on this journey back to India, my birthplace, in order to really understand the philosophy. I ended up, as you mentioned, the Maha Kumbh Mela is one of the biggest gatherings of spiritualism in Hinduism. I ended up going completely down the spiritual path. It was there on the banks of the Ganga River then that I first saw the Dalai Lama. That's where I heard these words from him, where he said what he encourages everyone to do is find peace with the religion of their birth rather than adopting a new religion or converting into a new religion. I thought that was really a lesson of congruence, guidance of congruence within ourselves. I kept on the road. That's when I got the motorcycle and ended up at the Rose Garden of Chandigarh.

Yeah, that's such a great way of putting it. At that point, I had gone through my 20s and I was just struggling how I was going to find congruence in my identity as an American Muslim woman, because the reality that I was experiencing was one in which my parents were 100% affirming of my identity, my life and my profession. There were definitely issues of identity that they had very definite opinions about, that I was struggling with. My father, especially, had a real desire for me to marry only within my religion because that was the edict for women, especially within Islam that you can only marry within the faith. This is for women and men in many faiths, of course. But that put this inner struggle in me, because here I was in the United States and most of my friends were non-Muslim. I started secretly dating men because in my socially conservative Muslim family didn't allow to date. I was living a double life and I think that was something that I didn't know how to reconcile. It caused great depression. It caused great anxiety. It is something that I now recognize as a very painful way to live. That's why at that age, when I was coming of age in the 80s, I connected very deeply to people within the gay community who were in the closet. Because in my own heterosexual life, I was living in the closet. I got married for a millisecond to the man that I thought I was supposed to marry. He was a Muslim Pakistani man and I fell in love, or the idea of love with him. But it was a complete mismatch of values and life.

This is where I learned in my late 20s that, especially when you're on this journey of a society that does value the individual, ultimately you cannot really even betray yourself. In my experience as a 27-year-old, I would lay my head to rest every night weeping because I felt such a pain about this life choice that I had made, but one I was forcing myself to commit to, to do what I should do, right? On the eve of my engagement, I even fell ill with 105-degree temperature with pneumonia. Can you imagine at the age of 27? Because, my body was rejecting these choices. As you know, meditative practice is to recognize the signs of our body. We started this conversation talking about voice, but indeed, voice reflects our inner self and our inner being, that ethereal, kundalini energy also. I didn't listen and proceeded with this marriage because I thought I needed to do that. I had to do that. In fact, the great lesson I learned from my beautiful parents when it came to the collapse of this marriage and my entire being came to collapse with depression, is they cared about me. My dad came to me and he said, "Asra, I want to save you, not the marriage." That's this lesson that I learned from my parents that I wanted to share with you, that I enjoyed listening to you talk about your father also. In their life, they model so often values that we don't even fully appreciate. But I now recognize, as having been life changing for me. That was this principle of unconditional love and this transcendent, divine love.

They had expectations. They did the best that they could do. But ultimately, we navigated our lives together in a place of love and acceptance. And so when the marriage fell apart, my mom was there, my father was there to save the being of who I was. That became the young woman who ended up with this book contract to go to India. I was trying to reconcile the very patriarchal, domineering expectations within so much of my Muslim culture that I had found in such conflict with what I wanted to be in this world with my own choices. That's how I ended up in India exploring Buddhism and Hinduism, because I think what happens is that you can come to peace with that which you're struggling with sometimes by going outside of your own self and then absorbing lessons that you can then bring back. That's what the journey that I ended up on there on the motorcycle.

Yeah, I'm smiling because, as you said, Danny's name, I was remembering standing at the banks of the Ganga River, texting Danny, saying, "You've got to come here to the Maha Kumbh Mela. It's amazing." We had become fast friends in the Washington, D.C. bureau. After that failed marriage, Danny had arrived at the Washington bureau as a new reporter, and I was going through therapy in which I was learning this important lesson that whenever we say to ourselves, "Oh, I should do that," ponder for a moment what you want to do, right? I was going through that exercise with my therapist, trying to make decisions moving forward that would reflect more of who I wanted to be in this world.

Danny arrived, and he became this great friend who introduced me to a lot of American society that I had never experienced as a good Muslim girl growing up in the United States. The most innocent of things like going out to open mic night. I had my first taste of beer. I loved playing the sport of volleyball, and so Danny and I would spend the weekends behind the Lincoln Memorial on these sand courts, and I got to literally fly across the sand and just enjoy life. That was my buddy, it was in Pakistan after the tragedy of the September 11th attacks that Danny and I found ourselves both as journalists in Pakistan. He was there for the Wall Street Journal, and I was still out on book leave, so I was writing for Salon Magazine.

When I started off my book project, I thought Divine Love was going to be a partner. A man. A soul mate for life. That's what I was thinking and Danny was on that quest with me. He had found his soulmate in a young woman named Mariane in Paris. Danny and Marianne were both in Pakistan together. Danny sent me one email where he said, "I know there's a war going on, but can I still look for your husband in Pakistan?" I was like, "All right, dude, go for it. Whatever you can do." I ended up falling in love with a man in Pakistan, renting a home in Karachi. Danny told me in late January 2002 that he was coming to visit because he had a big interview. I was so excited. I got that room fixed for Mariane and him, and Danny arrived on 22 January 2002, with his wife and he had this big interview the next day. I got a car for Danny to go off for the interview and stood in front of the house that I had rented on this place called Zamzama Boulevard, which Zamzam is this holy water in Islam in the city of Mecca. That was when the rest of my life was determined and Danny's life. Because that was the last time we saw him. He went into that car and he never came back. He didn't show up that night for dinner. As many people will know, but young listeners and viewers may not know, Danny was kidnapped by Muslim extremists who called him first a spy for the CIA. Then when it was discovered that he was Jewish, they called him a spy from Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.

Then for me, I ended up suddenly becoming a spy for the government of India. We were in this diabolical plot to shame the government of Pakistan, according to the stories now leaked into the Pakistani newspapers. Everything that we were just talking about related to identity, it just came home. We were being judged by our identity. Danny being Jewish, me being Indian, me even as a woman, I was called Danny's assistant, because in that universe, I couldn't be his equal. That was when I felt firsthand how identity can be used as a death sentence, because then in the days that followed, the refrain kept growing and growing about Danny as an enemy of the state. And four weeks later, we thought that we were about to find Danny, the police and FBI agents came back to my house and all their faces just crestfallen. One of the police officers turned to Mariane and said, "I'm sorry I couldn't bring your Danny home." Indeed, what I learned then in the next minutes was they had watched a video in which Danny had been slain. He had been beheaded and these men in the name of my religion had taken from him his breath, his voice, the light in his eyes, the Kundalini spirit, whatever word you want to call it, his lifeline.

That's when I had my greatest conflict that I could never have even imagined with the faith into which I was born challenged and also on a very personal level, because I had fallen in love and not having gone through life's rituals in the order that my traditional Muslim society demanded. I discovered in the days before we discovered Danny had been murdered, that I was pregnant and my boyfriend bailed on us. He fled and so suddenly I was a pregnant woman without a wedding ring. The concept that you talk about boundaries is very deep and enshrined in law. In Pakistan, a sacred boundary is now turned into something called Hudud laws. Hudud means that sacred boundary and I had violated the sacred boundary, making me a criminal in Pakistan. Because of this life within me now. Hitendra, you know with murder and then with life, that was when I had the greatest confrontation with my faith.

Like what I was saying, Durga carries this sword, right? It's to me very symbolic, because what happened, as you know, in Danny's murder was these men took a knife to Danny's neck and they detached that part of him that makes him alive for one. They took his life from him. I know that in Hinduism there is that imagery of slaying, but it is symbolic of the slaying of ego. These men thought that in slaying Danny in that brutal way, they would expunge him from this world. But what he did in those last moments was lay claim to his identity as a Jewish ancestor of Israel, his parents being Jewish. And in him, in those moments of the video, when I watched it again and again as an investigator trying to know the hand of the man who held the knife, I had my own meditation. I think you know how deeply and also in spiritual practice we meditate upon death, not in a dark way, but as a vehicle to reflect and then get to a place of impermanence, right? To recognize that which we have in this world is not permanent. To get to that place of non-attachment, it was stuff that I was reading about, but it was in Danny's last moments and in the way that they killed him but his spirit transcended that I really got these deep, deep lessons. I just mentioned that because I came back to the United States and those parents that had been with me through one dark moment in my life were with me again. I came back to my hometown of West Virginia and I was grappling with one of the greatest burdens that we can have on our spirits, I think, in this world. That is shame internalized.

Even when the world may want to shame you or in Pakistan, I was considered a criminal for crossing the sacred boundaries. I had a choice in my own self on whether I was going to internalize those messages. And I did. I internalized them through my pregnancy. It was my mother who freed me in constant conversation and reflection, saying I didn't have to live with shame. But it was then finally at my son's birth that I saw the divine love that I had thought I was going to realize with a man I knew as a mother. That kind of love where, you know it is impermanent, because hopefully your child will outlive you. You will have to leave the child one day; they will leave you but you give them love unconditionally and fully knowing that there will be an impermanence to it. I felt that for my son, the moment I had him in my arms and shame evaporated.

With this new certainty, but yet uncertainty about how I was going to manifest it in my life, I went on the pilgrimage to Mecca with my parents, my niece, my nephew and my newborn baby. Mecca, as most people know, is the birthplace of Islam. It was there that I walked in the footsteps of the women who had been pioneers within the religion. The mother of Islam really should be considered to be this woman named Hagar in Christianity and Judaism and Hajar in Islam. I finally kind of rethought her narrative and her hero's journey, like you talk about encouraging in your students. She was a mother who was left in the desert in Mecca without a 24-hour Walmart like I got back in Morgantown, West Virginia, just herself and her own resilience. It was in that desert sand that the story goes that her son, Ismail kicked up this spring of water, Zamzam, that my street in Karachi was named for. I don't know if you've seen, but the holy mosque in Mecca is not just some mosque. It is a multi-storied marble floor chandelier lit creation. I ended up on the top floor with the stars above me. It was there that I could feel the pulse of the Hajar and generations of women, who may not have always overcome the barriers that they faced in their life but persevered. That's when I really felt the pulse of my ancestors, my grandmothers on both sides, my Nani, my Dadi, my mother and her journey of strength and power over the traditional expectations. It was there that I really came to understand that we had to challenge the patriarchal and traditional doctrine, mostly created by men that did not treat women as equal citizens. That was the lesson that I came back to the United States with to discover that my dad was helping to start a new mosque, build a new mosque. I was so excited then by year's end, when the mosque opened, to go there with my son. But when I went to the front door, this elder told me, "Sister, take the back door." They're wearing the same headscarf that I had worn in Mecca. I had to make this choice about whether I was going to go around the corner by the dumpster and go up the backstairs to the balcony where they expected women to sit. Hitendra, that's when I challenged my inner Durga, and channeled her and I stepped forward. I knew that that step forward was going to unleash a lot of new dynamic in my community. But I did it because I had this clarity now of congruence with who I wanted to be in the world and who I am.

Yes. I knew that there were fundamental philosophies that were not congruent with the 21st century, and I didn't know how to manage them intellectually and then spiritually, but I came with a process then. Being a journalist and a researcher, I ended up talking to all of the most progressive scholars in the Muslim community today and learned about concepts like Ijtihad, which is an Arabic word that means critical thinking. That was a hallmark of our Muslim communities through the 8th, 9th, 10th century. But then the purveyors of Ijtihad were massacred as they were facing within the community very strict interpreters of the faith and that was the critical moment when they say that the gates of Ijtihad were closed, so the gates of critical thinking were closed. That's a huge setback. Of course, all societies have grappled with that, right? There are dark ages in all communities.

But, I finally got to understand intellectually, and that's where going back to what we were talking about earlier, just being a lay student of our brains, I do appreciate how much we need to integrate our emotion with intellect, because I was feeling emotionally the disconnect. I was feeling trauma also. A real tragedy that could have put me in a place of hate, anger. And I had it, trust me. I had it and I was processing it. I was trying to understand it. But then using all that I had been offered in this world in terms of brain processing, I went and I was able to find a way in my own self to manage that hurt and that trauma and that wound to come up with a new reality that could not only bring healing to myself, but to the world and also to so many Muslims and to my younger self. Because, who was I as a young woman in my 20s? I was a young woman who was hostage to those patriarchal expectations that I marry the man that my community expected me to marry, not the man that I wanted to marry.

And so I knew that simple dynamic defined the lives of half of our community. I don't ever impose upon other people my path, but I want to just have the opportunity for anybody to walk the path that they wish. And so that's when I learned that indeed in the 7th century, when Islam was formed, women did not take a back door. They did not sit in a separate area. They were not even required to cover their hair, that women had a new agency in the society that was built around Mecca and then later Medina. I realized that centuries of male interpretation had given us this new under status that we were now experiencing. That's when I really realized, "Hey, we need to have a new school of jurisprudence. We need to have a new school of interpretation." It's not just to get power. It's about having equal status, having the values that the best of religion is supposed to provide to society and to bring ultimately, "sukoon" in Urdu. It means peace of mind. Every aspiration that I would have for humanity and individuals is to find peace of mind. If religion can be a pathway to it, great. If it's even non religion and spirituality, if it's running, whatever it is, let us get to that place. But religion should not take it from us and it should not take life. It should not be used as an excuse to take life and to subject people to shame and second-class status. That's how I had that real clarity and going back to the idea of the Kundalini, what I did realize is, in order to garner the strength and the power to do this, you do have to have a point of focus. For me, that point of focus was always that shining smile of my friend Danny taken from this Earth.

Yeah, every faith and every community has faced these challenges of rigidity for creating boundaries that are illogical and inhumane, ultimately. In this journey, I went to Rome and I created my own Heretics tour of every place, where the church had killed somebody for challenging the orthodoxy. In India, we have also overcome so much that in which religion was used both in Hinduism and Buddhism to put women on a second-class status. Judaism has also gone through various reforms. I saw these lessons in other faiths and thought we can apply them within my own faith community, just like the Dalai Lama had told me on the banks of the Ganges River, to find peace within your own faith. That's when I really confronted the institutions that prop up these boundaries.

There are institutions that we oftentimes have to face when we want to challenge the boundaries. Because when you present it, I know you know that people have to overcome fears. They have to overcome shame. They have to overcome the experience of being an outlier. Now we're called change makers, right? Disruptors like nice words for the rebel. But, oftentimes the rebel is the black sheep as another metaphor. And so that is something that my family and I ended up confronting together. I ended up writing about these challenges. First, I wrote about the idea that a woman should never be killed or punished for giving birth without a wedding ring within my community. Then I argued in the pages of The Washington Post that a woman should not have second class status at the mosque. What I faced immediately was the assault of those folks that are the defenders of those boundaries and how that played out in my own life.

I'll never forget the day that this young man from the community took me to Panera Bread, I thought, for a coffee. What he was there was as a messenger from the elders. He literally said to me, "Stop writing. You're bringing too much shame to the community". And I looked at him and I said, "That's not possible. I cannot stop." We started off the conversation talking about voice, and voice, as we know is physical. Also, it's external. But in order to bring voice to ideas, to counterintuitive thoughts, you have to overcome so much within yourself too. You have is a long and deep meditation. That idea of the Kundalini energy that manifests as voice and as strong ideas comes from a deep meditation. I had learned that meditative practices during my research into Buddhism and Tantra, and there on a rooftop in Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Buddhist world has its home in exile. I had great meditations on really deep concepts like equanimity, where you have evenness in your emotional response to different experiences or people, point of focus meditation. Another one on my drive to Chandigarh, I was learning was to look in the mirror and to actually smile at yourself and to see the divine in yourself. So, all those practices were now playing out for me as a Muslim feminist.

You can't believe it, but when I went to the mosque, I would do the breathing exercises because I would sit in the men's section, as it was called, and with my mother, who would go with a hoodie as her headscarf. She went there just to be somebody next to me. I would do those exercises of the breath through my entire being. I added to it the zikr, which is what we call the Mantra, the repetitive words that we say on our fingers to steady my breath, to overcome fear because the men would come over me, I would be sitting on the carpet, men would come over me standing, telling me, demanding that we leave. We stood our ground and we stayed because we had an intellectual knowledge that this was our right within Islam and in the United States of America. But what it took emotionally was also that place that brings you to steady breath and this became my work for the last decades now to the point where today, thank goodness, the world hears the cries of the women in Iran for freedom for women, for life.

We have not won this struggle at all in this community, but obviously, also throughout the world. This is still a constant struggle. But it is decades long and it'll be lifelong for me, I know. But with it comes that energy and that moment. That's why I related it to you, getting off my motorcycle and sitting in the Rose Garden in Chandigarh, because everything that we can manifest in the world as we find the boundaries that we want to cross is informed by all those experiences and all the suffering and strength that we've garnered in the years before. That's why I was so happy to kind of bring it to the forefront even here today in talking to you.

Yes, and you learn lessons from other sources, right? Then the one that might manifest in your own life. That's why I think my journey into Hinduism and Buddhism was so important, because they're not personally and emotionally attached to difficulties that those faiths have or have had, in society. I was able to get deeper lessons. I'll never forget the first Hindu temple I went into was in Nepal, in Kathmandu. It was such a foreign experience for me to go into a place of worship in my own native community of South Asia. I walked in with no boundaries between male and female genders, there were men next to me, there were women next to me. There was no front door, back door. So I got to experience spiritualism and religion in my own ancestral community in a way that I had never experienced before, because even in so many mosques in Pakistan and India, women aren't even allowed to enter. I had never even gone through that experience. Then I knew back at home that actually there was a separate area and there was a back door. I didn't even bother to go through them after I'd had one experience at the big mosque on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, DC. At that mosque, women had to go into this trailer. I walked into the mosque, the big gates, funded by all the Muslim majority governments in the world, and was told to go to this back trailer where I heard the sermon through this crackling speaker. After that experience as a graduate student, I never went back. They had lost me as a community member. I was succeeding at the highest ranks of "Western Society", working at the Wall Street Journal, interviewing President Clinton and traveling with the US trade mission, but I couldn't even go into my mosque, because I didn't want to be humiliated.

So then here I am going to the Shakti Peethas, the temples of feminine energy and being on the banks of the Kumbh Mela. There I was like, now I can understand how actually it's not just about my culture, because these are people from my culture who are manifesting their religion in a different way. And I took all of that into then imagining a different reality based on also interpretation within Islam. Going back to one example that I mentioned earlier that brought me so much pain, which was the expectation that I had absorbed, that I had to marry a man within my faith. That meant that I got this invitation to go to the city of Doha in the State of Qatar in the Persian Gulf area in the Middle East. It was a place that I didn't feel welcome, because this is a theocracy. This is a place that has very strict Hudud laws. And I said, anyway, I'm going to go because it was an invitation to this debate called the Doha Debate. The debate question was that "Do Muslim women have the right to marry anyone that they choose?" For most people, you think it's a no brainer. But within my community, as I had experienced, there was this expectation that you had to marry a Muslim man.

I went to the Nordstroms. I got the most businesslike suit I could think of and jetted to Doha, where I felt a lot of fear. I did feel fear because I knew that the law of that land was that a woman couldn't marry anyone that she chooses. In fact, men couldn't marry anyone that they choose in many instances also. So, I went there armed with the intellect of all the Quranic interpretations that I had read that said that actually a Muslim woman can marry outside the faith and she can marry anyone that she chooses. I went there with my story, too, and we won. My side won, because the people who voted were the people in the audience and who was in the audience? Half of them were women and they voted with us. I felt like everything else in life, that which we feel in our heart, many others also feel, and if we can just overcome our fears and get that voice, we can express for others what they may not yet be ready to express, but that together then we can collectively manifest once somebody breaks the silence.

Borrowing again from the journeys that others have made, this was the slogan of the Methodist Church here in the United States, because they too, have been trying to manage a lot of issues of inclusion, equality and openness. And so why was the Methodist Church message close to home for me? Because that was one of the first places that my dad and the men at the mosque prayed. They got a room when they first arrived in West Virginia, in Morgantown, and they got a room at the Methodist church. They opened their doors to the Muslim community. But I don't even know if they knew that women weren't welcome at those prayers. And so when it came time for me to think about how we were going to manifest all of this reform theologically, I returned then to history and though he has a kind of checkered history on some levels, Martin Luther, as many people know, brought reformation to Christianity, and he had nailed these precepts to the door of a church. I had this idea, "Okay, I'm going to manifest our own precepts," and we have 99 names of God, one of them that is really important in all this type of work is Wadud, which is the Arabic word for love. That's one precept that I'll focus on, because with the idea that we're all in a struggle, everybody has a struggle in this world. Everybody is on their hero's journey, as you've put it. Religion should be a place, as you had read before, to bring us to a higher place of existence, of positivity and wellness from a place of love. I had written this book, "Tantrika Traveling the Road of Divine Love" and love had manifested for me through my baby's life, through my parents' love for me, through the friendship that I had felt with my friend Danny. I really felt like we had lost that North Star. And so that was the most fundamental idea. And from those 99 precepts, I also wrote a Bill of Rights. It was a Bill of Rights for women in the mosque and a Bill of Rights for women in the bedroom. Because, from the public square to the intimate places of our lives, religion can express itself, and it can control and define our lives. It should bring us to a place of 'sukoon' or peace of mind and spiritual wellness that I would hope for everybody. But what I had seen was that, in fact, through the crush of things like shame and demands and sacred boundaries of Hudud, we were actually not realizing that full potential. So, that's why I wanted to not just be an activist with action, but also give people ideas that they could then have as markers in their own lives and then back them up with the theology to give them the argument when they have to talk in their own families and in their communities as they assert their rights.

And so now today, interfaith marriage is much more accepted. What else is accepted is even leaving the faith, Atheism. That wasn't the choice that I made, but I extend so much love to those who want to leave Islam, because I know that they just couldn't find hope. There was just something in their own experience and in their own processing of what was possible that didn't give them hope. Yet, there they are in this world as important as anyone.

The other really important idea that I wanted to really manifest, too, was that in all philosophies of domination, we have had a hierarchy of human value and that has expressed itself through various identity markers like your place of origin, your religion, your gender, your sexuality, even. I knew that the best of faith and the best of spiritualism is where we have no hierarchy of human value. I had felt it on that motorcycle of my Hero Honda Splendor with just the wind on my face and the sun on my eyes. It was the possibility when we crossed those boundaries. That's what I wanted to be able to share with everybody in this world. That we can experience it and that's actually something that we need to advocate. It's not just within my religion, but in all of humanity so that we have this common humanity that believes in the divine, in all people and the equality of all people and the spiritual power of all people.

I just want to add another layer to it that I have only personally myself learned and discovered is I've learned and now read the lives of their mothers. I definitely feel the parallel in their lives. But I also have another parallel, because they manifested so much wisdom, power, clarity and strength from their mothers. Malcolm X's mother had been a warrior in her own way, sent to a psychiatric hospital, because her type of rebellion was oftentimes institutionalized, especially when it expressed itself through women. Martin Luther King's mother was a pioneer in the civil rights movement herself and grounded her son in that challenge of doctrine that was conventional at that time because, yes, indeed, white churches would put blacks in a separate area like women have had to experience in mosques. That's how we really started recognizing not just separate and unequal in society, but separate and unequal as a part of religion is not okay also.

In both of them what I find inspirational is that like in Malcolm X's story especially, he did believe in that hierarchy of human value in his first incarnation within Islam. But then after he had his Mecca experience, he did come back with a sense of the humanity of people just beyond identity markers. Of course, we know that's what Martin Luther King was preaching in valuing all children by the content of their character. I think that's the lesson for all of us, really, is how they went on their journeys and they challenged the inequities and inequalities in society, but believed in this value of human beings as equals and spiritual equals in this world. That to me is so important, and I know that's a philosophy that you believe and I love hearing you manifest it, in the most unconventional ways, because you're in a universe of business and academics that isn't always going to go there. In terms of spiritualism and higher being, but I so appreciate that you're charting that path for everybody. I really thank you for that work that you're doing, because not everyone can pull it off and I'm so glad that you're doing it.

In your interview with Melissa, you talked about your father and the lessons that he gave you about serving humanity. I wanted to just ask you, if you don't mind just sharing with us a little bit about your mother, because we're talking a lot about feminine energy and feminine spirit. I bet she imparted a lot on you.

She said it in Hindi, right?

How did she say it in Hindi?

That's so beautiful! I'm feeling with her as you tell the story. That exercise that I knew I would have to do too, is divine love. Because she loves you so much that though it brings her pain to have you leave, she will experience this for your happiness and for your joy and for your choice.

Right. But it's not under your roof.

You can just imagine, it was the late 80s, right, when you left? I think we were still using the blue arrow gram paper for letters.

Remember, we had landlines? A phone call at 3 in the morning meant tragedy at home. That's the future you were going off to where you weren't going to meet her for a Starbucks coffee. But, I bet in her eyes, too, you could feel that love and the strength, right? Everything that we've been talking about in her life, she was manifesting, I'm sure, every practice that she had learned herself to be the strongest being that she could be as her son is about to set off.

Well, what's your mother's name?

Nirmal?

That's a really important name. What does that mean again?

Oh, nice.

Yeah, that's why I was wondering, because my mother's name is Sajida. Sajida means prostration, and I was just thinking about it when you were talking about prostration. You were asking me about my mother, too, because my mom is the inspiration in my life. Honestly, she is so important to me. I think what you were just saying about the care giving and the love that our mothers provide, but they give us something else. My mother gave me this, which is so important. I know it had to have been true in your life, too, is intellectual courage, because when she set you off, you went on your journey of intellectual courage. My mother grew up in a community and a family in which she wore the full-face veil and the burqa, the black gown, from the time she was a teen, and she didn't want to do it, but she had to do it because that was the norm in the family.

Then when she married into my father's family, they didn't expect it. My grandmother had actually been the first in our village and in our town of Azamgarh to take off the veil. But my mom, when she came to the US, she didn't know what the temperature, she still says to my dad, "He should have told me about Winters in America". She came in a sari and sandals, and she worked first in her ancestry as a woman to work, babysitting to raise the money for a ticket for my brother and me. She crossed those boundaries. She crossed the Hudud and in a way that was so graceful and so smart and so dignified that she taught me by modeling for me that journey that we can make in our own lives, that it's possible. As children do, like my own crossing of boundaries manifested in a different way than hers did, but because she had overcome her own fears, she gave me the capacity then to overcome mine and to take action. I'm so lucky that I have my mother, too, in my life right now. She's in her 80s and my father is also in his 80s, and I just treasure them and cherish them and to anybody listening whoever wonders what we impart on each other is so important. The role of parents is so critical.

When my son left for college, I was in my room for days. I had lost my bearing. Then I started searching for the stories of empty nesters. I found that this was a universal experience from Australia to India. Then I learned it was timeless, too, because there was this poem that I'll leave you with that I think is true about all of life, not just for parents. In this poem by Khalil Gibran from Lebanon, he said that "Our children are the arrows and we are the bows and our journey is to be the stable bows from which our arrows go into the world and they will go into the world." I think, going back to what we began with and what we talked about throughout this whole conversation is to have that deep meditation, that deep reflection so that kundalini breath can express itself in the world in however our identities are manifested, whether as parents, as friends, as colleagues, as leaders, as just community members in whichever way it's possible. I'm just so honored to have talked with you, because I know that you are in a constant, constant journey manifesting that in the world for other people and for yourself. So, thank you for having me be a part of your humsafar, as we call it, the journey together.

Thank you so much.