Once upon a time, a rabbi told me to “crawl back into the cave you came from." The words became an invitation. What if I did crawl back into the cave I came from — what could that look like?

Book burnings, death sentences, and attempted assassinations. How did an Islamic theocracy and an atheist writer with a target on his back both completely miss the mark on Islam’s most tabooed origin story?

After twenty-two years of studying religious conflict, I discovered that Islam was a seed-faith and our task was to bury it in the Dark.

After September 11th, 2001, I left law school and dove into the rabbit hole of faith to understand how a religion I was told was peaceful, was producing people who were so terribly violent. This question in my heart took me on a path where I spent the next 22 years studying Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and of course Islam.

From an Islam of beards and robes toward an Islam of Light and Dark. The task is to move mountains, to shift a religion of matter that is so entrenched (ironically) in the physical world despite being a faith of glory in the afterlife, toward a religion that embraces metaphysics as a very real and forgotten aspect of our human experience.

We didn’t inherit a faith. We inherited a Mystery. A look at how Islam’s “Night of Power” gives us another clue into a metaphysical reality.

In April 2022, I spoke at the Global Counterterrorism Institute’s panel talk on “Women in Extremism” and asked the question of whether women’s rights as the West has interpreted them, interfere with women’s needs. Did the drive to push a ‘strong independent woman’ annex a woman from her innate and intuitive need for connection?

“This is the only prayer I know. This is the only prayer that only I know. This is my prayer, in the tongue of my embodiment. A language only I know.” — Shireen Qudosi. A practice in embodiment through non-linear movement that is as sacred as any inherited prayer.

The cave, a geological cavity, is allegorical code for going inward. The underworld is a state of creation and dreams, the weaving together of things, of attachment and detachment. Ushered by forms of silence, descent into the underworld cuts the fantasy that tethers us to world outside. The outer world that determines what is ‘normal’ is created by the same systems that have taught us to see the underworld as dark and fearful, systems that have pushed humanity further away from a true homecoming.

My own ability to invoke beautiful and more powerful questions over time is linked to the vast isolation that is a graveyard of the deconstructed self. Questions like, why are we experiencing the most chaotic outburst of religious fanaticism today during the most innovative period in modern history? Or, how can we look to past Islamic civilizations as a torch for moving out of this darkness? And, how can we use the tapestry of Islam’s origin story to weave a new narrative?

It all begins with an idea. If we’re winning the war against terror — if we’re doing this right — more come. If we don’t find a way to fold people back into our values and civilization then we’re fueling more civilizational rifts. A growing multi-generational population even more vulnerable to extreme terror and radicalization, caught in the rift of having no identity, no belonging, no future, no choice, no hope.