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Ahmad Fahmy got his first job at an investment bank at eighteen, as a second-year engineering student, before anyone used the word engineer for it. He didn’t balance it with school. He worked all day, taught himself at night out of books, and dropped semesters when the two collided. He describes the method as jumping into the lake and then buying a book on how to swim.

By twenty-three he had all of it: married, a son, a house, two cars, a career inside a firm he’d grown up in. He says he felt like his life was over, not beginning.

What followed was twelve years in London, a climb toward managing director, and a definition of success he now calls a pie-eating contest where the reward is more pie. Then nine days running across the deep Sahara with no signal and nothing to do but think. He describes the order his thoughts arrived in: work, for the first two days. Then life. Then his parents. Then his children, and a question he couldn’t answer. Provide them with what?

He left, eventually. A mentor wouldn’t let him quit until he could say whether he was running towards something or running away from something. He couldn’t, so he stayed until he could.

Today he coaches organizations through change and tells most of them not to hire him. He lives in Istanbul, homeschools four children, and runs his home on systems instead of willpower. And he built 114, a challenge that asks you to run a distance and memorize a portion of the Quran, on the theory that memorizing is to an adult what the open-water swim is to an Ironman: the part that sounds impossible, filters nearly everyone out, and turns out to be the easiest leg of the race.

When one community asked him to make it easier, he made it harder.

His own wird is small. Surah al-Kahf on Fridays with friends at Şemsi Paşa, read out loud rather than listened to, and then a run.

Man laysa lahu wird, laysa lahu wārid.

CHAPTERS

00:00 What the wird is

02:03 Growing up in his father’s shadow

06:10 A job at an investment bank at eighteen

08:10 Jumping in the lake, then buying a book on swimming

10:57 London, and losing himself

11:44 Success as a pie-eating contest

12:44 Nine days in the Sahara

14:38 Crying over an iPod

15:38 “Provide them with what?”

16:45 Falling for organizational change

20:05 What AI does to the line manager

24:32 Coaching executives

29:40 Who actually wants to change

32:13 The one-inch hurdle

33:34 What would an Islamic Ironman look like

36:54 Memorization is the swim

39:01 The terrain of the Mushaf

39:55 “They asked us to make it easier”

41:01 Everything by twenty-three

43:35 What a work year actually looks like

47:22 What’s below the lake

48:56 “Are you running towards something?”

49:29 Lining up the first client

50:43 Ultraman, and the end of chasing

53:10 Stopped convincing, started finding

57:17 How he defines success now

58:30 Values versus the calendar

1:00:31 Surah al-Kahf at Şemsi Paşa

1:03:45 Niyyah, and what he actually thinks about

1:04:18 Hadith Jibril, and ihsan in a medal

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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